When Business and IT Align: A Recipe for Agility

For some, it’s a culture question. IT is typecast by other employees as a bastion of geeks who are a culture apart. IT professionals, for their part, often characterize business folk, especially those in sales and marketing, as brutish and disingenuous.

For others, culture is not a factor. For them, the demands on both sides of the fence pit teams against one another. Business folks need things done ASAP in order to conduct their roles, while IT is beset with the burden of doing more with less and is barely able to keep up with the high demands of simply keeping systems running.

Still others believe that something more nefarious is in play, that IT’s main role is "command and control," and that it uses governance to be the team that always says no.

Each of these perspectives has both kernels of truth and heaps of exaggeration. But no matter the cause of this divide, we know one thing for sure: it persists, and it creates inefficiencies in the organization.

In this presentation, attendees will learn:

How do we approach this singularity and banish the schismatic behavior that marks the broken conversation between IT and business?
How do we help create the foundation for allowing business to self-service and self-discover information while adhering to strict rules about rights, governance, and security?
How do we recognize that these issues impede progress and reduce agility?
How do we work with the other side to find solutions that simultaneously enable and liberate?
How do we avoid the trap of sticking to the current way of doing things and believing a solution will emerge from the very circumstances that created it?

Reducing the schism between business and IT is paramount if the organization is to gain agility. Put differently, the more business and IT converge, the better chance an organization has to be innovative and fleet-footed.

John Myers is the Managing Research Director of Business Intelligence at Enterprise Management Associates. John has nearly 20 years of experience in areas related to business analytics and business intelligence in professional services, sales consulting, product management, industry analysis, and research. He has helped organizations to solve their analytics problems whether they related to operational platforms such as customer care or billing or applied analytical applications, such as revenue assurance or fraud management. Established thought leadership in emerging data management paradigms such as Big Data (combination of multi-structured and relational data sets) applications and NoSQL access data stores.

John is a frequent contributor to industry publications including Search Business Analytics, Inside Analysis and Information Management. He speaks internationally on the topics of telecom analytics, data virtualization, and Big Data. John is also considered one of the Top 100 Big Data Influencers.

Steve Sanders is Vice President at TimeXtender, a software leader dedicated to democratizing access to corporate data. Steve has more than 20 years of experience in senior roles helping early-stage software companies. He has an extensive background and interest in Web analytics and social media predictive analytics. Steve helps CIOs, CAO, and VP level executives involved in their corporate BI and IT initiatives democratize access to their corporate data, helping to end the battle between business and IT. This re-engineering transforms an organization from one focused on business intelligence to a modern-day intelligent business. Over the years, Steve has nurtured and counseled many organizations to help them learn about complex products and how to achieve the greatest possible value from their technology investment.