When Great Minds Converge...

Dear readers,

Please take note:

We've recently decided that the insightful musings from the experts here at Baseline Consulting would be best served under one umbrella. Rather than our two bi-weekly blogs, In The Industry and In The Field, we've moved all our content into the In The Field blog. After all, all of our experts are in the industry, and they're also working in the field. Thus, In an effort to make this content accessible to everyone, we've opted to merge the blogs. As a reader, you can expect all of the same great content, but you only have to look/subscribe/link to one location: Baseline's In The Field with Our Experts.

Be sure to save that link or set up your RSS feeds or email subcriptions to catch all of the new content that we will continue to send your direction in the coming weeks!

IT and Business Alignment Begins with Listening

By Robert Stone, Managing Consultant

A lot has been written about the topic of IT –business alignment. We see it in action at our clients all the time. Baseline even offers a course on the topic.  I’ve made certain observations about it in my client work over the years that I’d like to share in this blog post.

We find that business intelligence projects are often the optimum way for companies to achieve tighter IT-business alignment. That’s because IT - business alignment will succeed only if you’re solving a business problem.  IT should not show up at a meeting with business users and recite a laundry list of everything they can do.  They should also avoid discussions of technology or existing reports. Instead, they should ask the business what their problems are.  Stakeholders actually enjoy describing what is preventing them from achieving their strategic goals or, at an individual level, what is preventing them from being more productive in their daily work.  IT should listen to the concerns of the business stakeholders and then determine how they can help in an effective manner.   Successful projects will become more frequent because IT already knows the business problems in detail before the project ever begins.

photo by Orange_Beard

Alignment is really all about building a relationship of trust.  If you constantly help business find reasonable and effective solutions then they will trust you.  Trust is also doing what you say—much easier with a set of articulated business requirements in place—and this requires good data management and business intelligence capabilities.

Alignment is not about pitching the business on a new project, the latest BI tool, or the latest methodology. It’s about establishing rules of engagement that can only be followed after earning the stakeholders’ trust.

Does Data Governance Equal Data Quality?

By Frank Dravis, Senior Consultant

I was working with a client collecting stakeholder inputs in preparation for a proposed data governance program. One of the questions I asked the interviewees was “How do you expect data governance to help you?” The responses varied by the person’s role in the organization, but universally, all of the managers, be they in field marketing, global marketing, sales ops, or other areas answered the question in roughly the same way: they expected data governance to improve data quality.

Yes, data governance will indeed improve data quality over time through the implementation of policies and better processes, but the respondents expected data governance to directly affect data cleansing operations.

Suffice it to say there is a whole chain of activities that need to take place between the formation of a data governance program and the point where a data analyst connects a data quality solution to the data and begins the standardizing and de-duping. However, it was encouraging for me to see the value proposition of the two concepts, governance and quality, inextricably intertwined, no attempts to separate or isolate them. Our client’s business people fervently believed that taken together data governance and data quality were the solution to the myriad of problems exacerbated by silo-ed, fractured, and unreliable data.

My guess is that this client’s adoption curve for data governance will be shorter and can piggy-back off the successes of data quality. I’ll let you know if I’m right.

Finding the Gold in Enterprise Data

By Adam White, Senior Consultant

Without control of their data corporations can no longer compete. The emphasis on globalization, new competitive pressures, and the widespread adoption of the Internet have introduced a new sense of urgency around data integration and management.  These days a company must not only have control of its physical data, the actual information that it has captured, it must have the ability to derive information from that data, interpreting it accurately and leveraging it for operational efficiencies and strategic advantage. And it must be able to deploy enterprise data across business users, including call center agents, point of sale staff, sales representatives, managers, directors, and executives. The data may also be required for direct use by customers and/or prospects.

Corporate control of data extends beyond just using data. Data management is also an emerging discipline in most companies. Data must be protected. There are regulatory requirements, customer privacy expectations, and the need to securethe customer base from competitors.  The unforeseen forces of a global economy mean that companies must be able to work with data that is not English. And, of course, the need to integrate the data across various external and internal silos means that point-to-point interfaces must be phased out in favor of a single version of the truth.

Indeed, many of your company’s databases are replicated to provide access to various constituencies. But the point-to-point interfaces they use to exchange data are costly both development and maintenance-wise. Control over heterogeneous data—not to mention sustained management and integration of that data—is next to impossible.  Application upgrades and data enhancements mean large, expensive projects that come with a high risk of failure. A deliberate approach to enterprise data integration can help IT save time, headcount, and rework, as well as launching efficiencies that can not only drive down costs—ensuring responsiveness, repeatable development practices, and data reuse—but, more importantly, delivering value to the business.

