Inside the Biz with Jill Dyche

Dear IT: A Letter from Your Business Users

In which Jill writes a rebuttal letter on behalf of her business clients.

photo by aflcio2008

In my last blog post I told a story of a client who, in an effort to explain the value of business intelligence, wrote a letter to his CEO explaining the business value delivered by BI and the ROI projections for newly-integrated data. The letter worked. The BI team got the funding it needed to propel itself from project to program.

But at many companies it would take more than a letter and a value proposition to convince business users of the value of BI. Knowing some of the harsh realities at other companies, I’ve penned a sort of rebuttal letter from the BI user community back to IT.

Dear BI Team:

Long time no see. And by that, we mean where the hell have you been? We know you’re around. Seems you’ve been complaining to our execs about the lack of user adoption. And that we never engage you. And now you’re mad that we’ve hired consultants to come in to help us build a roadmap.

Well guess what? We had no choice. While you’re letting that big database vendor buy you lunch and having dashboard bake-offs and devising new IT standards—again—we have work to do. This may have slipped your mind, but the company has just downsized. Despite this rough patch, our responsibilities haven’t changed. Remember the CEO’s company-wide webcast in January? The one where he promised that in the coming year the company would cut costs while increasing customer acquisition and driving innovation? Well, that’s our job. And we’re trying to get it done.

Frankly we’re not sure whether to feel resentment or resignation. After all, we know what you guys have been spending and, frankly, all that funding should align with our needs. You’ve been loading data warehouse tables for as long as we can remember. But no one’s asked us if we wanted any of that data. And if we hear the question, “What keeps you up at night?” from one of your business analysts one more time we’re going to throw the poor bugger down the elevator shaft. Odds are he’ll bounce off one of those big servers in your data center.

We read someplace that IT is supposed to act as a supplier to the business. We deal with suppliers all the time. But none of them expects us to understand their internal processes—they just help us solve our problems. You guys insist on us working within your framework. Whatever it is.

Here’s what we’d like. We’d like to track the results of our marketing campaigns by the hour and make continuous adjustments. We’d like to monitor and respond to the buzz about the company through social media. We’d like the account reps to know about support and payment issues when they’re writing customer bids. We’d like management to understand the true profitability of our products, not just their revenues. We’d like our numbers to reconcile between finance and sales.

So while you’re mounting your campaign against our consultants and lamenting our shoddy technical skills, why don’t you calendar a face-to-face meeting with us and ask us about this list? No, this isn’t another requirements gathering session. Instead, it’s us offering you an opportunity to participate. We’re hopeful that maybe you can help us solve some of these problems? Or maybe it’ll just be business as usual.

In characteristic anticipation of something new,

Your Users

Dear CEO: A Letter from Your BI Team

In which one of Jill’s clients puts his team’s success in writing.

 

photo by spitecho

Baseline Consulting was recently engaged by a large pharmaceutical company’s business intelligence team to give BI a shot in the arm. Paul, the Director of BI, had been frustrated with the general lack of support he was getting from business stakeholders. Our goal was to help Paul and his team to formalize their BI program, lay out an 18-month roadmap, and build a pitch to solicit additional funding from lines of business.

“They’re taking us for granted,” Paul explained when we asked about his users. “They don’t understand the complexity of their requests. They think everything should be cheap and easy and take four weeks.” Indeed, the business users saw the BI team as just another IT development organization. Rather than engaging them in sustained requirements conversations and discussing business outcomes, they had marginalized the group as nothing more than reporting order-takers. There were no rules of engagement. There was no collaboration.

Ironically, the BI team had a pretty good delivery record. Their analytical applications were comprehensive. Despite widespread disaffection, user adoption had increased, and data quality had improved over time. In fact after reviewing the team’s progress we recommended that Paul stop focusing on battling the various line of business managers and go straight to the top: he should go talk to the CEO.

Paul demurred. A meeting with the CEO was outside his comfort zone. He wasn’t even sure he could convince his boss, the CIO, to support the idea. He didn’t know what points to bring up, and he feared he might even flub his lines. “This could turn out to be career-limiting,” he said nervously.

We suggested that before he scheduled the dreaded meeting, he write the CEO a letter. The letter would outline the BI team’s contributions to date, discuss the potential of BI to solve additional business problems and drive competitive differentiation, and explain the opportunity cost of cutting BI investments. We agreed that if, after writing the letter, Paul was still nervous about meeting with the CEO, we would find another way to tell the story of BI to the business and get buy-in.

Writing the letter brought up some difficult issues. Paul had to be honest about his team’s ability to speak the business’ language. He also admitted that the BI development process was squishy and roles within the team weren’t circumscribed. This left the business users guessing about the team’s delivery process, resulting in incessant questioning about timelines, functionality, and value.

We worked together with Paul to write a letter to the CEO that was well-crafted, clear, and made a compelling case for renewed BI investment. It explained why the firm’s physician management program would flounder without the team’s data expertise; outlined how much money the company could save by pushing out accurate physician spend figures; made the case for integrating R&D data; and outlined the strategic initiatives that would be BI-enabled. It was also specific about new resource needs, technology upgrade costs, and why they were part of a larger vision for an information-driven enterprise.

Our bet was that the letter would energize Paul, giving him the confidence—and the ammunition—he needed to schedule that in-person meeting with the CEO. Instead, with the CIO’s enthusiastic approval and a little relief, Paul decided to e-mail the letter to the CEO.

We weren’t surprised when, upon receiving the letter, the CEO called Paul to request an in-person meeting. But Paul was.

Nevertheless, he bit the bullet and led a meeting with the CEO, the CIO, the V.P. of Sales and Marketing for the U.S., and several other business leaders, leaning heavily on our letter, but explaining historical challenges and additional opportunities for BI and integrated data. At lunch afterwards, we celebrated the fact that the CEO had a new appreciation for the overall value of BI, and a new level of commitment. And that Paul, flush with his own success and looking forward to a new way of working, had increased his team’s budget by 30 percent.