« Getting Governed: Handling the Risk of Value | Main | Optimizing IT for Business »

March 1, 2006

BI versus Parkinson's Law

Technologies that can effectively extract management-grade data from the flow of changing operations states have now surfaced in all three main layers of the business structure: resources, functions and transactions.

All parts of the business can now be smarter about the business.

But the danger in focusing on that as an expansion of "the "BI category" is that such a viewpoint does not add quality or maturity to the management disciplines. Instead, it will just increase the complexity and difficulty that a business has in dealing with so-called "BI" solution providers in the marketplace, because their overlapping and competing notions of "intelligence" as a practice will be even more unbounded. Without practice-level discipline, the more BI is said to encompass the less it will mean.

In contrast, consider this: the idea that we can "drive the business" has gone from being just "instrumental" to actually *instrumented*. We can now have real-time mapping of the resources to the functions to the transactions and their impact.

Now that we've crossed that bridge, "navigation" becomes a most powerful model for understanding the probable requirements of an information infrastructure in the business, giving BI a context.

Before thinking about BI, for example, a business needs to understand the difference between its engineering, its navigation, and its governance -- and how to mature its planning and execution capability in each practice.

- Business engineering, for example, would attend to the performance management, business model, and production architecture issues.
- Business navigation would attend to the mission, strategy, and continuity issues.
- Business governance would attend to the alignment of policy, opportunity and change management within execution.

Each of the three major groups has its own needs for management information. Since all of them are likely already pursued by most mid-to-large sized organizations, the question is one of what key information has usually been unavailable to those management efforts on time, making it harder for them to predictably do business well.

Except in some vestigial marketing sense, the solutions to those deficits are not better understood by calling them "BI" solutions.

Rather, we might evangelize the idea that "management" should not be an elite responsibility in the business but instead a competency that is increasingly and pervasively enabled by information processing focused on the business issues. Taking the business management instrumentation everywhere -- such as through BSM and enterprise architecture in IT, or through transparency in Finance and in Process Management -- will make sense to organizations for reasons that they already understand.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at March 1, 2006 10:49 AM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.malcolmryder.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/224

Comments

Post a comment