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American Medical Response |
Revenue: $1.1 billion
Tech exec: William Tara
Business colleague: William Sanger, CEO
Working together: 2 years
IT/business challenge: Providing real-time information for managing ambulance services.
Upshot: Bringing IT into the boardroom for all strategic planning is the key to making sure technology solves a business problem.
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How much BI experience did you have before you started this project?
Tara: This is probably my fifth, sixth, BI project. My third as a technology lead. In two of those, I was actually the business sponsor.
Sanger: Oh, boy. I would say at least 8-10, major enterprise-wide initiatives of this nature over the last 30 years. When I say major -- I hate to use the phrase "shift in paradigm" -- but this literally takes a business to the next level of value. I'm not talking about just small, incremental pieces. I'm talking about quantum leaps.
And at which point did Bill, the CEO, become involved in the vendor selection?
Tara: In this particular case, we had a combined business-technology governance team including a number of business operating executives as well as some of my key MIS folks who worked together to define our needs and identify all the vendors on the market. As part of the selection process, we actually gave both Cognos and Business Objects our data and had that presented back to us in a way that demonstrated how it could help us. At that point, the team made recommendations to the business sponsor, our EVP [executive vice president], who brought them to me and to Bill. [They chose Business Objects.]
Sanger: This is important: It's not the exclusive domain of Bill [Tara] and his team members. The governance structure is such that it has disciplined representation from the field and from the management level as well. As we look at any initiative related to IT that supports business, a singular view, I think, is very dangerous.
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