Some companies put an overkill of procedures in place making fast implementations almost impossible. Some companies hardly have any procedures and implement all the time during the day whenever they like. What is the right balance between serving the business and being in control?

In my work as consultant I have encountered different levels of change control within companies. Coming out of a situation where a small change would take you almost three months before it could be delivered to the users I found it like heaven to come into the situation where you could just call someone and the change was transported to production within a couple of days. This made me wonder: is it really worth having all these formal processes in place in a BI environment?

One of the key characteristics of a successful BI environment is being able to react quickly to the changing needs of the business. On the other hand, BI is often used to report to management, when the information is not available on time you have escalations going up to senior management levels. So in fact: our users are putting us for an impossible task. They demand short implementation cycles but also high levels of availability of the system.

I often have the feeling we are unable to find the right balance in the level of flexibility compared to the level of control. Often we look to processes and procedures to solve these types of problems but maybe the answers need to be looked for in other areas of expertise. Maybe it is time to organize the system landscape to provide a solution. What if we were to split the production environment into an area where fast implementations are allowed but service levels are low, and an area where service levels are high but the change control is very strict.

Up until now I have not seen any companies having a strategy like that or even thinking about it. Have you?