Down With ROI!

  Business Intelligence   Strategy  

You have all undoubtedly heard about the recent problems in intelligence gathering in the United States. The recent 9/11 report uncovered that hundreds of intelligence agencies seldom coordinated with each other on intelligence finds and the result was, of course, less than superb information.

Believe it or not, the building of IT systems has similar characteristics. IT systems across corporate America have been built in a stove-piped manner over the years. They have been built to solve a particular business problem, built with a specific architecture, built with specific business rules and seldom built with interoperability with other systems. Just like our intelligence agencies, they were not built in an integrated fashion to take advantage of economies of scale, but rather live on as individual parts in an overall fragmented system.

IT finally started realizing that these stove-piped systems were not optimal. They often consumed duplicate resources (both human and computational) and were not coordinated to perform more complex functions (e.g. data mining). In the late 1990s, many enterprise transformation initiatives often with packaged solutions were attempted as an opportunity to reduce stove-piped systems and provide more functionality. There were many failures, and business customers lost appetite for these colossal solutions.

Today…

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