Stuck in First Gear

porsche Big investments were made in recent years in IT. IBM, Oracle/Siebel and SAP lead the market and were successful not only with the multi-national enterprise companies but, also with mid-sized companies. There are a lot of companies out there that have purchased application and data management/data warehouse solutions only to find themselves using a portion of what it could do. It’s like driving a Porcshe in first gear.

There are some fundamental reasons for this, outside of the fact that companies may feel it is the fault of their sales execute selling them the wrong bill of goods. IT will blame the business for not knowing what it wants. The business will blame IT for not getting it. Doesn’t really matter, there is plenty of blame to go around. What matters is that now you have a solution that isn’t giving you the benefits that it really could and should be.

Maybe I’m a bit biased since I’m the data chick. Well, more than a bit. Regardless, I think that from a data management perspective, companies are failing. The maniacal focus on process efficiency has drowned out the fact that process runs on data and feeds data. This focus has put data in the back seat too long and now when we need it to better understand our customers, our business, and make decisions, it is sorely lacking. Our data lacks unity, structure, definition, and most of all purpose. Companies simply cannot leverage their information except at very basic levels. When things are good, this may be okay. When things are bad, this is a real problem.

What makes this even more sad, is that companies are looking to spend more money on applications and data infrastructure to ‘fix’ the problem. The promise of the new model and more sophisticated bells and whistles that will solve anything you throw at it is just marketing. Until you can understand and control what you already have under your hood, getting something bigger, better, and shinier isn’t going to help anymore than it does now. So, there was no ROI on existing purchases and there won’t be any ROI on new purchases.

There are two things companies need to do to make the investments in enterprise solutions worthwhile:

Clean-up the back-end data management practice so that it is fluid with business process and application usage.
Have a clear data management strategy for new applications that is fluid and scalable outside of application databases.

Your company may already be embarking on SOA or MDM projects. But, have you looked at how these new practices will support applications outside of changing the oil? Can the data drive process?

Today, applications are bogged down because data is treated as something to put in the trunk and horde. Until data is thought of as fuel, you’re IT investments will stay in 1st gear and never get to 6th. Now how fun is that?