managing

The business people didn’t show up to the meeting. They’d been invited to come and talk with IT about the new BI project and in the same stroke help launch it.

This is one of the first stories I ever heard about BI. Though daddy of data modelers Steve Hoberman didn’t say what happened next, I can imagine: all the usual suspects in business were soon rounded up for a later attempt.

The usual suspects are almost always the ones with positional power, the ones with staffs and budgets. But an article in the current strategy+business magazine says that sometimes—such as when creating a politically risky new system—what matters most is trust. Yes, an old story, but for once there’s a prescription.