Business Intelligence - A Practitioner's Thoughts

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June 17, 2008

Agile Framework - Managing and Measuring Enterprise BI

I recently participated in the International Project Management Conference (PML-2008) by presenting a paper on Agile Framework applicability to Business Intelligence. The paper was among the final 10 nominations for the Leadership award and I thought of sharing the gist of the paper on this blog.

The Paper Abstract:
Enterprise Business Intelligence solutions are complex from an implementation standpoint because of the Develop - Support (Growth-Sustain) cycle followed concurrently. Every enterprise wide BI system continuously evolves over a period of time with new business functionality getting added at regular intervals and they need to be in conformance with existing ones. Also, with continuous evolution of functionality comes the question - "How does one measure the progress"?

This paper addresses the two major problems in managing Enterprise Business Intelligence initiatives, namely:
1) Sustenance of concurrent Develop-Support cycles
2) Calibrating the evolution of business functionality

The solution to the vexing problem in development & maintenance of large data warehouses lies in the adaptation of Agile Methodology. Agility in the Data Warehousing context is an approach that "cycles" through the different phases, with the ultimate aim of adding new functionality and stabilizing what is already present. Agile Methodology also provides the platform for measuring/calibrating the progress of Business Intelligence initiatives.

The Paper Contents:
The contents of the paper are given below at a fairly high-level:

The Project Management Framework
Agile development is a software development approach that "cycles" through the development phases, from gathering requirements to delivering functionality into a working release.

Two phases to the Agile framework implementation are:
1) Planning Phase
2) Execution Phase

Agile Framework - Planning Phase
Planning is typically done at the end of a particular year for the subsequent year, once the business plans & budgets are finalized. The steps in the Planning phase are:
1) Create and Prioritize the Stories
2) Create the Phase Plan
3) Identify the "Cycles" (Development and Stabilization Cycles)
4) Create the Release Plan

Agile Framework - Execution Phase
The Execution Phase is for implementing the periodic releases. This has the following steps:
1) Execution of Cycles
2) Delivering the Release
3) Delivering the Phase
4) Completing the Story

The Measurement Framework
The Measurement Framework for Enterprise Business Intelligence combines the practical implementation power of the Agile Methodology and the statistical robustness of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP).

There are 3 levels of scorecards that are part of the measurement framework:
a) Level 1 (Highest Level) - Actual and Planned Rating of the environment shown on a periodic basis
b) Level 2 - For each period, the rating for different components ("Stories" in the Agile terminology) are arrived at.
c)Level 3 - For each component, the score till the end of that particular period is calculated using appropriate calibration factors following the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) technique.

The key takeaways from this paper are:
1) Enterprise Business Intelligence systems are complex to manage as they constantly evolve over time
2) Agile Framework does provide an elegant way for managing the concurrent "Develop-Support" cycles required for Business Intelligence projects.
3) AHP based measurement techniques provide a powerful way for calibrating and enhancing BI application performance
4) AHP is a simple yet comprehensive way of determining relative importance / weightages among sub-projects that makes up complex systems.

I will elaborate on this topic in my future posts.

Thanks for reading. Please do share your comments.

Posted by Karthikeyan Sankaran at June 17, 2008 6:15 AM

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Posted by: Jorge at June 19, 2008 8:25 AM

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