Posts Tagged SOA
Does Business Intelligence Require Intelligent Business?
As I started to develop this blog post, it occurred to me that my working title, “Does Business Intelligence require Intelligent Business?” might have been previously used in some other publication. So, I Googled it.
I did find some very close variations, but not exactly in the form of the question that the title poses.
I was led to a white paper, “business intelligence is intelligent business”, by Gerry Davis, Regional Managing Partner, Asia-Pacific for Heidrick & Struggles. In the opening paragraph, the problem is summarized thusly:
“Collecting information about customers is relatively easy. Analyzing customer information for potential cross-sells, increased revenue streams, and improved service is more challenging. But getting the information to the front line in a timely manner and thus providing further competitive edge is proving increasingly difficult for many corporations.”
As we look at this statement, there are three main points: 1) collecting is “easy”; 2) analyzing is hard; and 3) disseminating it is very hard. Perhaps a bit oversimplified. But, in reality, most users will need this to be oversimplified to be able to overcome all their biases about IT, systems in general, any extra “work” that will automatically be assumed and fears about job security. This is said this way, not to be unkind, or even to be negative, but to make sure that the focus is on the right “problem”.
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Take your Vacation-The Future will still be there when you get back!
I cannot believe it. Tomorrow morning, I am back to the ‘real’ world. You see, I have just returned from 16 days of vacation. I did not do a thing related to work, other than tweet some from my mobile. In effect, I put my brain in a jar and let it cool down. There is so much to occupy its time that burn-out or, in my case, flame-out, is a very real possibility.
As I began packing for this week’s business travel, I thought back to an article that I wrote in CIO magazine ‘way’ back in 2002 (available here). It had several themes, but the primary reason for writing it was that I actually accomplished a three-week vacation and felt that the world needed to know about it. By this time, I was less than 4 years as a CIO. However, in that time, I had been through enough global system and infrastructure deployments to fill several careers.
But, that was becoming something I could do in my sleep. 2002 was a time of the coming of age of the business savvy CIO. It was the only way that a CIO would be able to survive-at least those who considered themselves “strategic”. At that time, the average tenure of a CIO was something like 18 months and that wasn’t good for anybody.
At the end of the day, the true revelation about actually taking a three week vacation was more about the fact that I could let go of the techie stuff. I had built a high potential group of managers that were running things just fine. When I got back from that vacation, I was all fired up about diving into the business issues and strategic imperatives.
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