Spotlight on Agile Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing
Business decision cycles are turning faster, and to keep up, executives and managers are in constant need of new data and new types of reporting and analysis. Dynamic organizations are demanding greater agility from their business intelligence (BI) systems. TDWI Research is currently examining how well organizations are able to adjust their BI and data warehouse (DW) development, deployment, and management to enable greater agility.
How is your organization doing in addressing user demands for more agile BI/DW? What are your toughest challenges? We would very much like to include your opinions and insights in the TDWI Research survey, which is live right now. Thank you to everyone who has already participated in the survey. As part of my research for what will ultimately be a TDWI Best Practices Report, I am also conducting interviews with professionals to understand their experiences with agile development methods for BI/DW and with deploying self-service BI, data virtualization, and other technologies that are helping organizations become more agile. If you are interested, please drop me a line at dstodder@tdwi.org.
With survey data coming in, it’s hard not to take a peek at what we have so far. Respondents say that the business factors having the most disruptive impact, requiring greater business and IT agility, are increased competition (74%, with 20% calling it “very disruptive”), economic or global instability (68%), shorter decision cycles (65%), and technology modernization (62%). Changes in customer behavior form the fifth highest factor, with 60%. The largest percentage of respondents (45%) say that their organizations are “average” at adjusting to change and taking advantage of emerging opportunities, with 10% saying that their organization is “excellent,” 31% saying “good,” and 14% saying “poor.”
Other questions in the survey will provide data for deeper insight into where challenges are most acute in terms of BI/DW development processes and technologies. One of the biggest issues regarding agility is, of course, agile software development method adoption. Ralph Hughes, chief systems architect for Ceregenics and I will be speaking on this topic on September 20 at the upcoming TDWI World Conference in Boston. If you would like to hear a preview of what we will be talking about, including the ongoing research effort into use of agile methods, listen to our recent Webinar.
Achieving greater agility through better methods and technology is a hot area of interest in the TDWI community. Let us know your views on this important topic, both by taking the research survey and by getting in touch.
Posted by David Stodder on August 27, 2012