A lot of importance is being placed on business intelligence again. It seems as though the promises that business intelligence was supposed to deliver got lost at some point, but that it’s oddly enough found its way back onto the path of productivity gains and ergo back into the minds of the IT pundits that drive the rhetoric of the industry.
But what I don’t hear people talking about is applying business intelligence to the business of IT. A lot of resources are put into a wide variety of IT projects. But what drives the agenda? Are the allocation of those resources justified based on quantifiable metrics or are they based on the influence that various business units have, whether that influence is legitimate or simply based on which wheels are the squeakiest?
Let’s take a step back for a moment and look at something simple such as application utilization. There is a cost to owning, updating and managing a specific application. Even if it is free (after all there is no such thing as free). Let’s say that your user base spends 18% of their time in one product and 9% of their time in another. Seems easy to look at which product to invest in? Now let’s go a step further and say that the product that users spend 9% of their time in makes the organization 1% more profitable per percentage point of time spent in the application whereas the application that users spend 18% of their time in (on average) nets the organization half of a percentage point of profitability per percent point of time. In that case it becomes a bit more difficult to determine which product of the two deserves more resources from the IT department.
But who knows what percentage of time is spent in a given application? And for that matter, who can equate profitability or productivity to time spent in a given application? Let’s face it, budget constraints are causing IT departments in most enterprises a big headache. Given less capital to expend than last year, how is IT to make the decision about where dwindling precious resources are to be spent? How is one to predict which budget that gets slashed will end with massive blowback? There’s no magic formula for any of that. But quantification provides a means of justification for those decisions. Just make the most informed decision possible by taking on as many variables as possible…