Chapters

CaseIT interview with Jories Timmers

CaseIT INTERVIEW: with CIOCAN’s Vancouver Chapter President, Jories Timmers

CaseIT: This year's CaseIT theme is BA - Business Analytics. What’s your take on how Canadian CIOs think about BA?

Timmers: There’s considerable interest among our CIO members in BA and its close cousin BI as a strategic business resource. In one form or another, BA has been around for many years, and CIOs recognize its tremendous potential to provide a competitive edge. However, not all CIOs have taken the plunge to invest in significant BA initiatives, though many are running some kind of ad hoc programs to test the waters. Naturally, the large organizations – those with significant R & D resources, are leading the way in BA, and the bar is being raised every year.

At mid-size enterprises, however, CIOs need more certainty about the returns that they can expect on any investment they might make, and about how to best position BA initiatives within the executive team for optimum results.

CaseIT: What action have you taken at CIOCAN?

Timmers: Because CIOCAN membership includes a large component of CIOs at mid-size organizations, we try to provide some perspective on BA that will be useful to them, and we collect their opinions and reports of their experiences wherever we can to share with the group. Over a year ago, in January 2010, CIOCAN's Vancouver Chapter hosted a well-attended seminar on BA as one of its networking/ professional development events and there was follow-up discussion at subsequent sessions.

CaseIT: What were the take-aways for CIOs?

Timmers: My main take-aways were that BA is a business resource, not exclusively an IT resource, and that BA initiatives must be driven by the business units if they are to succeed.

CaseIT: How does this translate to the CIO’s role in BA?

Timmers: The CIO must be a thought-leader, and must take responsibility for creating synergy among C-level executives to drive action in BI. The CIO must continue to educate the executive team on the opportunities, challenges and scope of BA, while taking opportunities to implement small deliverables as opportunities arise. Business unit leaders need to understand that when they want to correlate data from different sources - they are requesting a BI initiative.

The CIO needs a long-term comprehensive view and short-term deliverables. Why? It takes many, many months of sustained commitment to put a comprehensive BI platform in place, and we know that business lacks patience. Any project requiring more than 3 months risks being dropped or reprioritized.

In BA, the benefits are easy to understand but the process for getting to a fully integrated platform can be painful. BA projects can open up a can of worms, as data need to be integrated organization-wide, and this means that department-exclusive caches of data as well as business processes need to be realigned. Even tacit models for decision-making need to be articulated and re-examined. An undertaking of this scope needs wide support and enthusiasm.

CaseIT: What are you doing in BA at your own organization?

Timmers: At Powerex, we do energy trading, and BA is of strategic importance in that we need to correlate several sources of data such as forecasted energy requirements with expected climate conditions to lock in optimum prices. In power trading, you need the data to make decisions NOW. In other industries, such as manufacturing, there is a bit more flexibility in timeframe.