This should be a rhetorical question since the obvious answer is YES, but if an alien from another planet were to observe the behavior of many organizations in regards to business involvement in data quality, the conclusion would be NO. Here are the questions the alien might ask:
- Who makes staff hiring/firing decisions? Line management or HR?
- Who makes investment decisions? Line management or Finance?
- Who is responsible for data decisions? Line management or IT?
The alien observer would quickly determine that Line Management is in charge of managing staff assets and financial assets, but in most organizations it would appear that IT is responsible for managing information assets. Why is this? Has the business abdicated responsibility for information or has IT wrestled it away from line management in some sort of power grab?
In my last posting about Business/IT Collaboration – It DOES Matter, I highlighted how firms with high “IT Savvy” (including business engagement) realize superior business results in comparison to their competitors. In firms with low IT Savvy, there may be weak IT skills among business staff so they have relinquished control to IT due to their lack of confidence and competence in dealing with difficult data governance issues.
Similarly, in firms where the IT staff have weak business skills, the responsibility for managing data may have defaulted into their lap since they are unable to communicate the business value of quality data and the criticality of integrated business operations to ensure sustainability. Or maybe the IT organization is run like a cost center with no charge-backs to the business groups – what would you do as a business manager of a group that is overloaded with work and you could dump some of it on another group for free?
The reality is that IT can be, and should be, the custodian of data – store it, provide access from multiple channels to whoever needs it and is allowed to see it, keep it secure, available, safe, etc. But when it comes to using data for competitive advantage, growing revenue, or improving profits, this is the domain of line management.
Clearly IT can help drive one version of the truth and should even lead the effort by providing a framework for MDM, identifying redundant, duplicate and inconsistent data and engaging business functions to resolve conflicts – but that doesn’t mean that IT “owns” the data. Line management should own the data and as my prior post said, organizations that have a strong business engagement in IT demonstrate superior results and have a compelling advantage over their competitors. Let’s show those aliens what we’re really capable of!
3 Comments
John,
Nice article as always.
Of course, business needs to be involved. Existence of IT departments is because of “BUSINESS” and hence it is incumbent upon IT to understand what their role/responsibilities are as a service organization to the business. Avoiding any initiatives or projects where there is no clear sponsorship and participation from business is one way to start getting business involved.
One would think that with years of experience observing successful and failed IT projects, we as a community of professionals, would have learned that collaboration(across various parts of the organization) is key for any successful business initiative. It is really important to work as a team to maximize the returns on any investment made in projects/activities.
IT needs to clearly tie every single project/initiative into business goals. IT needs to have an agreement around perceived benefits from business before any project (MDM, Data Quality) or activity is undertaken. This agreement and buy in into initiatives will be evident by the extent to which business takes ownership and commits resources to the project.
Vish Agashe
Hi John,
while I share your conclusions and like the piece, in my recent experience the real question in terms of data integration, business intelligence and making smart use of existing information assets is:
Does IT still need to be involved?
And that is not a rethorical question at all! Many of Informatica’s competitors in the integration and BI space actually have started to put that blunt thesis to the test. Why can’t we look at IT as the enabler and catalyst but turn over the execution into the same hands that are held accountable for a company’s success or failure?
…read on at http://blog.anvalad.com
Rgds
-Tom
Tom, we’re saying the same thing. Your question “Does IT still need to be involved” is also a rhetorical question – you answered it yourself by saying that IT should be an enabler and catalyst – which of course means IT is still involved.
Informatica is actually ahead of its competitors in this regard and is about to leap even further ahead with Informatica 9 announcement. The idea of Self-Service integration is something that David and I wrote about in our ICC book in 2005. Informatica’s On-Demand offering is yet another example of a capability that has been available for years – it enables business users to design, build and deploy integration solutions (for business intelligence, data synchronization, or data migration) without ever talking to a software engineer.
Of course IT “experts” (system analysts, software engineers, data-base administrators, operations staff, etc.) still need to be involved – they are the ones that built the tools and are still working in the background to make sure they continue to operate efficiently. They may however not be a visible since the business users can serve themselves directly using tools like On-Demand. In short, IT in this context is acting as an enabler and catalyst.
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