A Culture of Business Intelligence

QUESTIONS


Along my mission to help refocus Business Intelligence off and away from that mindless culmination of technology, tools, and thrown together (or even over-engineered) data, let's review some of the, seemingly, common-sense aspects of Business Intelligence....

How about asking tough questions.
What good are answers that we have no questions for? (play Watson ;-)

How about an intrinsic shift in business stakeholders thinking.
One of the hallmarks of human intelligence" is "thinking", so why should this logic not apply to business as well?


How about more accountability (transparency about what's being done and why; ownership, clear expectations and costs associated)


How about more commitment, and less lip service 
(business intelligence starts with all business stake holders, regardless of B.I. initiative, tools, data)

How about awakening genuine interest ("what's in it for me?") , instead of mandating, top-down. This will foster agility. 
Goal-seeking agents versus puppets on a string (that doesn't scale). Self-motivated behavior is more effective than central planning (this insight courtesy of a 70 year study in the Soviet Block)


How about being honest about the risks and rewards, and keep a healthy balance between them.


How about minimizing that which does not add value, or can't be tangibly justified.




ANSWERS


There is a reason why topics about organizational or process Agility interlace with the Business Intelligence thread.


How would you feel if you had only one sink in your house. And from the faucet of that one sink would run water only once every 6 hours. And it would take about 5 hour delay between you opening up the spigot, and when liquid would actually flow out of it. And once it would flow, you realize it's dirty, soapy waster water, instead of fresh drinking water.


Now if you are involved with an existing "Business Intelligence" infrastructure at your company, compare the above analogy to it. Not far fetched, eh?


In the developed world, the water utility company typically provides fresh water, 24x7x365, by default. It's not that the commercial water provider fails a lot, and only responds to complaints, and then only fixes those household water supplied where the highest fine gets ordered.

Again, compare this conceptually to you Data Warehousing/B.I. infrastructure. Okay, I guess fires can be fought with waste water just as well ;-)


So why does this 100% availability & quality service fulfillment work?

1. customer expectations (in those societies that have had infrastructure stability for a long time)
2. adverse consequences (legal, financial, reputation)

And again, compare this to your organization, in terms of Business Intelligence... 

(1) represents the consumer of your B.I. service. 

(2) represents the B.I. service provider.

If, in the business world, 

• the B.I. consumer's expectations would be so ingrained, as to accept nothing but the most timely and accurate information, available whenever demanded (and not dependent on supply schedule), and if 
• the B.I. provider would have a stake in the adverse consequences to the business, when the B.I. deliverables do not measure up to the rightful expectations (timely, accurate)

do you think Business Intelligence might be a more successful undertaking?

Compared to today's most common B.I. approach of...

• the supply side (B.I. provider) defines the SLA, based on what's "doable" (which is often heavily deluded based on the provider's limited capacity, or competence)
• the demand side (B.I. consumer) not being aware of what's possible, and how much more empowered they could be (just as the competition that has figured this out!)

So what do you think would it take to adapt the "utility" mindset (a culture of reliability, continuity and service) to the Business Intelligence space?

Will "B.I. in the cloud" take care of this? 

And if so, do the people running "the cloud" know all this?