An Unexpected Obstacle to Forming a Business Analysis Group

In the last post I talked about forming a Business Analysis group to provide a strategic service of helping the business operations to better utilize technology.  In talking about this concept with other people I was surprised to hear of one significant obstacle to implementing this.

A friend and fellow CIO was set to implement this concept.  He had support from top management and the business units and had started to interview candidates.  However under intense pushback from within the IT group he decided to postpone the implementation.

Sometime later I was talking to the president of a large company.  This president liked the concept but was concerned about the effect of it on the IT department.  To my surprise this president raised the same objection as my friend's IT staff had.  Wait a minute!  A company president and the IT staff having the same concern?  This seemed like a very unusual situation.

And just what was this objection they had in common?

I was somewhat surprised to hear this objection from IT folks but completely bowled over to hear it from a business leader.  What they said was:

"If we do this it will generate too much work for the IT group.  The demand for IT services will go through the roof"

At first it seemed they were concerned that this might be too successful.  It's as if Ford Motor said we better not design a car our customers like because we might get too many orders.  As IT leaders we've always said that for worthwhile projects we can always get funding, hire staff or outside firms and complete the projects.  If we do this a higher demand for IT services really shouldn't be a problem.  However,I believe 'if' is the operative word in the previous sentence.  Unfortunately I didn't have the opportunity to discuss this in more detail with them but I believe The IT staff and the company president were not really concerned with too many projects, they were concerned whether we as IT leaders could do as we promised.  It is isn't a problem of too many IT projects, it is an issue of IT governance.

In thinking about this I believe they both had the same 2 governance concerns although they may have come at from different perspectives:

1. Do we have a good way of evaluating and prioritizing projects:
   • The staff knows that cost and budget issues always seem to stop us from getting the extra resources and we end up trying to handle more projects with the same amount of staff.
   • The president is concerned that we have no method of evaluation which project are "worthwhile" and as a result all projects are approved as long as someone thinks they will improve things.
2. Can we properly manage the project when using outside resources: 
   • The staff is concerned is that they will have to train and cleanup after the outside resources to make it work properly.
   • The president is concerned that we can not manage outside resources properly and the costs will skyrocket and the project will be late.

If this is true we have some significant prepartory work to do.  I believe that adding a Business Analysis group can cause an increase in demand for IT services.  But as shown above we will need to demonstrate that we have the ability to manage this increase.

What are your thoughts on this?  Do you have a good IT governance process in place?

If  this topic was of interest, you might also like these:

• Let's Get Down to Business
• Let's Get Strategic!
• Show Me the Money - Getting Your Project Funded
• Developing a Credible Business Case
• Or the posts in the Business Analysts / Analysis category