How BI can help IT win over the board

IT departments that don't use business intelligence tools could be missing out on valuable technical and political benefits, says Danny Bradbury.

We've all seen it happen - a company buys an expensive intrusion detection system or application firewall and puts it in a corner where it emits a quiet, comforting hum. The problem is that no-one ever checks the logs, so they don't really know what's happening in their infrastructure. Why? Because there's too much data to analyse and not enough time or expertise to do it.

IT departments that don't use business intelligence (BI) tools to analyse metrics could be missing out on a substantial advantage, say experts. If they manage to use the tools properly, there's also a chance they could use that information to enhance their standing within the broader business.

Royce Bell, global head of Accenture's Information Management practice, advises IT departments to define what they mean by business intelligence. "Analytics is about getting stuff out of the information that they didn't know before," he warns. "What most people are calling business intelligence is really reporting."

Reporting is a common activity in IT. Most departments will check the logs to see if there were any service outages or spikes in service desk call levels, for example. But analysing the information to throw out new insights will be a relatively new activity for most IT shops.

Nevertheless, applying analytics to IT logs can provide useful insights, says Frank Buytendijk, vice president of corporate strategy at business intelligence tools vendor Hyperion. One example: administrative software throws up detailed reporting on the memory and processing loads of various servers. Many companies might simply check the logs to ensure that no critical overloading occurred but with business intelligence tools, they could find out how much capacity was left unused on average across the entire range of servers. This information could be used as the basis for a virtualisation and consolidation strategy, for example.

That's fine in theory but "in many cases the cobblers' children go barefoot", says Buytendijk. Rather than investing in multi-dimensional business intelligence and data mining systems that let them slice and dice data, cash-strapped IT managers live and die by the pivot table. "It's Excel galore."

And yet, according to Accenture's Bell, the IT department often needs business intelligence the most because of the high level of complexity involved in the work. He finds IT practitioners spend more of their time looking for the right information than business managers. "Part of that is due to the nature of IT - there are more project-related activities than in normal business," he says, adding that IT departments must become better at responding to the data BI systems generate for them.

At present, many IT departments can chart events, with administrators being alerted when, for example, free disk space falls below certain levels. But aside from responding to a few basic alerts, many managers tend to compile information and deliver snapshots of projects in monthly meetings, Bell says. But putting a presentation layer on top of the data - with BI tools - could make it more digestible by highlighting the most relevant information and could lead to managers accessing the data more frequently.

How useful might it be to find out that one development team is cutting less code on a daily basis than all the other teams, for example? Addressing that now, rather than in three weeks' time at the monthly meeting, might stop a project falling behind budget and keep business stakeholders happy.

And, after all, keeping business stakeholders happy is what it's all about. Using business intelligence internally in the IT department to hone efficiencies can make an IT department more confident when it comes to building a case for IT with the rest of the business.

With IT departments becoming increasingly business-focused, realigning themselves to support and even influence business direction rather than simply being a cost centre, BI tools are more important than ever for them.

Suranjan Som, a principal consultant and technology architect at business intelligence consultancy IMGroup, says: "If there is buy-in from the business, then companies can focus on measuring the effectiveness of literally anything that's going on in the business, including IT. So they can say this is what we spent on a particular project and this is the return that we got from it."

This is easier in some cases than others but it can lead to more effective internal charging mechanisms, for example. IT departments can begin identifying the IT resources that stakeholders are using and charting the benefits.

Accenture's Bell says: "I've yet to meet an IT guy who, if you talked about his charging mechanism, didn't just turn to drink on the spot. Because of the fragmented and project-focused nature of IT, the finance systems often don't support the levels of granularity that they need for this stuff." Proving the value of IT can create a more balanced budget and justify further R&D.

Justifying that R&D is probably the ultimate level of maturity when it comes to the IT department's use of business intelligence. Using analytics to show how valuable the IT department has been to the business is one thing; using it to make the case for new projects requires a quantum leap in terms of business understanding, warns IM Group's Som.

Will the IT director be able to make the case for, say, a supply chain integration project by slicing logistics and customer satisfaction data and presenting it to the board?

Som says: "To what extent they'll be able to model that remains to be seen because most of the drivers will be business drivers, so naturally there has to be an input from the business." Business intelligence will certainly help with a cost-benefit analysis but adds "it's down to power politics at the end of the day too".