The View From Here: More Focus, More Specifics, More BI

December 12, 2008

I’ve learned some interesting things in the short time I have published The IT-Finance Connection. The most important is that creating a meaningful site requires a narrow focus on something tangible. It’s not that the initial concept for the site – that an organization benefits if IT and other departments communicate effectively – isn’t still relevant. It is. The problem is that concepts alone aren’t enough to support a site.

The need for good communications is true and relevant – and still the site’s theme. There are just so many times and so many ways that that basic message can be repeated before it starts sounding like Faber College’s motto from the movie Animal House: “Knowledge is Good.” As time passes, an ever broader mix of topics seems to fit. After all, everything involves communications, and almost everything touches the IT department. Pretty soon, the site is not about anything.

So the answer is to focus on something real. What than, is the most common organizational activity that actually puts the concept into practice? For my money, it’s business intelligence. IT departments generally are in charge of deploying and the subsequent care and feeding of BI infrastructures. These are monstrously complex undertakings. Without clear and ongoing communications between IT and the departments that ultimately will use the data, projects at best will under perform and at worse fail.

For this reason, I am re-orienting The IT-Finance Connection to focus on communications between IT and data-consuming departments as BI systems are planned, rolled out, managed, used and upgraded. I will present more news and shift the focus from contributed articles to podcasts. I’ll still post the articles when I get them, but concentrate on talking to users, vendors and analysts and presenting those conversations at the site.

Posted by Carl · Filed Under Business Intelligence