Bridging the great divide between business and IT

Business intelligence (BI) is 80% politics and only 20% technology.

This is the view of Martin Rennhackkamp of Prescient Business Technologies, who addressed delegates at the recent SAS Forum on business intelligence where the challenge of bridging the gap between business and IT emerged as one of the major themes.

"In addition to the technological and business challenges involved in managing information, there are often complex political agendas at play. Often there is also a huge gap between the IT department and management, which must be bridged if BI projects are to deliver tangible benefits," he said.

"Both areas of the business must understand each other's worlds and there must be buy-in and investment from the business for BI projects, whether they are complex implementations or basic data quality programmes."

He also stressed the importance of the business/IT partnership in managing information.

"The two sides of the organisation need to dance the 'responsibility dance' - as IT drives information management, but the business gets the benefits," he says. "The power for IT comes from the ability to create that partnership, not from getting the glory."

Deon Hefer, who leads the data quality management team at Ernst and Young, echoed this sentiment, saying that business buy-in is particularly vital when it comes to quality control.

"Business owns the data so it is the business's responsibility. The IT department is simply the custodian of the data," he pointed out, stressing that there must be close co-operation, buy-in and ownership from the business, or data quality programmes won't work.

"Companies should try to engender a positive culture that encourages close cooperation between IT and business. Ideally, it should not be left up to the IT department to enforce this," he added.

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One of the biggest problems around data quality is that often no one is prepared to take responsibility.

"Responsibility must reside with those in the production environment," says Hefer. "IT can only be a support function to business, and cannot work with any data before establishing ownership.

"When it comes to data quality, business must sign off processes that IT will follow. The business must drive the operations, compile reports and answer the questions when audit queries come through," he said.

He recommended that a single individual within the business be identified to take responsibility for data quality.

Rennhackkamp agreed: "Business needs to play a major role, for example in escalating any information quality issues. IT does not have the control or authority to make source system people take responsibility for data quality. That mandate needs to come from the top."

Rennhackkamp also cautioned IT departments not to over-charge for services. He said IT is too often driven as a profit centre.

"If the fees are too high, this can be self-defeating as business units will outsource to external providers. This goes against the grain of creating centrally managed organisations, and can be dangerous.

"The BI centre must be cost-effective, but should not try for huge profits," he noted. "It must be an enterprise-wide support function that shows value, but is not profitable at the expense of business units."