Agile Analytics

Leader: Dr. Ken Collier, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium

Length of workshop: 1 day

General Overview: Historically business intelligence practitioners have treated the development of BI systems more like incubating an egg than raising a child. That is, the BI system is built inside a shell with limited visibility or guidance by the business stakeholders until it eventually hatches as the first production release. Imagine if we raised our children like we build BI systems! We’d keep them in highly controlled and protected environments, away from others until they are mature and fully developed. Then we would release them into the world to see if they can function effectively. Clearly this is not a healthy way to raise a child, nor is it a healthy way to build a business intelligence solution or system.

Agile Analytics is a highly iterative and evolutionary approach to building any business intelligence system. This is effective whether it is an enterprise data warehouse; a customer relationship management system; or advanced set of data mining models. Agile Analytics treats BI system development like healthy child rearing. From its inception, no matter how immature, the system is frequently exposed to stakeholders. Early versions of the system help stakeholders shape their visions and provide feedback. Developers have the opportunity to respond to this feedback and continuously mature the system to align with the stakeholders’ vision. As children gradually mature, we give them greater freedom and responsibility; similarly as an Agile BI system gradually matures, we increase the number of users who can access the system and it gradually becomes a production system.

In this workshop you'll learn:

• The values, principals, and practices behind Agile Analytics
• How to enable the collaboration and continuous realignment of expectations between developers, customers, and managers that agile analytics requires.
• Who makes up the core group of critical project community members without whom the agile analytics project cannot succeed?
• The collaboration characteristics shared by effective analytics teams, and how you can become an effective leader who fosters these characteristics.
• How Agile modeling balances some up-front design with a sequence of adaptive, just-in-time data model refinements to respond to the demands of the project

Plus, Dr. Collier will recount the successes BI professionals have experienced as a result of using this method.

For more information on bringing this workshop to your organization, contact Dennis Crowley by phone at +1 781 641 5125, by fax at +1 781 648 1950, or by e-mail at sales@cutter.com.