The "Un" Case Study - The never ending Informatics Initiative!!

I play golf. In fact, I am sort of obsessed with it at the moment. Recently, a friend of mine invited his co-worker to play with us. I welcomed him as a friend of a friend and went to play. The man, first of all, showed up while we were on the 5th hole. Then he joins us (thank God the rangers never found out) and starts playing. Long story short, every time any one of us tried to make a shot, he would loudly point out that it was our "2nd", "3rd" or "4th" shot and "cheer" us to make the shot! I kid you not, he did a "back flip" on the golf course when he chipped a ball in straight to the hole. At the 18th, since he had fewer number of shots on the hole than either of us, he decided that he was the "winner". Needless to say, he was never invited again. My friend profusely apologized to the rest of us.

How does it relate to Informatics, you ask? Well, consider this. You are in the market for a vendor ( as I have said earlier in one of my blogs, I don't like the term "vendor" when it comes to Informatics initiatives. I think of it as a partnership, because, guess what, if the initiative fails, so do we and vice versa ). So you are in the market for a "partner" to take you through a complex informatics initiative. You ask your friends and a friend suggest "OverPriced Consulting" as a partner because she has heard good things about them. "OverPriced" does a presentation for you and tell you about all the clients they have and how they have had "successes" with other firms. You feel warm and fuzzy. You hire them to implement your initiative. They come in with their solutions architects and do a "roadmap" for you (3 months, $150K). Looks good. The roadmap includes a project plan with their technologists, data modelers, ETL architects, developers and BI architects and developers. The Solution Architects have moved on to other clients by now. They suggest you buy Cognos/Business Objects and AbInitio/Informatica.
"Isn't the price tag a bit steep?" You ask. Scalability, Metadata management, Data governance and other terms convince you that you need the Ferrari instead of the Prius. All the time, they cheer you on as to what a great purchase you made and you can't go wrong with these purchases.
3 monhs later, you find out that Cognos can't write to the database and you need a Java interface to manage security. 8 months and $5M later, you are still working on bringing data to your warehouse and the blame game starts. Fault of the product we purchased, dependency issues, data not in the right format, data quality issues....the list goes on.

What went wrong? Let's look at the golf game I talked about. First of all, he was late. We should've told him to come another day. But since he was already there, we let him play, starting from the 5th hole! But since he is a friend of a friend, we thought it would be ok. He started "cheering" us. We should've stopped and taught him some golf etiquette. We never did. He is the friend of a friend after all! At the 18th and a painful 13 holes at that, he declared that he was the winner. By that time, we were licking our wounds and too anxious to get out of there that we didn't care.

Parallel, you ask to the informatics initiative? Even with the company you hired having a great reputation and being a "known" entity, they never stopped to do the "first"thing in an informatics initiative. "Define your measures". They put together a "roadmap" and said you needed the Ferrari. What they should've done is to look at your measurements, what data elements you needed, what requirements you had (security and others), do a gap analysis with your existing technology and "then" suggest what technology to buy.

It is a "partnership" folks. While we are all in business to add to our bottom lines, the responsibility of executing lie in the hand of the "vendor" and you. So remember, if someone walks on your line on the green, call them out on it!