Eat Your Own Dog Food, IT

	Business Intelligence Business Intelligence

by Vijay Sankaran

December 3, 2001

Corporate IT organizations all around the country have been doing the same things for years. Telling the business how they can use IT enhance their business. I can hear the spiel ringing in my ears: "By building a financial data warehouse, you can control your costs blah blah blah blah..." Great idea, huge cost savings. The business must be thinking, "Those IT guys are wizards." As an IT guy, unfortunately, I have yet to achieve that glamorous perception. In fact, sometimes I feel like crawling into a hole based on what I've seen at IT organizations. The business gives us money--but we have no idea what we spend it on. We have people--but have no idea what they are working on or, in some cases, who they even work for! For a group of individuals to know what the business needs to control costs, it is certainly pathetic that it does not even know how to control its own costs. So therefore I propose that it is time IT eats its own dog food!

Specifically, from a business intelligence context, what does this mean? First, it means budget analysis-- being able to analyze what you are spending and for what projects. It means being able to use business intelligence tools to run "what-if" scenarios on project return on investments and prioritization to determine the most value-added IT projects for the business. It means being able to slice and dice your workforce by role and skills and match appropriate people to appropriate projects. It means forecasting the skills you need in the organization based on a projected pipeline. It means being able to mine actual time reported against projects to develop benchmarks for certain types of projects. It means developing a knowledge management system to support the capture and organization of reusable components. There is more you can do, but here are some bits and pieces to begin with.

IT's business customer satisfaction is directly tied to how IT delivers, but it is also tied to how IT portrays itself. If IT portrays itself as a screwed-up smorgasbord of disjointed processes and tools, the business is less likely to listen to IT's opinion. The quicker IT is in adopting its own technology recommendations, the more successful it will be in getting the business to adopt them.

It is also interesting to note some of IT's ongoing soap operas. One is the lack of IT organizations that are able to have repeatable processes. There are so few IT organizations that have CMM (capability mature model) levels above 0. CMM measures how often IT repeats its own processes. Most IT organizations should be CMM negative, i.e., they develop new processes any time they deliver something. Repeatability and measurement should be easy for IT. With its array of business intelligence tools, it should be able to analyze its project efforts and come up with estimation metrics for new projects. Somehow I can never seem to find those estimation metrics anywhere. So instead we estimate a project based on gut-feel, and when the project costs go over, we go back and beg for more money with our proverbial and bottomless tin cup. Hence, the ongoing soap opera of IT.

Bottom line: IT needs to improve itself to be more efficient and follow the recommendations that it makes to the business. IT needs to be a lean, mean service organization that is continually looking inward and analyzing to deliver better results to the business. So before you start offering your food to others, definitely make sure that it tastes yummy yourself.