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Time to break down the corporate silos
In the modern enterprise, information technology is an enabler for more productive collaboration between all departments, units and workers.
At a time when key performance indicators (or KPIs) should be readily available for all information workers and especially the C-level, it seems too many decisions are still taken without a clear picture of the real-time data that underlies critical applications, infrastructure and projects.
So even if IT could deliver awesome “dashboards”, ripe with timely and highly readable information, it seems way too many companies fail to tear down their corporate silos to produce such data.
The advantages of overcoming the silo approach makes it possible to envision a much better understanding of the company, as a whole. For instance, in an “un-siloed” company using , the IT department can get much better “real time” information so to anticipate (and resolve) the problems instead of merely reacting to them.
Having some kind of central repository, most likely gathering data from many sources, makes so much sense because to be able, in a single window, to identify [for instance] the performance of critical systems and projects in real time empowers people to act on things, way before problems occur.
It seems straightforward enough to work as a company-wide team but still, too many companies force their employees to rely on manual extrapolation of multiple applications, each containing silos of critical data, to go about their daily work. At best, this results in hit-or-miss decision making and a dangerous slide towards a certain inertia. At worst, working from flawed assumptions leads to significant costs, delays and wasted resources.
Retrofitting portal software to pull together solied data can help but overall, it does little to correlate information into useful guidance. In regards to software destined to enterprises of all sizes looking to implement dashboards, inquire with vendors such as BMC, Oracle, CA, Hewlett-Packard and IBM who are melding business service management (BSM), business intelligence (BI) as well as project and portfolio management (PPM) tools into overall dashboards.
Expect implementation and integration to be somewhat demanding while customization is plain inevitable (call it a “technical challenge”). This complex work might involve SOAP or XML bridges, especially if your application infrastructure isn’t homogeneous.
The payoff for such a bold transformative project towards dashboards mainly resides in the newfound ability to have largely useless data chunks (when taken individually) suddenly provide highly correlative insight, from all the data collected.
If your company isn’t using dashboards yet, now is probably a goodtime to break down those antiquated corporate silos to create infinite value from your various data sources.
Tags: dashboards, corporate silos, bsm, bi, ppm, kpi, it, critical data, information, enterprise
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