A Plea to the Engineers

By Stephen Putman, Senior Consultant

I am a computer engineer. I have been a computer engineer for over twenty years. I know a lot of other computer engineers. I have seen many techniques for implementing Business Intelligence systems, with varying degrees of effectiveness.

I have a simple request of my fellow engineers:

Please stop designing functions into your analytical applications without input from your business users.

It is a simple request, one that should be easy to understand and implement. Unfortunately, I have seen many companies where this idea is central to the fabric of the IT organization. Non-business managers are confident that they know what the business needs, either through hubris or a soured relationship with their users. Functionality is designed and developed that bears little relationship to how data is consumed and used in the business organization, usually without regard for the cost of development and maintenance of the resultant structures.

It’s easy to determine that this is happening in your organization - you attend meetings where the following phrases are used with increasing frequency:

“I think this is done...”
“They will need this eventually...”
“We didn’t think of that...”

We live in an age where the Business Intelligence projects that are completed are frequently over budget, late, and do not serve the needs of business users (too many projects are cancelled or abandoned as well). Much of this failure can be attributed to communication issues between the business users and the system implementation team. The system team means well by trying to fill in the gaps, but this often leads to frustration, uncertainty, and design based on hearsay. They really should try to resist that temptation.

How much more effective will your system be if you ask your users what they want, instead of guessing or assuming you know better?

photo by Wonderlane via Flickr (Creative Commons License)

---

Stephen Putman has over 20 years experience supporting client/server and internet-based operations from small offices to major corporations.  He has extensive experience in a variety of front-end development tools, as well as relational database design and administration, and is extremely effective in project management and leadership roles. He is the co-author of The Data Governance eBook, available at information-management.com.