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    BAIN BRIEF Building IT Capabilities

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    Any CIOs who have heard their business executives boasting about “going around IT” should be concerned for their jobs. We hear this sort of thing frequently, particularly from executives who have been talking with technology vendors that promise to solve their analytics problems with new technologies that glean business insights from vast amounts of data.

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    BAIN BRIEF Building IT Capabilities

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    johnwoo1hotmailcom
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    Any CIOs who have heard their business executives boasting about “going around IT” should be concerned for their jobs. We hear this sort of thing frequently, particularly from executives who have been talking with technology vendors that promise to solve their analytics problems with new technologies that glean business insights from vast amounts of data.

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    Any CIOs who have heard their business executives boasting about “going around IT” should be concerned for their jobs. We hear this sort of thing frequently, particularly from executives who have been talking with technology vendors that promise to solve their analytics problems with new technologies that glean business insights from vast amounts of data.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    86 views4 pages

    BAIN BRIEF Building IT Capabilities

    Uploaded by

    johnwoo1hotmailcom
    Any CIOs who have heard their business executives boasting about “going around IT” should be concerned for their jobs. We hear this sort of thing frequently, particularly from executives who have been talking with technology vendors that promise to solve their analytics problems with new technologies that glean business insights from vast amounts of data.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    of 4

    Building IT Capabilities to Deliver

    Better Insights
    Technology alone wont solve a companys analytics
    issues, but here are three no-regrets actions that CIOs
    can take to move ahead.
    By Steve Berez, Paul Callahan and Rasmus Wegener

    Building IT Capabilities to Deliver Better Insights

    gaged a vendor to consolidate various pools of data to


    provide essential insights. The IT team had wanted to
    invest rst in xing the underlying problem, which
    was a proliferation of different data systems resulting
    from years of acquisitions. The vendors analytics solution delivered insights, but also raised the cost of
    rationalizing the data later.

    Any CIOs who have heard their business executives


    boasting about going around IT should be concerned for their jobs.
    We hear this sort of thing frequently, particularly
    from executives who have been talking with technology vendors that promise to solve their analytics
    problems with new technologies that glean business
    insights from vast amounts of data.

    And while its true that data and analytics will change
    the way companies succeed in almost every industry,
    no company can hope to fully benet from analytic
    insights unless they undertake the hard work of
    building their internal capabilities for managing data
    and integrating the insights into operations.
    Most CIOs and other senior IT executives know their organizations are not prepared to make full use of the waves of
    data coming into their organization. A Bain survey of 325
    global companies found that 59% of those organizations
    believe they lack the capabilities to generate meaningful
    business insights from their data. In another Bain survey of
    250 companies, 85% said they will require substantial investments to update their existing data platform, which includes consolidating and cleaning data, simplifying access
    and rights management, and improving access to external
    data sources.
    Given that they understand how far they have to go, what
    keeps them from getting started? In our experience working with hundreds of companies around the world, we
    nd that three major obstacles get in the way.

    The divide between ownership and stewardship of


    data. IT may not always know where the value resides
    in data, while executives on the business side may not
    understand the intricacies of data storage and management. This disconnect can have expensive consequences if the business (which owns the data) and IT
    (the data stewards) make decisions without a solid understanding of each others perspective.
    Sometimes, point solutions from vendors can make
    the problem worse. In one case, business executives
    at a North American manufacturing company en-

    Overreliance on technology. IT departments budget


    and plan in terms of applications and infrastructure,
    but data has always been at the center of the effort.
    Historically, IT departments focused on how and
    where to store data and how to keep it secure. But
    companies dont create value by storing data or managing rights. Increasingly, value will come from making data available to the right people who can use it to
    derive insights and create business value.
    Its this last part of the equationputting data in the
    hands of business peoplewhere a lot of companies
    stumble. In many cases, they leave it up to IT to gure out how to create new value from data. Most IT
    organizations, though, were built with a focus on the
    T, technology, rather than the I. Previously it was
    enough to deliver comprehensive reports on current
    data sets, but today IT must work closely with the
    business to understand whats possible and how the
    business can make the best use of data.

    Old processes that no longer t business needs.


