You and your colleagues in FP&A (or whichever functional department you’re in), along with IT and maybe outside implementation consultants, have spent a quantity of blood, sweat and budget to get your spanking new Business Intelligence or Enterprise Performance Management solution up and running. The model has been built, source data integrated, dashboards and reports created. Congratulations!
Now, you might now be wondering, who’s going to support this? The implementation effort taught you the software (or SaaS cloud solution) isn’t magic, despite what the software vendor said. A certain amount of attentive care and feeding will be necessary. Who will make sure everything continues to run smoothly month in and month out?
First of all and most important, if you haven’t yet completed development, don’t wait – put together a post go-live support plan now to assure a smooth transition.
Who should be responsible for support? Don’t expect IT to take 100% of the responsibility, and they shouldn’t. Think of it this way: As a user of Excel, you prefer to have control over your spreadsheets and update your models yourself. You wouldn’t want IT poking around in your workbooks. But you rely on IT to keep your computer up and running, connected to the network, and secure.
It’s similar with an Essbase, Hyperion Planning or other BI or EPM solution you’ve deployed. Following the analogy, here’s generally where the responsibilities fall in a simple support model:
Model design and functionality: How the model works, including input screens, internal calculations, and reports are most effectively owned by the business (e.g. FP&A), those who use the solution to support their business processes. This responsibility includes making functional updates from time to time that enable the solution to continue to support evolving business needs.
Who has access: Again the business users should decide on and manage solution access, for example who can see what portion of the data, who gets write-back access and when, who gets read-only access, etc.
Data and data integrations: This is a joint responsibility between the business and IT. The business side is responsible for selecting and validating the data, while IT helps locate data from sources, then extracts and transforms it according to requirements. In production, IT typically makes sure automated update processes run successfully and troubleshoots issues.
Software upgrades: Upgrading and patching the software is the realm of IT. If your solution is hosted externally, the hosting service will upgrade. If a SaaS solution, this isn’t applicable.
Server infrastructure: Managing and optimizing the server infrastructure, including server and network performance, and backup and restore processes, is the realm of IT. Of course this would be the responsibility of an outside party, if the software is hosted externally or a SaaS.
The business responsibilities described above are taken on by an administrator. This is someone who has a very good understanding of software features and functions, the data the solution contains, and the business processes it supports. The most effective solution administrators reside in the business departments that use the application. Solution administration can be outsourced, however it’s more difficult for them to be as effective because they are removed from the day to day business processes.
IT doesn’t need to have a deep knowledge of the software and how it has been customized to meet specific requirements. IT’s role (or the role of an outside hosting service or a SaaS provider), is mainly to keep the infrastructure and processes around the solution running effectively.
How well are your solutions supported? Or is support a “hot potato” that’s tossed between users and IT?