The TDWI Wayne’s World post on “Evolving Your BI Team from a Data Provider to a Solutions Provider” provided a nice summary on some of the reasons why IT serves as just a data provider and how to evolve into a solutions provider. This topic is near and dear to my heart so I thought I would share some additional insights as a practitioner delivering BI solutions inside Microsoft.
In my view, IT must serve the business as a trusted advisor by delivering end-to-end information-enabled solutions while also providing a secure, scalable, and reliable BI platform for the business to innovate in areas where IT cannot or should not expect to serve. It is unrealistic that IT can cost effectively serve all of the needs given my practical experience so you need a strong collaborative partnership with the business to serve the growing thirst for strategic information and analytics. This includes leadership and credibility to deliver enterprise solutions but to also enable them to deliver their own solutions using IT’s platform.
My vision for enabling the business to deliver solutions is not about the business replicating data and developing applications in isolation from IT. Success in my opinion is IT delivering valuable end-to-end solutions and a certified integrated data platform that can be used by the business to also deliver solutions where and when needed. This is a collaborative model leveraging both the strengths of IT and the business.
While I do believe it's essential for IT to deliver end-to-end solutions for long-term viability, I do view providing the business with a certified data platform as a "solution" as they would generally prefer not to be in the data integration business. While this could be considered IT acting as a data provider, my experience tells me that IT is solving a huge problem by standardizing and integrating data into compelling offering that can quickly support decision support and analytics across the entire organization. Think about the huge opportunity cost when the business is spending their valuable time on hard core IT and not analyzing and understanding your customers, partners, market competition, and internal operations. The extreme cases of IT or the business doing it all is not realistic and there is a optimal position somewhere in between where IT focuses on the complex enterprise-level opportunities while enabling the business to innovate on the fringe.
Microsoft’s business intelligence environment is diverse including both IT solutions and business solutions. Maturing the information strategy is journey and there is no silver bullet so this requires strong leadership and phased approach.
Data Provider
IT can act as a data provider in two scenarios:
- Enabling direct data access to transactional systems
- Serving integrated data in the form of marts and cubes
We have both of these scenarios in Microsoft today. Let’s face it, in many companies the business built the shadow solutions they have today because they likely had a need that was not being served by IT at a specific point in time. In certain cases the business has built solutions by integrating data served by low level interfaces and bypassing IT completely (scenario #1). While this approach can address the immediate business need, the result is higher lifecycle costs due to data replication, needed changes to support corporate taxonomies and upstream data sources.
Strategies to Transform IT into a Premier Solutions Provider
Here are ten strategies for evolving IT from a data provider to a premier solutions provider:
- Strong IT Leadership – transforming an organization, it's offering and results requires strong leadership. Evolving to a true solutions provider will require trusting relationships with business executives that understand and value IT’s offering. Transformations do not happen overnight so leadership is required to sustain the journey and deliver on IT’s promises over time.
- Mature a solutions-focused organization – establish a trusted advisor organization within IT that is responsible for managing the business relationship, business architecture, understanding and anticipating needs of the user community, delivering solutions that enable complex end-to-end business scenarios, and leading change management. It’s also critical that the solutions organization understands the data and ensures data quality. These change agents must clearly define the business value of the solution and then measure and communicate the benefits after the solution is deployed. Our organization inside Microsoft IT is called “Solutions Delivery” which reinforces our mission: "Earn Trusted Partnership status by consistently delivering high value innovative business solutions". This team represents IT on behalf of the engineering and operations teams that deliver and support the applications.
- Differentiate and market IT’s solution - similar to any other product offering there needs to be something compelling that truly differentiates IT's solution. Evaluate what IT is offering and understand what is driving the business to invest in their own solutions. Position capabilities that can be best delivered by IT and not easily replicated by the business including data quality and report certification, enterprise-wide integration and analytics that enable a broad business view (multi-business solutions), embedding integrated data into IT applications, and a holistic information management solution set. Track and communicate the business value derived from IT's solution as part of the continued marketing communications process to drive brand recognition.
- Manage and predictably deliver on solution roadmaps - with a IT solutions organization in place, develop and manage solution roadmaps that include the business capabilities, features, and solutions that will be delivered on over the 1-3 year time frame. The roadmaps should support "priority" business capabilities where there is a high strategic importance but low performance. Establish credibility with the business by delivering on-time, on-schedule, and on-budget. That is the ticket to the game to advancing to higher value business solutions. The business is not going to give up their solutions until they have confidence that IT can predictably deliver the goods.
- Embed integrated data and analytics into business process applications – at the end of the day business value is only realized when users take action from insight. IT is uniquely positioned to deliver key information and analytical models into the applications that run the business and serving end users. Delivering on this promise requires strong collaboration inside of IT between the data warehousing/BI specialists and those organizations that own the transactional applications.
- Enable the enterprise perspective with multi-business solutions - most business BI solutions are targeted at specific problems or business capabilities within a business of a large organization. The most strategic insight can only be realized when there is an enterprise IT data platform in place that integrates data across a broad set of transactional systems that run the company. IT should focus on delivering the enterprise scope data platform and delivering BI solutions that serve multiple businesses as this will be difficult for a business group to replicate. A few years ago Microsoft started the Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) journey to mature it's internal and external insight as well as consolidate the application portfolio to reduce costs and quickly adapt to changing business models.
- Understand user needs - compelling IT solutions can only be delivered by understanding the pain points and needs of the employees executing business processes. Proactively engage and research the needs of both the corporate and field user base. Understand the roles that you are serving and what solutions they need for their job. This will help proactively focus IT on what "markets" to attack.
- Pro-actively reduce data access - easy access to transactional data, feeds, and integrated data perpetuates the growth of shadow applications around the company. Periodically assess the reasons why non-IT applications are integrating transactional data and aggressively reduce access by providing alternatives such as IT's BI solutions and integrated data platform.
- Engage the “Developer Network” - successfully executing a hybrid strategy where IT delivers solutions as well as the business can be accelerated when you can harness the power of the distributed network of "developers" across the organization. The business is going to deliver solutions with our without IT so my view is that IT's strategy should be to build a platform that can used by both IT and stakeholders in the business. Formalize this collaborative and social network that is geographically distributed to quickly surface best practices, data issues, and deliver on BI needs quickly. Members of the "developer network" would be formally approved and get access to sanctioned integrated data and IT services. I envision a robust social network where "information" is the lifeblood of the conversation and user needs are served quickly and cost-effectively by the "developer network" (both IT and approved business developers).
- Empower the business on IT infrastructure – IT will never have all of the data required by the business so it’s essential that IT provide a collaborative solution that enables the business to manage data on IT’s infrastructure and mitigate the need for the business to replicate data in their environment. There will also be scenarios where the business will need to have quick bridging solutions so providing capabilities to enable agility and access to IT’s certified data set will reinforce IT’s vision as a customer-focused organization. Recently, we have enabled a set of capabilities on our Enterprise Data Warehouse infrastructure that enables the business to co-locate and manage their business data on IT servers. We believe this will reduce data replication outside of IT, reduce shadow applications, improve insight into user needs and enable the business to deliver niche solutions.
Run your IT shop as a business and act as a change agent by delivering valuable end-to-end solutions across the organization!
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