Intelligent Enterprise

The state of information adequacy across business has never been worse. The percentage of IT budgets allocated to improving decision support and business intelligence for business and the underlying information management technologies is now a miniscule fraction of total spend by IT for business. Even worse, the time it takes to implement improvements is dire. The cycle time has gone beyond normal response and in many organizations can be measured in years. How is this possible? Well, IT is not spending enough time and resources on assessing the situation and has become fully out of touch with the user and functional requirements for information and process needs.

Where is the discussion on this problem? Well, it is being swept under the rug as status quo and is not acceptable. Yet, at the same time we see in the broader industry blogs and industry pundit conversation has technology supplier discussion about BI now as a commodity or that it has become pervasive. Of course this is an oxymoron if you look at the situation in business or the lack of rigor and focus in IT to support analytics and BI. Unfortunately, business has nothing close to true BI but instead has a plethora of spreadsheets, presentations, reports and thousands of emails that have little context or focused support for BI.

This is now the situation in operations, sales, HR, supply chain and finance as found in our research across thousands of organizations. From assessing business it is clear that organizations have managed through the situation and extra cycles of review are required safety nets to achieve acceptable levels of performance. With IT spending the majority of their time keeping the lights on with their data centers, networks, computers and the never ending CRM and ERP deployments, business should not expect much improvement in the short term.

The current situation should have business mad as hell and fed up. With so much of an organization's IT budget being spent on technology, but the situation in business having gotten a whole lot worse, now what? I would recommend that business either take back control of their BI destiny or just write them off as educational experiments. Another choice is to develop a new strategy built on the demands for information and analytics that might need to completely bypass IT and outsource to a supplier that provides software as a service (SaaS) and just requires data feeds to populate their analytics and BI capabilities.

Are you fed up? Are you looking for alternatives to your current information anarchy? Let me know.

Let me know your thoughts.