The Practice

  Business Intelligence   Strategy  

I have seen many different paradigms of how corporations structure their IT organizations. Some are focused functionally, where each group serves a functional business group and has all of the technical skill set within that functional IT group (e.g. Marketing IT systems) to support the customer business needs. Other organizations are structured by job practice where DBAs, developers and project managers gain depth in the specific areas and are brought together to form optimal development teams to support specific business goals.

These job practices may further be sub-segmented into specific technologies such as J2EE, Oracle and Microsoft. Each of these models has pros and cons and is employed in many places. However, I believe that the most effective organizational structure for IT is based upon application pattern. Examples of application patterns are business intelligence, object-oriented development, packaged applications, mainframe applications and traditional Web-based applications. I am going to make the case for this kind of structure by focusing on business intelligence applications.

Business intelligence applications are very specific applications. They solve a certain a type of business problem (typically analytical in nature), they employ a specific set of technologies and they require a unique blend of skills. By distributing business …

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