Agile BI (Business Intelligence) Basics

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.