Mind the Gap
- Details
- Category: Submitted recommendations
- Published: 15 May 2013
Bridging IT-Business divide is a two-way street. CPM and BI can definitely help. The eternal gap between IT departments and business units bedevils many organizations. But there’s a way to get them on the same page. Corporate Performance Management and Business Intelligence also have a role to play.
TODAY, MORE THAN ever before, there is a significant disconnect between what the business expects from its IT resources and what the IT department thinks it is delivering. Why is that? What is so fundamentally different about IT? Why don’t business departments have the same difficulty to have one another's expectations?
To answer those questions, let’s look at how business departments interact and then compare that with how IT functions. That way, we can identify fundamental changes that IT managers can implement to bridge this gap on business intelligence (BI) projects and other initiatives corporate performance management (CPM) initiatives.
Even in the most dysfunctional company, there is a common language understood by all business managers - profit, expenses, assets?and, at a high level, customers and products or services offered. The top executives in each department have their own goals to meet but also have a fundamental understanding of the goals for other departments. There are logical metrics for determining accomplishments and progress against those goals. These include customer churn rates, days of sales outstanding, same-store sales growth, inventory turns, call center hold times, marketing campaign response rates and, of course, weekly, monthly and quarterly revenues.
Most business units also have well-documented processes and procedures. They aren’t called “standard operating procedures” for nothing: Each department develops its own approved way of handling customers, orders, suppliers, inventory management and even external entities like regulatory agencies. These policies and procedures are detailed in manuals and taught in regularly scheduled training classes for new employees.
