Rapid BI – Part 3 Important Factors

This blog will presents some thoughts on the factors that make it possible to deliver a subject area in three months with five people.

One list I received from an academic in the field.  This list seems to be somewhat idealistic but provides a good checklist to compare with your project.  Often some of these ideas are not practical or possible but each one is worth considering.   

1. a clear executive vision of what needs to be done (Who creates the vision?)

2. a sense of urgency in the organization (How to raise the sense of urgency?)

3. an appreciation of agile development methods

4. a liberal use of outside experts (not sure about this)

5. the use of industry logical data models (May be some help.)

6. package software that is compatible with the logical data models (Depends on organizations strategy>)

7. a pre-existing data infrastructure

I wonder if others would take exception with this list.  I invite comment or discussion.   Are all these necessary for a rapidly responsive business intelligence solution?  What do you think?

As a developer of BI solutions, we can only work with what comes into our hands.  From a developer point of view here is another list:

• Sense of urgency based on
  • A clear understanding of the business need for information 
  • A clear understanding of the business 
  • The cost of delaying BI enabled decisions 
• Agile/Rapid BI Development
  •  Willingness to "Fail Fast"
  • Willingness to try multiple approaches to determine most effective
• Promote Best Practices and discourage Bad Practices
• An enterprise model based on business and business need using input from industry models
• Find experts with tools and techniques and leverage their knowledge to optimize tool effectiveness

One of the difficulties that both these lists demonstrate is the developer of the solutions is very dependent on the business to help make the solution happen quickly.  Clear business needs and urgency can really help drive a project.  However the developer does not chose the sponsor and business leader and cannot pick and choose the users.  So in the context of the team, how can we approach the project for maximum likelihood of producing Rapid BI.

I think that each project presents each own challenges and we need to search for innovative approaches.  I do not think there is a specific methodology or process.   I recommend a creative approach that requires agile thinking.  I will talk about some these ideas in future blogs.    

I invite comments and questions.