Design Tip #155 Going Agile? Start with the Bus Matrix

Many organizations are embracing agile development techniques for their DW/BI implementations. While we strongly concur with agile’s focus on business collaboration to deliver value via incremental initiatives, we’ve also witnessed agile’s “dark side.” Some teams get myopically focused on a narrowly-defined set of business requirements. They extract a limited amount of source data to develop a point solution in a vacuum. The resultant standalone solution can’t be leveraged by other groups and/or integrated with other analytics. The agile deliverable may have been built quickly, so it’s deemed a success. But when organizations...

White Paper: Evolving Role of the Enterprise Data Warehouse in the Era of Big Data Analytics

The enterprise data warehouse (EDW) community has entered a new realm of meeting new and growing business requirements in the era of big data. Common challenges include:     extreme integration     semi- and un-structured data sources     petabytes of behavioral and image data accessed through MapReduce/Hadoop     massively parallel relational database     structural considerations for the EDW to support predictive and other advanced analytics.  These pressing needs raise more than a few urgent questions, such as:     How do...