What do business people dislike most about IT projects? Is it the cost? Is it the adaptability? Is it the time it takes to go through the process? The long wait for delivery? The fact that IT projects fail to deliver business value? Is it “IT / Business Alignment” ?
My experience is that it all has to do with the value IT delivers. Value is a vexed issue because it means different things to different people. As IT is now really a functional service provider, it measures its value in terms of uptime and throughput .
Business survives on innovation and that means it values anything that contributes to better delivery of its product. The term ‘better’ connotes any or all of faster, cheaper, more effective. In other words- Value. While IT can and largely has automated business processes, it has been less successful at supporting business innovation – especially with regard to the facilitation of business decision making. As all business decisions are based on the concept of obtaining greater value for effort, IT’s path to re-establishment is less thought about “alignment” and more about how to create business value.
It’s well documented that large scale EDW/BI projects have a poor record of meeting business needs. Only about one in five are acknowledged by business as being of ANY value.
In a recent discussion with a public sector client, we looked at how large projects are procured. Long lead times, large often overly complex requirements, long bid processes and strict contractual terms. This supposedly mitigates risk! It may, so far as a “level playing field” procurement approach but it kills off any thoughts on the part of bidders regarding innovation.
For example, if you can rapidly develop a working system to confirm business needs, you will find out in the first few weeks of a project what you REALLY need to deliver. All too often that is not what is specified in the contracts. In fact CHANGE is specifically excluded in contracts because of the risk to the provider. So in most cases suppliers bid for work that, while signed off and understood by the authors as representing what they want, by the time it is developed no longer represents a valuable solution.
That is why Agile approaches to EDW/BI development will prevail. As business SEEs the results of IT becoming innovative again, it will buy into the concept. Agile reconnects IT with Business in a partnership that delivers value sooner at lower levels of risk and cost.