Optus and Goodman bridge divide between IT and business

Two case studies presented at the IBM Cognos Forum highlight the compromise required between business and IT when building new solutions.

Representatives from telco Optus and property giant Goodman explained the horse trading that went on to enable them to meet the needs of their shareholders.

The change management delivery manager for Optus' consumer marketing team, Kerry Williams, and Goodman's head of applications, Ritesh Deshpande, revealed how they forged connections across their businesses.

Optus' presentation discussed how a lack of a shared vision for what business and IT were trying to achieve often stalled projects before they began.

For instance, Optus has a business intelligence environment consisting of a Teradata data warehouse, IBM Cognos 8.2 business intelligence and reporting software and statistical package for the social sciences or SPSS Clementine analytics software.

"Although the infrastructure was there it wasn't something the consumer marketing team had exploited," Williams says.

The team had access to about 30 Terabytes of customer data, including call, customer service and network records. This was used to create and measure consumer marketing campaigns, such as for the iPhone 3G S.

But it took a team of 20 analysts to pull down the data, export it to Excel and then PowerPoint packs to report it.

Williams says they had "more work requests than they could ever fulfill" leading to long lead times on reports despite shrinking consumer-marketing cycles.

"When the iPhone launched, we had to turn around the campaign in a matter of weeks. The only constant we have is change and information is the lifeblood of the consumer marketing business. We wanted to do what we could to nurture [its availability]".

Given Cognos business intelligence and reporting software was bedded down in other parts of Optus, it seemed on the surface logical to find a way to exploit that existing infrastructure.

"[But] IT was a little hesitant to do another decentralised BI [business intelligence] project," Williams says.

"Their preference was for a strategic BI solution led by IT and embedded at the enterprise level. They weren't keen on the idea of setting up BI [just] for consumer marketing and literally pleaded with us not to go against their strategic BI roadmap."

Believing the consumer marketers couldn't wait for the rest of the business to catch up, Williams and her division "pushed and pushed".

"It took weeks of presentations, meetings and discussions with IT but in the end we came to a position where they were and are largely supportive of our approach," Williams says.

"We came up with agreements with IT to settle their nerves".

These included reports branded from consumer marketing - quashing confusion over their origins - and an agreement that consumer marketing's customer knowledge team would be the first port of call for any support issues.

"Any intellectual property we developed would be handed over to IT for their strategic BI project," Williams says. "In return, they supported us."

Williams says she will have to keep going back to IT: "We're going to need to keep nurturing the relationship to keep them on board with what we're doing".

This was necessary because the project's early success "kicked up a huge amount of demand" for more reports, says Steve Jackson, principal consultant for implementation partner, Focus.

Read on to see how Goodman handed-off IT application development to users.

Goodman's IT team has adopted a completely different strategy to IT-business alignment.

Goodman is a property group with investments in around 300 business parks, industrial estates and warehouse and distribution centres, counting Woolworths, Brambles, Linfox, Toll and Unilever among its customers.

A small IT team - just 10 people - support over 100 applications, including multiple general ledgers and IBM Cognos TM1 for business analytics.

"The application portfolio is huge," Goodman's head of applications Ritesh Deshpande said. "Mind you, we even class Adobe Reader as an application."

Many applications were inherited through global acquisitions. The company has four general ledger applications - Yardi, Oracle Process Manufacturing, MRI and Coda, depending on where in the world users are.

It runs IBM Cognos TM1 over top of all four to extract information out for central reports.

But given the small size of the IT team, Goodman has placed trust and responsibility for developing reports in the hands of the business.

This was in part possible because TM1 has close ties to Excel. It was designed so Excel users could apply their skills to develop reports in the TM1 system.

"It seems a bit weird because [the finance team are] suddenly writing essentially IT applications," said Luka Montin, a business analyst at Goodman.

"But our model was to get the business to do as much work as possible and for IT to work in a support role."

Goodman's model essentially empowered the finance team as a self-service group. Users are given tiered secure access to the system. For example, data consumers are able to create reports only for their own use, whereas ‘super users' get access "to a bit more data", can create publicly-facing reports and manage change requests.

"End users consult their super users before having to take it to the next level and consult IT resources which are scarce," Montin said.

Montin stressed IT was not cut out of the report provisioning process entirely.

"Obviously there's still some consultation with the IT department to make sure data isn't being duplicated and that there's appropriate infrastructure to support new applications," Montin said.

"But it has heavily reduced the amount of handholding we need to run with finance users.

"The business is happy because they literally created the system themselves. They own the product. It also means they can't come back to the IT team and blame [us if something goes wrong]."

"The model we follow is essentially not to build an IT empire," Deshpande said.

"Business users are in charge of most changes. We just keep some of the very technical things like extract, transform and load (ETL). We outsource most of the actual work [to partner Cubewise]."

Cubewise was also understood to have recommended tools to help IT transition business user-developed applications from development to test to production server environments, streamlining back office elements of the model.

Deshpande believed negotiation between IT and the business was the key to project success.

"It's my primary function to negotiate with internal business people and make sure they're aligned with the business applications strategy," he said.

That strategy was defined and driven by the business, he said. "It's a matter of the business putting some structure and governance around it," he said.

How much IT responsibility are you prepared to offload to business users? Have your say below.