Thursday, October 17, 2013

Revisiting Agile Business Intelligence

The other day the TDWI (the Data Warehouse Institute) sent me a brochure highlighting Agile BI workshops and seminars. Here's how they define it:
"Agile business intelligence addresses a broad need to enable flexibility by accelerating the time it takes to deliver value with BI projects. It can include technology deployment options such as self-service BI, cloud-based BI, and data discovery dashboards that allow users to begin working with data more rapidly and adjust to changing needs.
To transform traditional BI project development to fit dynamic user requirements, many organizations implement formal methodologies that utilize agile software development techniques and tools to accelerate development, testing, and deployment. Ongoing scoping, rapid iterations that deliver working components, evolving requirementsscrum sessions, frequent and thorough testing, and business/development communication are important facets of a formal agile approach. "
Now I found this very interesting given it's something I have been advocating for some time. Although, the definition above left me a bit concerned that what in fact is being suggested is merely the adoption of Agile methodology with minimal regard to Business Intelligence architecture (we've been given a laundry list of related solutions with not clear idea of how they integrate). More importantly, the heavy focus on the development methodology leaves out what we considered the most important aspect of Agile BI (when we first presented this back in 2007) - the end user and how they are integrated into the development process and /or how they drive the very structure of BI by defining it "on the fly" themselves (this goes beyond data discovery).

We presented this in the Fall of 2007 in Chicago
Agile BI must encompass a wider architectural approach...

Since 2007, a number of tools have come out that specifically answer this end-user consideration. A good example of this is Tableau (which markets itself as "visual analytics for everyone"). So on the one hand it is both gratifying and exciting to see that Agile concepts are being extended to Data Architecture and that new products are being introduced to help bridge the gap between IT development and IT capability - on the other though, it is disturbing to see that they haven't quite merged yet in the data industry.

Why is this important? Well, because when viewed out of context (of each other) the value proposition for these innovations diminishes significantly. Data Architecture, BI Methodology and the expectations for how users will exploit data are part of the same problem space...


Copyright 2013, Stephen Lahanas

1 comments:

  1. Sounds like a good thing,What i feel is its a perfect thing to grow your business in the best possible way.When someone follows it so they get to understand agile business and how that works so this is the meaning of it,Grows in perfect way.This is how it should be.

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