President
Good News, Bad News.
Good news is that Excel can now hold more
than 65,536 rows of data. Bad news is that Excel can now hold more than 65,536
rows of data.
It is not uncommon for users to ask for
everything they “need” downloaded into Excel.
This confuses the IT group and usually generates responses such as,
“Huh? We already have that information in a database,” “Why would you want to
do that?” or my favorite, “You do not need that.” So what we really have here is an IT
individual determining what a business user needs. The business user making this request typically
helps generate sales in an organization.
This is also the same business user that if they did not do their job
well, the IT group and other support areas would have no purpose and therefore
no job.
There is stress to deliver value on all
parties in an organization. IT is
responsible for keeping systems up and running so that mountains of data
concerning sales and operations can be collected. The business user is responsible for
increasing sales year after year, driving profitability, and winning market
share. Some organizations have a culture
that encourages these two areas to work together for the betterment of the
company. Others are still
struggling.
When the business wants to track something
new and the IT process does not support that change, many times the business
will just track it themselves. There are
multimillion dollar organizations out there that have critical business
information in Excel. And that the Excel
65K row limit has been eliminated, the only real limit is the amount of memory
on the workstation. More sophisticated
users will use Access Databases.
How do we fix this? We fix it together – time to order a pizza
for lunch. BOTH business and IT have to
come to the pizza lunch open minded.
BOTH business and IT cannot blame the other for where they are. Gone are traditional SDLC waterfall methods of
developing BI and Analytics. The
business needs to see that today’s technology can enable IT to be more
responsive to them. When the business
sees that IT can respond to them in less than 6 months, they will stop asking
for data dumps and also stop collecting data on their own. IT needs to show that when the business comes
back to “ask for more” it is not because the business user is stupid, it is
because until they could see what was initially delivered, they are now better
able to articulate the refinements that will add even more value to the
organization.
This iteration the first time through is
tough. IT is afraid that the business will have an uncompleted or open project
for-ev-ver (shine flashlight up on your face).
What really happens is an
alignment of IT and the business. IT
begins to understand what the true business needs are, and the business begins
to understand that if they share their goals and strategies with IT, IT can
better server them. Ahhh…the beauty of
iterative development…
After the first cycle of development,
business request, and IT fulfillment, the culture of the organization MUST not
find fault in the business user for incomplete requirements. In addition, the culture of the organization
MUST not find fault in IT for delivering what the business asked for but not
what they wanted.
The jury is in; conversational
design and iterative development for BI and analytics brings IT and business
back together aligning strategic goals of the organization. This results in improved process, increased
profitability, and an aligned culture – a good thing, right?
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