Building Business Intelligence Solutions Using Agile BI

Historically, starting new Business Intelligence projects required careful consideration of a broad set of factors including:

Data Considerations

• Where is my data coming from?
• Where will it be stored?
• What cleansing and enrichment is necessary to address the business needs?

Information Delivery Consideration

• Will information be delivered through static content like pre-canned reports and dashboards?
• Will users need the ability to build their own reports or perform interactive analysis on the data?

Skill Set Considerations

• If users need self-service reporting and analysis, what skill sets do you expect them to have?
• Assuming the project involves some combination of ETL, content creation for reports and dashboards, and meta-data modeling to enable business users to create their own content, do we have all the tools and skill sets to build the solution in a timely fashion?

Cost

• How many tools and from how many vendors will it take to implement the total solution?
• If expanding the use of a BI tool already in house, what are the additional licensing costs associated with rolling it out to a new user community?
• What are the costs in both time and money to train up on all tools necessary to roll out the solution?
• How long is the project going to take and when will we start seeing some ROI?

Because of this, many new projects are abandoned before they even begin. Pentaho's Agile BI initiative seeks to break down the barriers to expanding your use of Business Intelligence through an iterative approach to scoping, prototyping, and building complete BI solutions. It is an approach that centers on the business needs first, empowers the business users to get involved at every phase of development, and prevents projects from going completely off track from the original business goals.
In support of the Agile BI methodology, the Spoon design environment provides an integrated design environment for performing all tasks related to building a BI solution including ETL, reporting and OLAP metadata modeling and end user visualization. In a single click, Business users will instantly be able to start interacting with data, building reports with zero knowledge of SQL or MDX, and work hand-in-hand with solution architects to refine the solution.