Thursday, May 5, 2011

Agile BI

Notes on Forrester 2011 Trends and beyond
90s was the time of silos development, 2000s the decade of centralization and 2010s the decade of agile

Centralization of BI address issues related to "one single vision of the truth" and provide uniform tools across the enterprise. The problem is that with consolidation comes additional processes, administration and middle people to go through to reach knowledgeable player/developers

Thus the idea of agility on top of centralization. The idea is to be flexible enough to address unique problematic of evolving business processes which induce small changes requests. These type of requests don't go well with traditional SDLC (software development lifecycle). BPM suite seem to be well suited to agile development. Business must have ownership of the BI initiative. Create a hub and spoke environment i.e. what needs to be centralize and what needs to belong to satellites.

Forester define 4 major sub-category to agility:

  1. Automation: Free up human resource and process time by automating what can. Will leave more time for custom/last minute/ad'hoc request. Example: Auto information discovery - data profiling -> speedup ETL/Schema built; All stages of BI (ETL, data management, reporting) in one tool can enable life-cycle automation; optimize usage/speed/availability for most used elements/entities/tables/reports; See and share what other do; Auto decision 
  2. Unify toolset: have a common choice across company for BI tools. Example of unification: SaaS logical linking to data; structure, unstructured, predictive, complex data structure like unbalanced, ragged or sparse hierarchy
  3. Pervasive: Spread widely information; whenever, however, whatever
  4. Limitless: adaptive DM, multi-dim
TIBCO Spotfire
Endica
Quiterian
Attivio

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