This week I had one of the oddest inquiries I have seen in 11 years as an analyst. I dialed in and met with 3 business users. Their challenge was this (and I paraphrase):
We can see all manner of issues with data inconsistency and quality all around or business. Numerous times our business outcomes are harmed or held hostage to issues in the data. We know this. We can see these issues. We can explain them – even to our IT colleagues But we cannot get them to join with us to do something about this issue! IT reports to us that “the integration between the two (or more) systems is working as designed – everything is OK”. Help.
I do not remember being asked to help business people build a business case to convince IT that IT needs to change its behavior. When this kind of question comes up (which is quite frequently), it is usually IT that has the challenge with the business not overly interested in cleaning up data and business processes that abuse the data. Of course, in any one week, up to 40% of my inquiries will be with (business) end users (sometimes with IT too); but the fact that IT was not even interested in the problem was the most interesting part about this inquiry this week.
I wondered to myself l- what was the CIO actually doing for this organization? Was the CIO aware of the opportunity in front of them? Who knows. Well, this stuff certainly keeps you on your toes!