    Old architectures and processes may be out of
    date in the current business environment, where
    no one can predict who will want what data and
    for what purpose. Data platforms will need to
    evolve to support a wider range of use cases. For
    example, enterprise data warehouses used to be
    the centerpiece of data landscapes. These were
    treated as walled gardens, protecting a companys
    most valuable data and restricting access to only a
    fewwhich is increasingly unworkable in organizations where many need to access the data,
    including those who may want to play with the
    data to make discoveries.
    More sophisticated cases beg the need for more
    advanced architectures to access, integrate and vir-

    Building IT Capabilities to Deliver Better Insights

    tualize data sets for consumption and analysis. For


    these uses, cloud-based infrastructure can work
    better than on-premise systems because they can
    be scaled up, provisioned on-demand and paid for
    on a consumption basis.
    Unfortunately, few organizations have a clear
    point of arrival and roadmap for their data platforms to support the massive growth of data along
    with the challenge of managing legacy systems;
    fewer have a well-dened, systematic approach to
    execute. And only the very best performers have
    established relationships between IT and the business that focus on generating valuable insights as
    the primary goal of technology. Most well-established companies need to critically review and revamp their plans and approaches to data management in order to optimize technology investments
    and reduce the likelihood of costly lock-in and inexible proprietary point solutions.

    No-regrets moves to support analytics


    These barriers are common, but not insurmountable.
    Our work with organizations around the world shows
    that organizations can develop the capabilities to deliver effective data management in the age of advanced analytics. Sometimes, but not always, a
    change in technology management prompts the revitalization. But whether or not technology leadership
    has changed, there are several things any organization can do to begin to close the gap between their
    data capabilities and those of analytics leaders.

    Continue to prioritize where technology will deliver


    the most value. As IT executives begin to build up
    analytics capabilities, they need to continue to let
    business decisions determine investments. A process to explore the business opportunities can help
    discover where theres value and then use those insights to prioritize the investment in IT. A solid focus
    on long-term business priorities will help companies
    look beyond current fads and buzzwords and toward
    building sustainable analytics capabilities.

    Upgrade while keeping a legacy system running.


    The risk in prioritization based on business value
    is that it can make it difcult to address underlying
    issues that can affect productivity in the long
    termsuch as different versions of customer data
    spread across multiple systems. Some of these are
    no-regrets actions that IT can act on immediately.
    Others may be further out of view, things that IT
    must do to unlock access to dataand which may
    not be tied to an urgent business need. Since in
    most companies the capital budget is tied up in
    keeping the lights on and responding to business demands, it can be difcult to place these in
    the work schedule, but nding ways to do so will
    return benets down the road.

    Change the ways of working. Traditional data


    management processesfor example, extracttransform-load (ETL)have served companies
    well in the past. But they break down when analytics and applications have real-time requirements. One way to keep up is to bring the business closer to the development process. Agile
    development methods, which build applications
    more incrementally with frequent input and review from the business, are an essential step in
    that direction. So too is the concept of DataOps:
    Just as DevOps improves efficiency by increasing collaboration between application development and operations, a DataOps mentality focuses the organization on improving the way
    that business leaders, data scientists and IT
    managers work together to discover insights.

    Plenty of CIOs will fail to push their IT departments


    beyond traditional data management into a realm
    where their technology makes it easy for executives
    to access data and derive valuable business insights.
    Successful CIOs, however, will be those who move
    from a technologists view to one that allows a
    broader swath of business users to access data, experiment with analytics and derive new insights that
    deliver meaningful value to the organization.

    Key contacts in Bains Global Information Technology practice


    Americas

    Franz Bedacht in So Paulo ([email protected])


    Steve Berez in Boston ([email protected])
    Paul Callahan in Atlanta ([email protected])
    Rudy Puryear in Chicago ([email protected])
    Rasmus Wegener in Atlanta ([email protected])

    Asia-Pacic

    Arpan Sheth in Bangalore ([email protected])

    Europe,
    Middle East
    and Africa

    Stephen Phillips in London ([email protected])

    Steve Berez is a partner with Bain & Company in Boston, where he leads the IT practice in the Americas. Rasmus Wegener
    is a Bain partner in Atlanta and the founder of Bains Advanced Analytics practice. Paul Callahan is a principal in Atlanta,
    where he works with Bains Global IT practice.
    The authors would like to acknowledge the contributions of Sukumar Kalmanje, a senior data scientist with Bain & Companys
    Advanced Analytics Group in Silicon Valley.

    For more information, visit www.bain.com

    Copyright 2016 Bain & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

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