KLE: Comunicación

Business and IT are always at odds with each other with regard to ownership of BI efforts.

In the olden days, there was no question that IT owned BI efforts, decided what tools need to be used and owned the rollout and making it all work together.

These days, many businesses have taken to dealing with Cloud vendors of BI directly without their own IT's involvement.

I know of at least one major International Bank where many Business Intelligence projects are completed outsourced from collection of data, storage and reports generation. None of the data resides within the Bank's internal networks!

Users say that they are tired of IT's ownership of BI efforts and have taken it upon themselves to insulate themselves from IT and just take budgets and go outside the company for BI.

They all have businesses to run and frustrated with IT not being able to give them the reports they needed on time. They just decide we will be doing it ourselves and with external help.

Now for the IT's side of the story - IT has too many priorities and not enough IT budget at any time to do all of what the Business needs at any time. It has a big headache just collecting, cleansing and storing data, let alone creating reports out of them, useful ones.

They have a headache reconciling different identities of products, customers from one system to the next. There are too many versions of the truth within all of their systems. When they bring it all to one data warehouse they have a tough time correlating between different identities of the same entities - customer, product, etc between the Sales, Financial and Manufacturing systems for example.

So what is the answer? Some kind of middle ground will evolve. I don't think there will be an outright victory for one side or the other. It will come to the middle sometime.

Interesting times make for interesting problems and solutions.

May you live in Interesting Times - Chinese Proverb or Curse ?:-)

Nari Kannan is currently Chief Delivery Officer at VSoft Consulting Group, Inc, a Louisville, KY based Software Consulting Company. He is a technologist over two decades of experience. He was previously Co-Founder and CEO of Ajira Technologies, Inc, a company that designed and developed Process Intelligence tools. He started out as a senior software engineer at Digital Equipment Corp. He has since served variously as VP of Engineering or CTO of five Silicon Valley startup companies dealing with a variety of problems in Business Process Improvement, IT Consulting, Automotive Claims Processing, Human Resources and Logistics applications. Contact Nari Kannan at nari@vsoftconsulting.com

Who should own Business Intelligence Efforts? Business or IT?