How to unearth buried treasures

Users can be a pain, especially those individuals with more knowledge. You know the type: they spend a whole day extracting information from half a dozen different systems, importing it into Microsoft Access or
Excel, coming up with results that do not stack up and then expecting IT to bail them out.

Looked at from an IT perspective, supporting expert users can be a drain on resources and a distraction to the department, as can the constant stream of requests from other users to find specific data or prepare a particular report.

If only such individuals would just get on with their real jobs and stop pestering you.

Well, the reality is that they generally are getting on with their real jobs.

If you step across to the other side of the looking glass and peer back out, you see the mirror image of IT frustration with users: user frustration with IT.

From a user perspective, technology leaders responsible for overall business performance are dealing with a relentless increase in the pace of business.

But when Freeform Dynamics interviewed a group of senior managers from City of London financial institutions earlier this year, they revealed that while they could get their hands on retrospective financial performance figures, they had limited visibility of day-to-day and hour-by-hour operational metrics.

Put simply, senior finance managers often only get to know about a trend at an operational level once it has affected the overall numbers. By which time, of course, the damage has often been done or the opportunity missed.

Even in the highly progressive financial services sector, businesses are therefore constrained in their ability to manage causes and are often only capable of tracking effects ­ and even then with a time lag in many cases.

The frustration with IT, then, stems from the fact that users know the information they need is usually there somewhere in databases and applications, but it is too hard for them to extract quickly enough in a coherent manner ­ see box.

User problems do not stop with time lag concerns. There is also the problem of data consistency ­ or more to the point, inconsistency ­ meaning that data from different sources is often contradictory.

Such issues leads to multiple versions of the truth. It is a problem that needs to be resolved
before information can be used confidently for monitoring and decision-making purposes.

Whichever way you look at it, IT has an integration problem on its hands ­ and a nasty one, given that the requirement typically involves pulling together redundant and often conflicting content.

It is not, however, a problem that can be ignored. In the majority of organisations, fragmentation of information across systems directly hampers visibility and is therefore a serious impediment to continuous and effective business management.

So what is the answer? Well it is always tempting for IT people to think in terms of technology, which in this case might translate to data warehouses and master data management.

Others will go for business intelligence software to provide clever analytics capability and fancy front-end dashboards, scorecards and presentation aids.

Some IT managers may even advocate trying to defragment the source systems by consolidating or replacing legacy applications, although there is a limit to how much can be achieved cost-effectively through such a route in most environments, especially when the risk of operational disruption is introduced into the equation.

The trick, of course, is to start with the business requirement and then work backwards. In a world in which users cannot have everything they would ideally want, it is necessary for IT to prioritise, which in turn means understanding what really drives the business in terms of performance.

In practice, most organisations already have a reasonably good view of business requirements, at least at a high level. But the degree to which such demands have been translated into precise measures, or key performance indicators, varies considerably between organisations.

The variation is largely a business, rather than an IT, imperative. But once the key performance indicators have been defined for causes as well as effects, knowing where to focus information integration efforts and investments becomes a great deal clearer.

Dale Vile is managing director of analyst Freeform Dynamics

The impact of data fragmentation

In a recent study, Freeform Dynamics interviewed 50 senior managers in City of London financial institutions, who ranked the three most common information access problems, in order of frequency, as:

*We often know the data is there, but getting at it is difficult or impossible.
*Finding and collating data across different information sources is often very difficult.
*Performance data is often not available quickly enough to act on it effectively.

The last of these three problems is typically a consequence of the first two, as the need for either IT or more knowledgeable users to hand-craft management reports or manually populate dashboards with the latest performance information can introduce significant delay.

Such time lags also represent an overhead and risk, as manual manipulation of data is both time-consuming and error-prone.

If we look behind the symptoms as articulated by business users, it quickly becomes clear that fragmentation of IT systems and applications lies at the root of most information access problems.

Fragmentation highlights the importance of integration in the context of business intelligence as well as transaction processing.

The full research is available at: www.freeformdynamics.com