What is Agile BI?
Cindi Howson: The Agile Manifesto was first published in 2001 by a group of software engineers (see agilemanifesto.org) trying to improve the software development process and customer satisfaction. There are 12 principles, but the six that most apply to BI are:
• Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
• Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage.
• Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
• The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
• Simplicity -- the art of maximizing the amount of work not done -- is essential.
• The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
Who is using agile development and how important is it?
I do get the sense that more innovative companies are using agile development, but I have also seen it in established manufacturing companies. It is less well suited to companies that have outsourced BI because it makes it harder to build things to a specification. Then again, I’m not a supporter of outsourcing for BI.
Agile BI emerged as a common theme among successful BI case studies when I began researching my book Successful Business Intelligence in 2007, so last year, we included this data point in the survey. Overall, agile development was identified as being not that important.
Agile sounds like the Wild West of BI with no requirements, no documentation.
If you are used to having everything highly documented with requirements precisely defined, then less formal requirements definition can seem like the Wild West. The difference is in the how and degrees. Requirements are still gathered, but perhaps through rapid prototyping, collaboratively, rather than the business writing out their specifications before they can look at any results.
lunes, 28 de junio de 2010
martes, 1 de junio de 2010
Business Intelligence First Steps
Many small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs) are looking for the best business intelligence (BI) solution to address their specific business problems. Whether these business pains are putting out regular fires, managing a sales force, increasing customer satisfaction, or gaining more visibility into the business and data, business intelligence is becoming the buzzword used to identify the solution used to address these problems.
Unfortunately, business intelligence on its own is not the answer to solving an organization’s business problems. The ability to effectively solve issues and develop a successful BI infrastructure depends upon the combination of the people involved and the business processes put in place. Although there are no surefire ways to ensure project success, there are things that SMEs can do and take into account when looking at starting their BI initiatives.
This article explores the first steps that SMEs should take in order to work toward BI success. The key factors that organizations must consider when looking to use BI to solve business problems and gain visibility into their business are:
1.Defining the right scope
2.Identifying, using, and managing the right data
3.Engaging the right people
4.Integrating proper project planning and management practices
Defining BI Project Success
As mentioned, the four areas listed above do not guarantee project success. However, careful consideration of these items gives companies a way to start any BI project on the right foot and put the processes in place that are required to grow and maintain a strong BI infrastructure and front-end analytics and reporting solution. Because there is so much to consider when looking at any hardware- and software-related project that deeply affects how people do business on a daily basis, taking a step back and identifying individual aspects helps simplify initiatives that require the collection of many complicated and diverse business and technical requirements.
1. Defining the Right Scope – Answering the Right Questions
The first step in any BI project is to identify the business problem. In some cases, organizations want business intelligence to solve all of their problems at once. Obviously, one of BI’s advantages is the ability to consolidate large amounts of disparate data to help companies gain a broader view of what is happening within the company. However, when looking at solving business issues and aligning strategic goals with business performance, doing it well outweighs doing it fast. Therefore, companies should identify their main business pain and start building their solution around that issue to identify general goals and metrics associated with performance management. By developing a targeted scope that addresses key business issues and starting small, organizations can work toward building a solution that meets the needs of many departments within the organization based on incremental success.
2. Identifying, Using and Managing the Right Data – Turning Data into Information
Once the scope is defined, businesses can look at what information is required. This means looking at where data resides, who accesses that data – both operationally or analytically, how often it is updated, how often it is required for reporting and analytics, the types of business rules that exist, what hardware and software it runs on, and what gaps currently exist in relation to analytics or general visibility. Although it is important to start small, organizations can identify all of the information required for the data warehouse because it is easier to identify all required data sources up front to lessen the time spent on integration activities over time.
The type of data and systems currently in use will affect the overall solution choice. Depending upon integration requirements, some solutions integrate specific types of data or information from source systems more easily, while others offer robust linking, matching and data profiling that can help with complicated data reconciliation efforts or merging various business practices into a single data warehouse. Although not always seen as important to business users, the ability to maintain data integrity on a continual basis will help ensure accurate data visibility and better decision making over time.
3. Engaging the Right People – Enter the Stakeholders
Without proper input from the people who own the data and interact with the data, there is the potential to miss key requirements when looking at developing a BI solution. Every person interacts with information differently depending upon his or her role within the company. Consequently, the requirements gathered can make the difference between project success and a solution that no one uses. To make sure that general buy-in occurs, it is important to include the relevant stakeholders in the process. Stakeholder involvement will be different in each company as many different business functions may interact with financial or sales data, or have input related to employee performance.
4. Integrating Proper Project Planning and Management Practices – Back to the Basics with Project Management
Even though not all companies use formal project management tools to manage software selection initiatives, managing projects requires some sort of formalized approach. Tracking stages and managing dependencies throughout the project life cycle helps identify whether everything is on track, how delays will affect future activities, and if the project will be completed within the proposed time frame and budget. The success of a project should not be measured by only identifying whether a project finishes on time and within budget, but implementing BI for the first time within defined parameters helps ensure support for future expansions. Within a BI environment, there are constant projects to enhance and expand solution use because of the benefits seen by companies as they begin to interact with their reporting and analytics environment.
