Ok, I made up a story. It's not true. Just trying to make a point. The story is about Queen Beatrix of The Netherlands. As a Dutchman, I thought it would be appropriate. Or... not too inappropriate.
The story is about the Queen needing a bit of money. She decides to open up the gardens of one of the palaces. As she is a clever businessperson, she creates a well-designed plan. At the gate there is an admission booth, where you can buy day tickets and season tickets. A few pathways are changed and a few trees are planted, to make sure the queen has enough privacy, while people are walking through the park. The queen thinks of everything, she even buys a little tractor to mow the grass, a few rakes and other tools. After, the park needs to look nice!
The plan is a huge success, and hundreds of thousands of people visit the park. But after the summer, the number of visitors collapses, as the park doesn't look nice anymore. How silly, the queen forgot one vital thing: to hire gardeners.
Duh....... Or not?
Rethink the story, but now with corporate data in minds. We invest heavily in the infrastructure, such as data warehouses, to make sure the data (= park) is accessible. There are many tools to manage the data, keep it nice and clean. But who owns them? Sometimes when I use this example, someone smart remarks it is the power users. But the power users are the season's ticket holders. You can't ask them to maintain the park!
In our organizations we have an owner for everything. Capital is actively managed by Finance, Employees by HR and as my former colleague Andy Bitterer from Gartner would point out, most organizations even have someone responsible for minding the parking lot. But who minds the management information?
The biggest trend currently in BI is figuring out how to do that, and many organizations have set up a BI competency center... more on that subject later...
Wishing you sunshine on your walk through the park,
frank
