Agile Business Intelligence is a term that is thrown around a lot. It is interesting to ask people “What is Agile BI.” In general, since I work with mostly technology people I get the answer like “agile BI is the application of agile SDLC methodologies like SCRUM to deliver BI capabilities to business stakeholders.” To that question I usually ask a follow-up question:
Do you really think when your company is not making its sales numbers and a business analyst sits down to answer the “Why” question, that he really cares if a SCRUM process was used to delivery his BI application?
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It does not take long for the light bulb to come on. The reality is most users care about the flexibility of the BI system not how the system was delivered. The reason is simple; a flexible, responsive BI system helps an analyst do his job easier. The value of an agile SDLC methodology is that they reduce the risk in the delivery process. Once a system is delivered this reduction of risk has been realized. It is of little value to the business user when he is trying to use a system to answer a critical business question.
More questions. In your current BI environment what is process to get a million row table added to your data warehouse? Do you require a project? Does this project have to go through a funding mechanism, business case development, then through the typical requirements driven delivery process (either agile or waterfall) that includes conceptual, logical, physical modeling, ETL, semantic layer design, unit, integration, system, and user acceptance testing? Yikes, what is agile about that?
It is no wonder data discovery tools, like Qlikview, Tableau, and Spotfire (to name a few) are lighting it up in the BI market place. These tools all allow users to take large tables (in spreadsheets, Microsoft Access, staging areas or flatfiles) and integrate them with IT “published” data. Once the data is integrated they can perform the analysis to answer the “Why” question. No extended funding cycles. No extended delivery lifecycles. No IT involvement. This “agility” is what your users desire and require to enable an agile company. Time is money and these answers cannot wait for a lengthy delivery funding and delivery cycle. In other words, if your bonus is predicated on your company making its sales numbers, do you want your business users to have to go through an extended process to answer the “Why” question to maximize sales?
