Podcast: BI’s Role in Bridging the IT/Business Gap

April 16, 2009

Listen to the Podcast:

For years we have heard that IT must be more business-focused, but the question remains as to what that actually means. In my new book Value-Driven IT I answer that question with tangible, actionable advice based on real experiences.

Business is about cash flows, and yet IT practitioners focus almost entirely on data flows. This disconnect is central to the lack of a strong relationship between business and IT and the common view of IT as a mere provider of services rather than a business partner. It is also a root cause of the difficulty of measuring business performance, which is a central goal of business intelligence. If systems are not designed to measure business performance, then reverse engineering performance metrics from existing data will only be partially successful. Measurability must be thought of from the outset, but to define metrics, one must have a model of how IT systems affect business performance, and that is what IT practitioners today fail to establish: that failing is what our industry must change.

According to Mark D. Lutchen, Partner and lead of PricewaterhouseCoopers’ IT Business Risk Management Practice and author of the best-selling Managing IT as a Business (John Wiley & Sons, 2004),

The subtitle of [Cliff's] book, “Achieving Agility and Assurance without Compromising Either,” actually tells the whole story. The game going forward will no longer be about either/or. Rather, it will be about doing both, it will be about cause and effect, it will be about tight coordination and collaboration, it will be about effective balance, and it will surely be about effective leverage. In this book, Cliff Berg has done an admirable job of pointing out many of the practical reasons why this must be done and how to make it happen by weaving together a very credible latticework of concepts, approaches, advice, and real examples. This book presents a call to action for many different players within the IT organization - CIO’s, IT architects, developers, programmers, and implementers, among others.

–Cliff Berg

Posted by Carl · Filed Under Business Intelligence