Ever had an IT Management problem and thought “if only I had a second set of ears or an easy way to get a quick outside opinion?” For those times when you need a sounding board, help figuring out how to get started on a large project, or some good advice fast, I am introducing a new service: CIO 911. With far less overhead than a full consulting engagement, CIO 911 will get you the right answers, right now.

Mention you heard about CIO 911 from IT BS Watch, and I’ll send you a signed copy of Breakthrough IT for signing up. More information can be found on the Prevoyance Group website.

The good folks over at TechRepublic, where I have a regular column, have given me the green light to try something I’ve always wanted to do, a Dear Abby of sorts for IT management. In the debut column I respond to a CIO who is concerned he “gets no respect.”

I’m looking for new respondents willing to air their IT-related troubles (sorry, you’ll have to go to the real Abby for problems with that pesky mother in law, shopping addiction, or concerns about how many cats are too many). I can promise anonymity and hopefully some good ideas on solving your IT management challenge. If you’d like to participate, just email me.

Prevoyance Group, the company behind IT BS Watch has a new free whitepaper available that details the challenges and provides mitigation strategies for implementing global change project, whether they involve massive software rollouts or business process changes. The author has spent much of his career in a global environment, and the price for the whitepaper is certainly right! You can download the whitepaper here.

We’ve heard about the wonders of teams to the point that our minds can barely hold another iota of information about how marvelous they are. With captivating analogies from sports to the humanities, pundits, authors and educators extol the virtues of teams to near-religious proportions.

While in many situations teams are all well and good, there are quite a few notable exceptions. Many have heard the story of Steve Jobs’ personal involvement in the design of the iPhone. Eschewing teams, committees, focus groups and “centers of excellence” (whatever that means), Jobs’ selfishly designed the phone he always wanted. What resulted was a purity of vision and tight integration that became an icon. Similarly, the granddaddy of today’s smart phone, the blocky Palm Pilot was initially a lumpy, hand-carved wood prototype that Palm founder Jeff Hawkins carried around in his pocket for weeks to determine if the size was what he wanted. One man, one vision, one pocket, one amazingly successful product.

In the management ranks, we often forget this lesson, outsourcing our key products to committees, teams, SMEs and other seas of ambiguity, half-hearted compromise and CYA-motivated mentalities. Whether it’s a presentation on strategy, a critical decision on the project portfolio, or a tough call on an HR matter, sometimes abandoning the morass of the team is the best way to go. After all, how often do we hear about Henry Ford’s great team, the committee that helped Dr. King pen his speeches, or Joan of Arc’s focus group.

There are two main problems with BI software.

First, too little thought is put into the post go-live analysis portion of implementing a BI package. All the effort is spent setting up software, gathering reams of data, and cooking up a few canned reports, and at the end of the day, when you’re sitting atop a mountain of data everyone looks around and says “now what?” More thought should be put into what the key drivers of that particular business are (there should be a handful, not a pile), and providing “real people” (i.e. not from IT) the tools and training to mine this pile of data as they see fit.

The second problem is with business reporting as a whole, and the reason why many BI implementations are billed as unsuccessful. By its very nature, BI looks at the past, and it is easy to look at your stack of fancy reports and believe it contains the tools you need to predict the future direction of the business. This is abjectly false, and the best example is the financial industry. Finance always has the highest IT spend in the industry, and a very high penetration of BI tools, yet nearly all the big financial organizations missed the recent financial crisis. You need strong management that realized BI provides clues to the future, but not the future itself. IT often is a partner in crime, overselling this aspect of BI.

Like all software, BI is a tool to be leveraged, it is not a magic potion that will predict the future, despite all the fancy dashboards, reams of data and fancy analytical terms.