One brand, one Web site! DM Review is now the home of all the content you're used to at BIReview.com and much more. If you are registered at BIReview.com, you're already registered at DM Review. If not, take just a moment to sign up for all the free services we have for you at the new DMReview.com.
Spending Fitness
I confess that for years I have been surprised at the lack of strategic accountability that applies to managing procurement budgets at the enterprise level. Part of the problem is grasping the scope of fragmented expenditures across divisions and departments, the many ways in which items are bought, and the myriad goods and services that are required to fuel the corporate machine. It's a problem made worse by unclean data locked up in multiple transaction systems, which makes spend management tough to accurately automate. All these issues mean it is still convenient and completely common to discover a lack of discipline when tracking huge, diverse procurement budgets.Our friend, former Gartner Inc. analyst David Hope-Ross (now head of procurement applications with Oracle) used to say that spending analysis is a lot like regular exercise in that most of us are aware of the benefits, but only a small number of us are very, very fit. If that's the case, enterprises that are thinking about joining the procurement health club might draw inspiration from our feature story and the example of HBOS.
On a different note, businesses that stick to old IT methodologies might rightly be accused of gambling with their future. For some fresh BI thinking, consider the case of Tracy Austin, a gaming executive and specialist in customer loyalty who made a reverse migration from business to become the first CIO at Mandalay Resort Group. Moving IT from cost center to business partner was an exercise in team-building, communication and collaboration, as author Jill Dyche explains.
Our In the Trenches byline comes from Anni Evans, VP of e-business at Meriwest Credit Union. We've all heard the "If you Build it..." axiom applied to many next generation application deployment failures, but it's a fact that people will discard old working tools only when presented with a superior alternative. Even when technology provides a provable productivity edge, sponsorship, education and user communities are good ways to ensure that adoption actually happens.
In our regular departments, see what's relevant to end users in our By the Numbers section and why Knightsbridge Solutions CEO Rod Walker says it reflects the "operationalization" of BI. Ventana Research's Mark Smith explains why the three most important words in BI might be: location, location, location. You can find the top 10 enterprise risk management mistakes seen by global risk consultancy Aon Corporation. John Greco, president and CEO of the Direct Marketing Association tells us about relevance marketing and consumer privacy. And the always-thinking Neil Raden shows us what happens when business users make an end around on IT departments. Finally, Howard Spielman digs up some century-old pie charts to make a helpful point about seeing what we believe, and believing what we are see. As always, please send your letters and comments to me at james.ericson@sourcemedia.com.
Jim Ericson is editorial director of DM Review, a SourceMedia publication. You can reach him at Jim.Ericson@sourcemedia.com.
