• It is difficult for IT staff to understand what management need.

• Management has changing needs and should be empowered by tools.

• Management does not have the sufficient IT skills to manipulate a powerful interface.

Now of course there are some companies where these statements may not hold true, but
they do in my (limited) experience. Indeed what manager has time to sit down and prepare
a detailed breakdown of every statistic they will need? What manager has time to learn
a new interface and regularly tweak their statistics? What manager works closely with
their IT team on a day to day basis? The only answer to those questions is the Microsoft
development team. Products like BizTalk and Scorecard Manager cannot be implemented
successfully unless a massive re-training and business analysis effort is put in place.
With Microsoft not offering a large scale consulting divison this means partners need
to fill the gap. This is a very tough gap to fill. Can it ever be filled by a budget
product? Companies would be looking to cut costs wherever possible, and small companies
rarely have the cash (or time) for a detailed business analysis.

So what is the solution then? Software that ‘learns’ how the business works by itself?
Integrated tutorials similar to Vista’s new guided
help functionality? I think it is part of a wider management shift towards seeing
IT as a source of competitive advantage rather than just a business overhead. One
day smart managers will wake up and say “hey my companies value is locked up in one
massive database, maybe the guy who has the keys can help me unlock it?”. I would
love to see this go mainstream, who knows how long it will take (maybe as long as
it takes to create the killer business analysis UI?).