It’s called “agile BI,” and it goes like this: forget the big meetings, forget the planning, forget the budgeting. Just get someone from IT and someone from business together and make a prototype in a week.
Dave Wells, an independent consultant after five and a half years as TDWI education director, reports that clients are asking for this. “Let’s just see what we can whip up in an hour or three,” he said. If the prototype doesn’t come up with the most useful answer, the two people on the team rework it until it does.
“People are no longer asking for the big heavy BI applications with a life span of five to ten years,” he said. “They want fast answers right now.”
It’s one solution for a chilled economy—and I’m looking for others for BI This Week. Have you heard any novel, out-of-the-box or off-the-wall ways that anyone has squeezed results from BI? Make a comment or use the contact form today.
As an effect of the economic downturn the IT budget of one of our clients has been frozen. At the same time you see a lot of business initiatives to come up with smart solutions to cope with this change in consumer spending. In order to tackle this we have come up with several alternative business services:
1. Quick Service: 1 hour work, 1 day throughput time, simple basic data dump
2. Quick Report: 8 hour work, 1 week thoughput time, simple basic not supported report
3. Quick Analytics: 1 week work, 2-4 week troughput time, answering business questions using advanced statistical analysis.
Non of these products are part of our supported BI service portfolio – but in enables us to meet customer demands.
Another possibility would be to give enduser access to the datawarehouse with simple end user tooling but this causes to many obvious problems to make it work.