No really, business first

After writing about how important it is to understand the business problem first, here is a story from CIO Magazine where the CIO (Wanyonyi Kendrick of JEA) successfully started with the technology.  How a CIO Sold Her CEO's Vision:

The boss was convinced neural net technology would be the answer to his company's problems. The CIO proved it.

At least the first impression is that the technology came first.  But in reading the article, the technology was the impetus for a long series of discussions and field work into understanding how and where the particular technology was going to help.  In fact, from the article it sounds like they spent over two years in the understanding mode before implementing.  And then the benefit was felt within weeks - the article claims the project paid for itself within weeks, and it continues to pay back the long investment in understanding.

I am really tempted to ask why they spent two years analyzing when the project paid for itself within weeks.  However, as Kendrick tells the story, it took that long to develop the underlying relationships and to do the actual work on the project before they could flip the switch.