Ladder of Business Intelligence

I purchased the book "CIO Wisdom: Best Practices from Silicon Valley's Leading IT Experts" recently, and it's full of great insight into what CIOs have to deal with on a daily basis. Every chapter is written by a CIO or two, and with chapter titles such as "The First 90 days", "Governance", "IT Organization", "The Metrics of IT: Mangement by Measurement" and "Strategic Outsourcing" there are plenty of real-world lessons learned.

One chapter that caught my eye was "Ladder of Business Intelligence: A Systematic Approach to Success for Information Technology" that explains the method used by Brocade CIO James Cates to explain the promise of IT to business partners, and what is required to deliver the promises. Here's an interview in this month's Intelligent Enterprise, which has one of the most insightful approaches I've read about:

What if I were to ask you: What are the one to 10 questions that, if you could answer every day, would allow you to perform your job better? And you can do that across an entire company, which represents about 100 to 120 business roles. Then you say, which business roles are most important? Which ones do I want to automate first? I always start with the CFO because he or she has to go to the street. Then you check out the CEO. It's not so easy to see which roles, if you automate them, give the company the best value. It may very well be that automating your purchasing people — the ones who are cutting the deals with your suppliers — may be more important than automating a set of middle directors.

When I ask the requirements of business units, I no longer ask for an exhaustive list written in prose. I just ask them to give me the questions. They're only 10 or so questions and have nothing to do with technology. Then I just build this (what I call BRIA [business role information analysis]) table that shows question, information, data, and data source. And then anybody can look at the table and spot problems.

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Most of your power comes when something is simple and a lot of people can look at it. You don't know right away what business role is going to give you the insightful question or answer — but if it's hidden in technology, my point is, they'll never see it.

For a fuller explanation (without purchasing the book) here's a writeup from CIO Insight, "Talking Tech to Business Execs."