Building BI Step by Step
These four aspects provide guidelines for organizations at the beginning of a BI project and can help lead to a greater chance of project success. Overall, organizations should realize that implementing BI requires business, technical, people, and process considerations and that any gap in one of those areas will create a hole in the overall project. Even if the first implementation breeds success, the continual use and expansion of business intelligence depends upon the cohesion of these four areas.
The ability to define and limit an initial project scope, include stakeholders within the requirements-gathering phase, and manage the project using a defined framework all fall into the areas of business, people, and processes. BI infrastructure and identifying data and how it will interrelate usually provide the bulk of what goes into preparing a BI initiative for the first time. And even though technology requirements are very important within any BI project (especially when looking at data warehousing for the first time), it is also essential not to overlook the business, people and process areas as they become a greater influence as business intelligence use starts to expand within the organization.
Unfortunately, business intelligence on its own is not the answer to solving an organization’s business problems. The ability to effectively solve issues and develop a successful BI infrastructure depends upon the combination of the people involved and the business processes put in place. Although there are no surefire ways to ensure project success, there are things that SMEs can do and take into account when looking at starting their BI initiatives.
This article explores the first steps that SMEs should take in order to work toward BI success. The key factors that organizations must consider when looking to use BI to solve business problems and gain visibility into their business are:
1.Defining the right scope
2.Identifying, using, and managing the right data
3.Engaging the right people
4.Integrating proper project planning and management practices
Defining BI Project Success
As mentioned, the four areas listed above do not guarantee project success. However, careful consideration of these items gives companies a way to start any BI project on the right foot and put the processes in place that are required to grow and maintain a strong BI infrastructure and front-end analytics and reporting solution. Because there is so much to consider when looking at any hardware- and software-related project that deeply affects how people do business on a daily basis, taking a step back and identifying individual aspects helps simplify initiatives that require the collection of many complicated and diverse business and technical requirements.
1. Defining the Right Scope – Answering the Right Questions
The first step in any BI project is to identify the business problem. In some cases, organizations want business intelligence to solve all of their problems at once. Obviously, one of BI’s advantages is the ability to consolidate large amounts of disparate data to help companies gain a broader view of what is happening within the company. However, when looking at solving business issues and aligning strategic goals with business performance, doing it well outweighs doing it fast. Therefore, companies should identify their main business pain and start building their solution around that issue to identify general goals and metrics associated with performance management. By developing a targeted scope that addresses key business issues and starting small, organizations can work toward building a solution that meets the needs of many departments within the organization based on incremental success.
2. Identifying, Using and Managing the Right Data – Turning Data into Information
Once the scope is defined, businesses can look at what information is required. This means looking at where data resides, who accesses that data – both operationally or analytically, how often it is updated, how often it is required for reporting and analytics, the types of business rules that exist, what hardware and software it runs on, and what gaps currently exist in relation to analytics or general visibility. Although it is important to start small, organizations can identify all of the information required for the data warehouse because it is easier to identify all required data sources up front to lessen the time spent on integration activities over time.
The type of data and systems currently in use will affect the overall solution choice. Depending upon integration requirements, some solutions integrate specific types of data or information from source systems more easily, while others offer robust linking, matching and data profiling that can help with complicated data reconciliation efforts or merging various business practices into a single data warehouse. Although not always seen as important to business users, the ability to maintain data integrity on a continual basis will help ensure accurate data visibility and better decision making over time.
3. Engaging the Right People – Enter the Stakeholders
Without proper input from the people who own the data and interact with the data, there is the potential to miss key requirements when looking at developing a BI solution. Every person interacts with information differently depending upon his or her role within the company. Consequently, the requirements gathered can make the difference between project success and a solution that no one uses. To make sure that general buy-in occurs, it is important to include the relevant stakeholders in the process. Stakeholder involvement will be different in each company as many different business functions may interact with financial or sales data, or have input related to employee performance.
4. Integrating Proper Project Planning and Management Practices – Back to the Basics with Project Management
Even though not all companies use formal project management tools to manage software selection initiatives, managing projects requires some sort of formalized approach. Tracking stages and managing dependencies throughout the project life cycle helps identify whether everything is on track, how delays will affect future activities, and if the project will be completed within the proposed time frame and budget. The success of a project should not be measured by only identifying whether a project finishes on time and within budget, but implementing BI for the first time within defined parameters helps ensure support for future expansions. Within a BI environment, there are constant projects to enhance and expand solution use because of the benefits seen by companies as they begin to interact with their reporting and analytics environment.
Building BI Step by Step
These four aspects provide guidelines for organizations at the beginning of a BI project and can help lead to a greater chance of project success. Overall, organizations should realize that implementing BI requires business, technical, people, and process considerations and that any gap in one of those areas will create a hole in the overall project. Even if the first implementation breeds success, the continual use and expansion of business intelligence depends upon the cohesion of these four areas.
The ability to define and limit an initial project scope, include stakeholders within the requirements-gathering phase, and manage the project using a defined framework all fall into the areas of business, people, and processes. BI infrastructure and identifying data and how it will interrelate usually provide the bulk of what goes into preparing a BI initiative for the first time. And even though technology requirements are very important within any BI project (especially when looking at data warehousing for the first time), it is also essential not to overlook the business, people and process areas as they become a greater influence as business intelligence use starts to expand within the organization.
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