Symptoms: Three major trends that essentially reached maturity within the last decade have led to a new emphasis on and concern with system flexibility and integration. Y2K led to a round of replacements of legacy business automation with more modern, primarily ERP, systems. Concurrently, the maturation of SQL databases and ready availability of the computing horsepower required to run them led to a new storage strategy for enterprise data. Finally, the invention of CRM systems made the integration of customer order data across the organization a clear mandate for IT

Fixes: Now, demands for greater flexibility in creating, storing, safeguarding, and interpreting integrated data have led to more demands on IT for new systems such as OLAP, ROLAP, and data warehousing, as well as new requirements that data reporting be “provable” for compliance with laws and regulations. Data integration and reporting flexibility are areas that require significant strategic perspective. The emphasis must be on the business use (and usefulness) of the information integrated and obtained. Projects that focus only on data sharing and reporting, without understanding how the information will be used, are clear candidates for failure – this usually occurs when reports from two systems show different results, and a third, integrated report fails to reconcile these differences. Similarly, data collected can be voluminous and difficult to understand if the presentation method is not well-thought-out. Understanding these problems and issues is as much a matter of experience and business outlook as it is a technical problem.

Most Commonly Experienced by: All Executive Staff, Boards, and External Advisers

Relevant ITS Services: Strategy, Process, Management: Interim CIO / vCIO