Agile BI in my view (1)

TDWI has a few good discussion on Agile BI recently, such as the followings.

Reflection on an Agile BI program

An Imperative to Build, Not Buy, Agile BI

While most of these articles are focused on establishing processes, guidelines or toolsets to ensure Agile BI success, I have different points of views.

If one looks at the current HR setup in IT branches of large enterprises, the key to ensure agility in BI is that they do have qualified people to do the good work. This is, in most cases, done by contractors such as external consultants, outsourcing partners, or experts that are going to be head-hunted to a better-pay job in 1-2 years.

Even the right processes, tools and guidelines are available, the more important part is that the developers have the awareness, competency, and willingness to follow the agile development.

Awareness means that the developers (IT and business) knows about the agile process and knows about how to follow the process. In large organizations, sometime it takes more time to know how to do the process than execute the process.

Competency is always an issue for managers in large enterprises. Employees who are eager to learn and improve skills are normally looking for challenges most of the time. If the project is done, it is hard to keep this competency inside the organization. In order to do agile BI, it is very important that the developers have good understanding of the toolset. Otherwise, the first 3-5 sprints will be used just to train the developers. Do we still consider such training as "agile development?" That's one of the reasons that a lot of companies are using external consultants.

By the way, using a single toolset such as MS BI tools or SAS tools or Cognos tools seems to be much better than using different tools from different vendors. at the same time. There are two reasons. i. It is impossible to have your developers with knowledge of all these tools; ii. The communication between these tools has a potentially large cost.

Willingness is an interesting issue. Sometime people may not follow the process even if they know the process and they have the right competency. Think about using a team with a hybrid structure, employees who have been working with you for 20 years (who may know COBOL very well), external consultants from company A with the latest BI tool knowledge, external consultants from company B with knowledge of another BI toolset, and developers from outsourcing partners. It is hard to imagine that all the team members will work perfectly in such situation.

Another important issue to agile BI is the communications. I mean communications inside the sprint team and with the outside world.

By the way, I think these books are very useful when you need to learn about agile methods and BI/DW.