Gartner on Agile BI

Gartner recently weighed in on the increasingly mentioned and growing momentum around Agile BI.

Full disclosure: Balanced Insight was mentioned as:

one of an emerging group of vendors offering software tools … designed to manage the process of gathering BI requirements and automating the production of a functional spec, the building of database structures, online analytical processing cubes and reports, somewhat akin to computer- aided software engineering tools.

We appreciate the notice, of course. And Gartner’s take, as usual, is on target and illuminating. However, we wanted to offer a bit of extra perspective on a couple of key points.

• “Agile BI is not a panacea to all regular BI issues.” We couldn’t agree more. In our experience, metrics standardization, close working relationships between business and IT, and a culture that values transparency and objectivity are important complements.
• Because “Agile BI is concerned with iterative collaboration between cross-functional teams,” it can be “a useful addition to the management of the development aspects of BI … and can fit well within a business intelligence competency center.” Again, we agree with the overall point. Agile BI can be a driving force behind the creation of BI competency centers or centers of excellence. But we think Agile BI can and should be seen as an enabling force or defining best practice, not an “addition.” The future belongs to Agile BI and to technologies that enable and assist in Agile BI. That includes collaborative social media.
• “Agile is not a substitute for good BI requirements gathering.” We agree that requirements gathering is a critical element in successful BI projects.  We also believe that the Agile BI does a much better job of requirements definition than traditional approaches. In fact, that may be Agile BI’s greatest strength. This is true mainly because of the constantly shifting nature of business requirements. Waterfall approaches may do a great job of capturing a fixed set of requirements at a fixed point in time. But the reality is that requirements are fluid, not fixed. As requirements shift, Agile BI gives developers the best chance to keep up, and deliver something that meets business needs at the time of delivery.
• “Agile BI can only be applied when IT is involved.” To some degree, the word “agile” highlights the lingering business-IT gap. Consider the relative definitions: when IT pros hear agile, they think about a specific development methodology; for business users, “agile” means a greater organizational nimbleness and increased responsiveness to changing business conditions.  We think it’s both.

The bottom line? Agile BI describes both a proven development process as well as the overall benefit and end-user experience. That is, Agile BI helps organizations increase the value of their data assets, BI toolset and decision making process. The ability and confidence to make informed decisions quickly in response to shifting business conditions – that’s what Agile BI is all about.