This Q&A with Raphael Klebanov highlights the state of BI today. Part 1 highlights the current state of BI. You can see his previous guest post here.

Raphael Klebanov is a Lead Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence specialist at WhereScape, Inc. He has more than 15 years of BI experience and expertise in all phases of the delivery lifecycle, from requirements discovery, through design and development, to successful deployment and rollout. A Professional Scrum Master and Certified Data Vault Modeler, Raphael continuously seeks ways to refine and optimize BI delivery.

Balanced Insight: How does WhereScape® help automate data warehousing projects?

Raphael Klebanov: Both of our products – RED and 3D – allow users to leverage WhereScape® Metadata repositories for all models, transactional code, audit and workflow components and documentation to remove many of the tedious aspects of building data warehouse (DW) and BI projects. In other words, WhereScape® RED automates the entire DW life cycle from design and building, through coding, implementation and scheduling, to maintenance, documentation and ongoing improvement. All the objects and processes are encapsulated in the database, making it independent from third-party tools. You also don’t need to engage the specialized skills of expensive contractors.

WhereScape® 3D automates the entire spectrum of pre-ETL data warehouse planning tasks from the source and target discovery and profiling through  modeling and mapping, scoping, sizing and appraisal activities. WhereScape® 3D produces complete project documentation that is suitable for review, approval, distribution and governance assessment; it even produces an implementation-ready design that can be imported into WhereScape® RED for build. Simply put, WhereScape® 3D allows you to know what kind of data you actually deal with before you embark on a full-scale DW-building project.

Balanced Insight: How does WhereScape help automate data warehousing projects?

Raphael Klebanov: WhereScape RED supports Agile development, as well as traditional project approaches, by creating rapidly prototyped and fully functional DW in hours, for user reviews and subsequent iterations. Using RED, development is completed so quickly that source data can start flowing within days through DW objects into the BI presentation layer. That means business users can evaluate apps and provide responses and input back to the development team.

This approach really brings to life all the Agile practices, such as Extreme Programming, SCRUM, Feature-Driven Development, Adaptive Software Development and Lean Development. In a matter of hours or days, the organization can define whether it’s on the  right track or not with DW and BI projects, which makes the whole process faster, more interactive, less risky and – ultimately – more valuable in terms of generating higher ROI.

Balanced Insight: What do you like about the combination of RED and Balanced Insight Consensus to enable faster, more efficient delivery?

Raphael Klebanov: The combination builds off the powerful premise that  effective BI is not about the database or BI platform, but more about what you build into that platform and what you can do with the data. When used together, WhereScape RED and Balanced Insight Consensus enable BI teams to build high quality, reliable, low-cost, and well-documented infrastructures to answer daily business questions, identify new profit opportunities, and drive cost reduction. It also enables stronger data governance capabilities for customer organizations.

Consensus automates the modeling solution based on business needs in target BI and database environments, while RED generates the EDW based on business priorities and solutions generated by Consensus. Executing EDW with live data provided by RED reveals new discoveries and business needs that can be fed into Consensus for adjusting solutions and subsequently creating another iteration of the EDW. I think of it as a helical iterative evolution of the EDW that totally harmonizes with Agile development theory and practice and produces healthy, ever-improving EDWs.

For more information on WhereScape RED, please visit WhereScape.com or reach out to Raphael (Email: rklebanov@wherescape.com; Skype: Raphael_ws; Mobile: (303) 968-0703).