The first half of my career looked like a scatter plot of technical roles. Tech support, systems administrator, network engineer, cybersecurity engineer, database administrator, software implementer, etc. Whether I was helping individual users troubleshoot video driver issues, configuring a new SAN for a virtualization cluster, or migrating a global enterprise off of legacy ERP systems, a recurring thought always haunted me:

Why are they paying me so much to Google stuff?

At THRDparty Advisors we use a mental model to categorize negative findings from IT Due Diligence as deal killers, red flags, or value creation opportunities. In this article, I’ll give examples of each and explain why IT Due Diligence is NOT an audit, but a key piece of the value creation process in private equity.

A core component of our IT Due Diligence service at THRDparty Advisors is benchmarking a target’s IT governance maturity. Every target we have ever evaluated has had a gap between the maturity of their IT governance program and our expectations based on their size, sector, and stated objectives.

In this article I’ll cover the organizational challenges you may face while building your Self-service Business Intelligence Program.

In my last BI article, Is Self-service BI a Myth?, I covered good reasons and bad reasons for launching a Self-service Business Intelligence Program, highlighting the importance of having reasonable expectations. Now I’ll cover the technical challenges you may face while planning and implementing your own program and suggest some solutions.

Imagine a world in which business users from across your company have, at their fingertips, an easy-to-understand data repository, gathered from both internal systems and external sources, that contains both live and historical information.