Making the Case for Agile BI

Thursday, 06 May 2010 07:56

A decade after its insurgency, agile programming is an established (and in most cases, respected) approach to application development. Now there's a push to assimilate agile concepts and methods into business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing (DW) practices.

The forthcoming TDWI Summer World Conference in San Diego, for example, has Agile BI as one of its major themes. Meanwhile, some BI and DW vendors -- including search applications specialist Endeca Technologies Inc., which recently commissioned an "Agile BI" study by Forrester Research -- tout a notionally "agile" approach to BI or DW as a means to differentiate their products.

One impetus, as always, is lagging BI usage, such as survey data indicating that BI uptake has basically flat-lined. Some BI professionals, concerned about the ability of enterprise data management (DM) teams to respond to the rapid pace of business change, tout the adoption of agile concepts and methods as one way to increase the responsiveness of BI and DW.

When agile programming first appeared, it advocated seemingly heretical application development methodology: in place of time-consuming background research -- e.g., a lengthy and exhaustive requirements analysis -- onerous documentation, and a protracted, pre-testing development cycle, agile championed a develop-as-you-go approach. Agile advocates like to emphasize the importance of early (and frequent) prototyping -- there's even an agile offshoot called "test-driven development" -- as well as ongoing collaboration between users, business stakeholders, and developers. Advocates claimed that agile could both accelerate the pace of application development and deliver more usable, functional and reliable applications.

Making the Case for Agile BI and DW

"As data volumes and information complexity continue to skyrocket, traditional BI tools try hard to keep up with ever increasing and changing demands. But it's an uphill battle -- and BI tools and applications do not always keep up the right level of pace and advancement," the report indicates.