This is not a new concept or question. In fact, for the last several years pretty much all BI vendors claimed that they have solved the “Business and IT Collaboration” needs. Or, at least their marketing departments did!
To truly solve a problem, we must first fully understand it. In this case it is important to ask questions such as: Why is there a lack of collaboration between these two groups? What is so drastically different about these two groups that have forced such a gap between them?
The truth is that IT needs a central ownership to information to streamline processes and ensure sustainability, while business users want their own self-service and ownership to gain results faster. After all business users have become a lot more analysis and data savvy these days as compared to the past; so, an old-school approach of letting IT do the work and just being the consumers of canned reports doesn’t cut it anymore.
Perhaps this picture illustrates the differences more clearly.
As you can see, these two groups are clearly in conflict when it comes to how they like to manage their information. So, we ask: What will help these two groups to start working in harmony?
The truth is that it won’t happen… unless there is a ‘balance’ between their needs.
As much as business users want quick time to value out of their BI projects, one-off applications are not sustainable overtime. They become monsters that are too hard to keep up-to-date, considering all the changes that happen to business requirements over time. Sooner or later, business users will need to reach to their IT friends for help.
The ‘balance’ lies in letting the business users get fast time to value, but still building applications that are sustainable to change. We define this ‘balance’ with an Agile BI approach:
– Quick prototyping and visualization of the results
– Frequent iterations and reviews between business and IT users to ‘get it right’
– Once the data is ‘fit-for-purpose’, providing self-service tools for business users to be self-sufficient in building their own reports, analysis, and dashboards
– Having a strong ‘shared’ metadata foundation across the board to adjust to changes quickly and to scale up with cumulative iterations
So back to our point about collaboration between business and IT: It is possible? Yes. Does it happen because a set of ‘tools’ facilitate this collaboration? Not necessarily, but they can help. What is the secret ingredient then to ensure such collaboration occurs? Simple: This collaboration happens as long as these two groups need each other, and are working towards a set of common / balanced goals for their BI projects. Something that is only possible with an Agile BI approach.
For more information about this topic and to explore how Pentaho has made Agile BI possible, attend our upcoming webinar on “How to Fast Track Your BI Projects with Agile BI” and see for yourself how Pentaho customers have come to reap the value of their BI projects with Pentaho’s Agile BI initiative.
This blog was originally posted on this site: http://blog.pentaho.com/2011/03/22/it-vs-business/
Data Runs The World 