TECHNOLOGY FOR CHANGE

Five Trends Changing the Face of BI

Ericka Chickowski | Date: 08-20-09 | Comments

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• Predictive analytics, agile development, user-centric business intelligence and improvements in visualization are giving new life to this mature technology.
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  Table of Contents:

  Five Trends Changing the Face of BI Trend 1: Predictive Analytics Trend 2: Agile Development Trend 3: User-Centric BI Trend 4: Visualization Improvements Trend 5: Operationalization of IT

• Five Trends Changing the Face of BI - Trend 2: Agile Development 

  Trend 2: Agile Development

  The economic downturn is forcing BI departments to rethink the way they develop their solution sets, according to Wayne Eckerson, director of research and services for The Data Warehousing Institute, a Renton, Wash.-based analyst firm. With users crying for more capabilities and management demanding faster deployments, he believes more enterprises will start to port the agile development philosophies that have permeated the developer community to the more traditional BI development teams.

  “With the down economy, there is a lot of movement to come up with lower-cost models and faster deployment to keep up with the business,” says Eckerson. “Organizations are exploring agile BI because the business doesn't want to wait around for even three months.”

  That golden three-month period used to be the perfect milestone that BI teams would shoot for to satisfy the business with new innovations. “Now it’s more like a couple of weeks to a month,” Eckerson says.

  The key to the agile approach to BI is that it “rolls out business intelligence in an incremental evolutionary way with a lot of involvement and participation from end users or customers,” says Ken Collier, senior consultant in business intelligence and agile product and project management for Cutter Consortium, an Arlington, Mass.-based IT advisory firm.

  In the enterprise projects he leads, Collier targets a two-week iteration of new functionality releases. He says the factors most critical to meeting this demanding schedule are to keep milestones small and targeted; to foster a highly collaborative environment between analysts, developers and users; and to implement test automation for databases.

  “That’s an entirely new concept for database folks who have been manually testing for years,” he says. “The problem is that if you work in two-week iterations and you’re trying to manually test these new features, you quickly get buried under the weight of your testing processes.” If you do it right, Collier adds, agile BI can deliver value in a number of ways. The most important is responsiveness to user needs.

  “In a relatively medium-size data warehouse or BI system, it typically could take eight or 12 months of requirements analysis and development and testing before users get to see working [betas] on their desktops,” Collier says. “What is really key is being able to show users features within the first few weeks of a project when new data is trickling in every night—even if you don’t roll these things live into production—and being able to show users working features and get feedback so you can quickly adapt.”

  Agile development can also cut down on function overkill. Collier cites industry statistics that show the typical user of any given system uses only about 50 percent of the features included in the application.

  “Simply by virtue of the fact that we focus on the highest value things first, we can complete projects faster and at less expense,” Collier says. “We can converge more quickly on a system that’s ready to go into production, and the user can say, ‘This is good enough; I don't need that other 40 percent in there.’”

  Even if an organization isn’t gung-ho about developing on a two-week schedule, the lesson to take away about the agile movement is its bite-size mentality of incrementalism. Pershing’s Nagappan says this is for organizations seeking to ramp up their intelligence maturity.

  “Many organizations try to do an enterprisewide solution on Day 1, and that is a huge elephant to move,” he says. “That is not going to be a success. Any time you wait a year for a product to show up, it’s not going to be easy.”

  Next: Trend 3: User-Centric BI >>