What is needed, and generally what the industry has failed to deliver, are technology solutions that are comfortable dealing with business change: “smarter” software. Today few IT systems can cope with a change in the structure of the data coming into the system without significant rework. The reason for this is in the heart of the way that databases are designed. They are usually implemented to reflect how the business is structured today, with relatively little regard to how to deal with future, possibly, unpredictable, change. Introductory courses on data modeling show “department” and “employee” with a “one-many” relationship between them i.e. a department can have many employees, but a person can be only in one department (and must be in one department). This is easy to understand and typical of the way data models are built up, yet even this most basic model is flawed. I have myself been in between departments for a time, and at another time was briefly part of two departments simultaneously. Hence the simple model works most of the time, but not all of the time: it is not resilient to exceptional cases, and IT systems built on this model will break and need maintenance to cope when such special cases arise. This is a trivial example, but it underlies the way in which systems, both custom built and packaged, are generally built today. Of course it is hard and expensive to cater for future and hence somewhat unknown change, but without greater “software IQ” we will be forever patching our systems and discovering that each package upgrade is a surprisingly costly process. If you are the CFO of a large company, and you know that it takes years to integrate the IT systems of an acquired company, and yet you are making several acquisitions each year, then getting a complete view of the business performance of your corporation requires teams of analysts with Excel spreadsheets, the modern equivalent of slaughtering a goat and gazing at its entrails for hidden meaning.

Some techniques in software are emerging that tackle the problem in a more future-oriented way, but these are the exception today. Unfortunately the vendor community finds it easier to sell appealing dreams than to build software to actually deliver them. “Real-time business intelligence” comes from the same stable as those who brought you the paperless office and executive information systems (remember those?) where the chief executive just touches a screen and the company instantly reacts. Back in reality, where it takes months to reflect a reorganization in the IT systems, and many months more just to upgrade a core ERP system to a new version, “real time” business intelligence remains a pipe dream. As long as people design data models and databases the traditional way, you can forget about true “real-time” business intelligence across an enterprise: the real world gets in the way.

About the Author

Prior to leading Kalido's spin off from Shell in June 2003, Andy was CEO of Kalido Ltd in January 2001. In previous roles at Shell, Andy led a 290-person global consultancy practice of Shell Services International, and was Technology Planning Manager of Shell UK Oil. Prior to Shell, Andy worked in a number of senior technology positions within Exxon.

A 20-year veteran of data warehousing and integration projects, Andy is a regular speaker at international conferences such as ETRE, Tornado Insider, Red Herring, Gartner and Enterprise Outlook. See his award winning blog www.andyonenterprisesoftware.com for his insights on the industry.

Andy has a BSc (Hons) Mathematics degree from Nottingham University.