Optus and Goodman bridge divide between IT and business

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.