Story 2 — What happens if: You take business initiatives without onboarding the IT department
In our previous story, we uncovered the consequences of underestimating the underlying complexity of data platforms. In this second story of our series “the 4 most common mistakes of digital transformation”, we will study the impact of an opaque and siloed organisation, where key departments like business and IT are invisible to one another, setting up their own separate agenda and strategy and acting solely for their individual benefit. Let’s explore together how complex IT-Business alignment can be.
In a rapidly mutating market, most enterprises aspire to be technology disruptors and innovators. Yet, what distinguishes top-performing companies is their ability to synergise business and IT altogether because they came to the realisation that strategically aligning both departments has become an imperative for data-driven business.
By contrast, companies who fail to find the balance between empowering business or IT, struggle deeply in successfully delivering and carrying out some kind of initiatives.
Taking business decisions without onboarding IT is a common mistake or shall I say a trap that most companies tend to fall into. Drawing a plan without having the means to implement it, is what generally happens when business people build up a strategy and a roadmap of projects without consulting their IT counterparts that fail to secure the technical tools or instruments to carry those projects forward.
In that context, a multinational insurer decided to set up a data office for the Benelux countries. The data office was under the COO reporting chain, meaning that the data office, since day one, was seen as a key asset by the top management.
The data office focused on data value management (including analytics use cases for market management and pricing), data architecture, BI/EDWH rationalisation, and governance (enterprise data model, metadata management, metadata harvesting, etc.) The data architecture was supposed to support the data value management and the BI rationalisation to cut down on the costs of developing and producing use cases.
In this company, inter as well as intra-department communication was disrupted and each one of them operated as separate entities.
The IT department was rather traditional with long architecture and development cycles. The data office needed to act fast, hence decided to bypass the tedious processes of the IT department to design its own data architecture. Still, they needed the IT department to deploy in production the data hub product they chose, since the business people did not have the ability, nor the human capital, to maintain that solution. As a consequence, the situation turned into an organisational warfare between both business and IT departments. The IT people refused to deploy the business people solution and this incited heated debates over the product choice, the absence of validation through a standard IT process, and the fact that the IT people had not been included in the initiative.
As a result of it all, the data office ended up aborting their data architecture initiative.
In the absence of a robust and scalable data architecture, the use cases costs skyrocketed and the expected ROI on each business case was not reached because of the too high ad-hoc infrastructure cost (development & production).
The lesson learned is that “data infrastructure” is a key pillar for organisations and the foundation for any data-supported action. As such, any initiative that may have an impact on them calls for the simultaneous onboarding of both business and IT departments from the onset.
Visit our website to find out more !