So what are the approaches that will give you control over your data and provide the functionality that you need to support your business?  There are different options for integration (the sharing of data and services), including: Extract, Transformation, and Loading (ETL); Enterprise Application Integration (EAI); Enterprise Information Integration (EII); and Customer Data Integration (CDI). The optimal solution at your company may be one of these, or a combination of all four. The point is that decisions about data integration remedies should involve a complete understanding of the differences of data integration solutions, and a deliberate technology selection process.  Also, the implementation of the solution means that you will have to have a robust data governance and data management framework in place so that data integration supports your needs going forward, and doesn’t over time revert back into the original legacy architecture, losing the capabilities that are instrumental in implementing the solution in the first place.

Note: Baseline Partner Evan Levy will be teaching a class at the TDWI World Conference in Las Vegas next month, titled Architectural Options for Data Integration, in which he will outline the differences in these and other integration approaches, compare the strengths and weaknesses of each, and offer lists of vendors in each category. I strongly recommend attending!

SOA and Enterprise Applications

By Adam White, Senior Consultant

It’s frustrating to see the consistent mistakes enterprise and solution architects make when implementing and supporting Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).  The most common one is co-opting functionality that comes with a packaged product as an enterprise solution.  

One example is using CRM workflow as enterprise workflow.  Most products nowadays  come packaged with workflow capabilities.  This means that events can trigger a process and that processes can interface outside of the application to activate other events. The first inclination of many enterprise architects is to utilize that functionality to support the enterprise-class business needs.  The problem is that the functionality that comes with the product is designed to support the product, not the overall enterprise. 

However, there are workflow products that support the entire enterprise. The easiest way to tell is by applying two trusted rules of thumb.  The first is by mapping your functional requirements.  You will see that by using this yardstick, product level functionality is different than enterprise level functionality.  And the second simple rule is if you replace your packaged application (say, your CRM application) do you also have to replace or rebuild your workflow?  The answer should be no.  If it’s yes, then you have incorrectly repurposed the product’s workflow functionality. 

This also occurs in the integration world.  Just because an ETL solution provides integration and can call a web service does not mean it’s the product to use for your core applications. After all, these are systems that support business operations, the systems that you use to process your day to day customer transactions.  In the end, it all comes down to fleshing out your requirements, and using the right tool for  the right job.

iBusiness Intelligence – Business Intelligence 2.0 with an i for Design

By Rob Paller, Consultant

Ten years ago Apple decided to change the way the world interacts with technology with the help of the innocuous little i. It started with the iMac and iBook. Not satisfied with the ripple those products created outside their loyal fan base they decided to make waves and introduced the iPod three years later. They revolutionized the cell phone industry with the release of the iPhone roughly 1.5 years ago. 

The success of the of the iPhone can be attributed to its well thought user interface, multi-touch input and tight controls placed on the developers creating applications for the iPhone.  Mint is an online personal finance and budget planning service with over 600,000 users. Not only do they boast a safe and secure online environment they provide excellent data visualization and analysis tools to their users at no cost.

Ever since Apple opened the doors on its App Store, Mint users have been clamoring for an iPhone application that gave them access to their financial and budget planning updated automatically at their fingertips, literally.

Mint recently released their iPhone app and after reviewing the application I asked myself why can’t Business Intelligence be this simple? Countless hours are spent identifying the right KPIs, capturing the metadata, and mastering the master data. When it comes to the working on the presentation, the data is jazzed up the wrong way and the intelligence is lost in 3D charts, gauges, and poor color palettes. Instead more time needs to be invested in helping the users of the data make intelligent decisions. It is about removing barriers and making the data accessible so you are able to get people to use, understand, and profit from it

Mint accomplishes this by giving users a simple yet intuitive interface. At the highest level you have the ability to see your cash balance, budget, cash on hand, expenses and more combined with a simple progress bar to provide a visual hint. The ability to drill deeper is hinted to you with a simple ‘>’ placed on the right side of the screen. With a simple tap of their finger you are able to drill down into your list of accounts and then into the transactions underneath a given account. The simplicity of the iPhone UI dictates that it must be this way. So does Business Intelligence 2.0.

Industrial Strength Thought Leadership

We at Baseline Consulting are pleased and honored—okay, we’re positively psyched—to introduce our new In the Industry blog. In this blog senior Baseline consulting and management staff will be weighing in on what’s happening in the worlds of MDM, data integration, data governance, data warehousing, and IT architecture. We’ll be looking at vendors, sharing trends, and posting our observations as market as it ebbs and flows. (For whatever it’s worth, our money’s on flow.)

Our In the Industry blog takes the position that BI and data integration solutions are changing. In that regard we’ll be provocative, but at the same time realistic. After all, we know that different companies are at different stages of maturity. To that end we’ll be comparing some before-and-after stories and looking at fresh new ways to deploy information and technology in business. We’ll not only be sharing some deep thinking but contributing some coaching. Hopefully you’ll contribute right back via your comments and e-mails. Thanks for visiting!