Why Management Isn't Enough

If you've been reading this series from the beginning, you may have noticed that, as of now, there has been no mention of that traditional management responsibility, resource allocation. To review, we started by listing four critical characteristics of business intelligence

• meaning (semantic) understood
• applicability (use/utility) understood
• currency (timeliness) understood
• source/lineage/pedigree understood

Clearly, none of these is about allocation of resources. Just as clearly, resources will have to be allocated to create and maintain those characteristics. The point is that management skills do not come into play until the organization has decided that business intelligence is a capability it must have.

Prior to this, we have also discussed three distinct functions that are typically thrown together in the basket labelled "management." They are

• Leadership: moving an organization in the best direction by motivating change
• Management: making the organization effective by managing costs and productivity
• Governance: keeping the organization's productivity high by ensuring consistency and stability

Creating, developing and maintaining the four essential characteristics of business intelligence is going to demand all three of these functions. Leadership will be required to define and effect necessary changes. People accustomed to doing their job as they see fit, may need help in adjusting from that paradigm to one of "best for the organization." In many cases, managers have interpreted "organization" to mean the group for which I am responsible. They will need some leadership to make the adjustment to thinking of the the good of the organization as a whole. The scope of organization will vary depending on the process under discussion.

By now, you may be entertaining doubts. The doubts may center on the organization's ability to carry this off. They may concern whether the right people, experience, skill sets are available. They may also be about whether this business intelligence thing is worth the effort. I can't answer any of those doubts for you, but I can say, without equivocation, that getting to business intelligence is going to demand change and that the change will demand strong and consistent leadership.

The people within an organization are fully capable of governing themselves. Indeed, the United States of America is founded on that premise. We are "a government of laws and not of men" said John Adams. In the corporate world, laws are known as standards. Employees representing various business functions and sub-functions will be the best ones to define the standards that they will follow as long as leaders keep before them the corporate interest. There is a long history of failed attempts to impose standards on people, including those by King George V that resulted in the American Revolution. There is no need to repeat those failures.

Once the standards have been defined and agreed to by those affected, and once they have been reviewed for costs and efficiency by the managers, then what remains is to establish the equivalent of legislative subcommittees to monitor their consistent use and consult with the parties when the standards must be improved or abandoned. The cost lies in the change that produces the standards, not in the governance of the standards. In fact, many organizations already have a function dedicated to the monitoring of standards application. Quality Assurance has frequently been given a bad name because it is charged with creation of the standards as well as their monitoring.

Do you want business intelligence? Do you need current, unambiguous, actionable information with provenance, or can you be satisfied with really cool charts and graphs in three (or more) dimensions and lots of colors? You will have to decide.