In the past, the mental model for providing an automated information technology (IT) solution to a business problem has been to "divide and conquer."
This approach works very well for reducing risk by breaking a complex problem into small, manageable chunks . However, this approach also has a severe drawback when applied without a nontechnical infrastructure. Namely, it produces stovepipe systems (automation silos ). The effects of stovepipe systems are lost business knowledge and lost cross-organizational business view, which severely impact business analytics and data mining activities. Most businesses are very complex, and as organizations mature, their business complexity increases . As business complexity is broken apart into smaller and less complex components, the interrelationships among those individual components are lost. Much of the business intelligence is contained in these lost interrelationships, and that is a problem for BI applications. Most BI applications, and especially data mining applications, expect to find "golden nuggets" of business wisdom embedded in these complex interrelationships. Although business managers can answer most questions about the business functions of their own departments, when asked a question spanning two or three lines of business (where complex interrelationships have been lost), those managers must scramble for weeks to piece together the answer. Fundamental business questions, such as the ones illustrated in Figure 2.7, present multimillion-dollar problems to large organizations. Figure 2.7. Fundamental Business Questions
The answers to these and many other questions do exist in the real business world. We have just been neglecting to design our systems in a cross-functional manner that would allow us to find these answers quickly. |