By Romi Mahajan, Chief Commercial Officer, TimeXtender
Despite the singular importance of IT to the success of modern organizations, the tension between business users and the IT department persists. While one can take sides, doing so is I believe misguided. The needs of and constraints on both sides are real. If one has to find a culprit, it’s the inertial frame in which so much of business is conducted today. It is that frame which must be deconstructed and undone. If that happens, business and IT can be aligned and the organization can truly lay claim to that much-vaunted term- agility.
Take the world of data as both an example and a test case. If indeed data is a unit of value, a “thing” of measurable importance upon which businesses are built then one can surmise that business users’ access to this data (the ability to get it, understand it, use it, and benefit from it) is paramount to an organization’s success. A truism perhaps but not so easy to come by. After all, data are not only abundant but are ever-changing and spring from many sources, all of which have their own logic, cycle, and format.
What this means is that truly democratic data discovery is not as easy as all that. It requires making the right bets on systems and processes. It requires understanding that as long as data needs are vectored through the IT department—with its existing backlog—that the ability to act on these data will be retarded in some way.
Now, imagine a “modern” construct in which there is indeed one source of data truth, accessible in all its splendor, up to date, and dynamic. Imagine an environment in which IT has to maintain only one source of truth, an automated source, and business can service its own needs. In this world, business moves quickly and IT spends its time innovating. These innovations can result in new products, new ways of doing thing and will, on occasion, create superlative successes. This is what agility means. This is a golden state.
Is this futuristic? Is this corporate “blade-runner” on steroids?
Actually it’s possible today.
The crux of the matter is that we know the issues but in order to find the solutions for this, we have to look for them. Because the alignment between business and IT is possible, NOW!