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By Tom Groenfeldt
Advice for making a new technology effort successful often starts with such unhelpful suggestions as "First, get the support of the CEO." The fact that CEOs usually have far more demands than time is rarely mentioned.
Anne Robinson, senior manager for information and data strategy at Cisco, laid out a more practical guide during the Teradata Partners conference in Washington, D.C. this week. Based on her experience of developing a system for supply chain management at Cisco, she faced an uphill battle to explain the benefits from a data warehouse.
Blake Johnson, a consulting professor at Stanford who has worked with Robinson, said she was extremely skillful at rounding up executive support.
"Spreadsheets still rule the world," he said. Data quality is poor, but the executive pressure is to get it done fast, whatever it takes." Business stakeholders don't understand data management, much less an enterprise data warehouse, he added, and they don't have the time or the inclination to learn about the technology in depth. A data warehouse project is long-term, the success is uncertain and the value isn't clear while the status quo seems to be working just fine, said Johnson.
Robinson's approach is to offer data management as a service the business can buy -- executives are accustomed to evaluating and buying services, so this is within their comfort zone.
One key is offering a project in small budgets and rapid time to value, she explained. IT owns the cost and delivery risk, subject to clear specifications of the contributions required from the business team.
She gained support by meeting with one executive after another to learn their burning issues. "Understand their impressions and expectations," said Robinson. She has one executive who is hung up on decommissioning -- "any innovation that allows decommissioning an existing bit of kit is a winner with him."
One you find their major pain points, translate it into a data perspective. "They probably won't be explicit about it because they don't know what they don't know," said Robinson. So she asks executives for their thoughts about data and data management and then shows how a data warehouse could help, such as pointing out where the executive is managing too much from aggregated data because more detail isn't available.
"Metrics don't mean anything unless you know how they are calculated," she said. IT has to explain the current state of affairs and its shortcomings to address the issue Johnson mentioned -- as far as the business users are concerned, the status quo seems to work just fine.
"Many business users depend on large amounts of manual data collection for sales force effectiveness and risk management," she added. By automating data management and eliminating the day for a sales person to do paperwork, the sales group could achieve a 25 percent increase in customer-facing time.
To make her points and expand the conversation with the business, Robinson did an internal road show to explain business intelligence and data issues. She then identified a few champions and leveraged the friendlies she had met.
Look for quick wins and then over-deliver, she noted. Among manufacturing partners, Robinson's group identified work which was being done manually. "Then we added one or two elements in the data warehouse and suddenly automated a process which had been pure drudgery. Over-deliver. You will know about information that no one else knows is there, so you can provide more granularity or history than users had expected."
While focusing on the quick wins, make sure they align with the longer term strategy. "You need to be able to report that to the organization through regular reporting, whether quarterly or annually," she said.
Before users will give up on their trusted data silos, they want to see that the data warehouse provides accurate information. "We do a heckuva lot of testing and show them the data they get from the data warehouse is as good as what they have now. If you can deliver it faster and they realize the information is the same, it develops their confidence."
If one group resists, advised Robinson, let them continue on their own. "If they insist on a silo leave them alone and eventually they are going to need your information or someone else will need information from them. It will happen eventually."
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