etis11 - agile business intelligence - presentation

CYPRUS ‘11 DATA MANAGEMENT & WAREHOUSING DAVID M WALKER

AGILE BUSINESS

INTELLIGENCE

CYPRUS ‘11 AGILE MANIFESTO

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.

Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

http://www.agilemanifesto.org/ Utah, Feb 2001

14-‐Oct-‐2011 © 2011 Data Management & Warehousing 2

CYPRUS ‘11 TWELVE PRINCIPLES OF AGILE SOFTWARE •  Our highest priority is to satisfy the

customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

•  Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage.

•  Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.

•  Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.

•  Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.

•  The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.

•  Working software is the primary measure of progress.

•  Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.

•  Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.

•  Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential.

•  The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.

•  At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.


CYPRUS ‘11 LARGE ORGANIZATIONS FORGET

•  Most companies start with an innovative and entrepreneurial people and processes that get things done – they are inherently agile

•  As organizations grow they put structures in place that standardize the organization but these limit creativity, increase timescales and reduce risk at the cost of reducing benefits and reward


CYPRUS ‘11 THE PROCESS IMPROVEMENT PARADOX

•  The paradox (…) is that process improvement is good, but process improvement programs aren't, or at least they often aren't.

•  Organizations become more and more averse to risk as they "mature”. An organization under the gun to demonstrate increased CMM level is not going to go looking for real challenge.

•  This (…) entices the play-it-safe behavior of low-risk, and therefore low-benefit, projects.

Peopleware; Tom De Marco & Timothy Lister; 1987


CYPRUS ‘11 SUCCESSFUL LARGE ORGANIZATIONS RECOGNIZE AND REACT

•  SkunkWorks –  Lockheed Martin Advance Development Projects –  A group within an organization given a high degree

of autonomy and unhampered by bureaucracy, tasked with working on advanced projects.

–  Responsible for U-2 & Blackbird Spy Planes, Stealth Fighter & Bomber

–  Founded in June 1943 specifically to overcome the hurdles of government and large corporations working together

–  SkunkWorks has 14 rules and practices •  Very Similar to the 12 Agile Principles

Ben Rich & Leo Janos; SkunkWorks; 1996


CYPRUS ‘11 OTHER EXAMPLES

•  In the late 80s/early 90s Telcos led the way in Agile BI development –  Vodafone: Mast Placement Project – Swisscom: Geo-located SMS Marketing

•  But they have been overtaken by the search and social networks websites that rely on rapidly creating and consuming BI data to survive –  Examples: Facebook, Google & LinkedIn –  These companies are also creating and

using the next generation of BI tools and BI engines


CYPRUS ‘11 AGILE BI IS NOW A 2-SPEED HIGHWAY

•  Truly Agile BI Organizations –  Small, strong, highly skilled teams with a

strong, trusting, focused user relationship –  Project team having delegated authority and

responsibility for delivery with long term funding

–  The ability to operate outside standard corporate procedures (e.g. procurement)

–  Regular delivery of incremental improvement •  Those that describe themselves as “wanting

to be more agile” –  Willing to adopt some of the methods but

unable to break free from the corporate chains


CYPRUS ‘11

BECOMING MORE AGILE TECHNIQUES


CYPRUS ‘11 HOW TO BE MORE AGILE

•  Team Structures •  Wiki-fy Everything •  Use A Dedicated Platform •  Build Literal Staging Areas •  Throw out your ETL Tool? •  More Dynamic Reporting Tools •  Develop reports with your users •  Embrace (not so) New Technologies


CYPRUS ‘11 TEAM STRUCTURES

•  Agile teams are generally smaller but with broader and deeper skill sets – These resources are more expensive

individually but cheaper collectively – Smaller teams significantly reduce the

management and communication overhead

– Close communications and broad skills are more likely to generate innovative solutions


CYPRUS ‘11 WIKI-FY EVERYTHING

•  Projects need a consistent, persistent, versioned knowledge store

•  Use a Wiki and train your business users how to use it

•  Optimizes the ‘documentation’ set collected in a single structured way

•  Abandon office products and SharePoint for critical documents

•  Don’t store your requirements in e-mails, IM chats and documents


CYPRUS ‘11 USE A DEDICATED PLATFORM

•  Marketplace has a choice of BI specific, low maintenance, low TCO appliances –  IBM Netezza –  Teradata 14 (AsterData) – Sybase IQ

•  And some high power workhorses – Oracle Exadata –  Teradata

•  There are plenty of emerging technologies – Curt Monash: http://www.dbms2.com/


CYPRUS ‘11 BUILD LITERAL STAGING AREAS

•  These are 1:1 copies of your source systems (hence the ‘Literal’)

•  Do this whilst others are collecting requirements, building data models, etc.

•  Do some test reporting off the LSA with the users – it starts the user engagement, helps evolve the business requirements, and develops communication

•  They will be an essential source for the data warehouse as it evolves and remove load from the operational systems


CYPRUS ‘11 THROW OUT YOUR ETL TOOL ?

•  ETL tools require product specific expertise –  Value add features are under-utilized –  Developers and DBAs use them as glorified

scheduling tools •  Good Source Code Control and Management

Scripting can compensate for much of the lost benefits

•  Significantly reduces the project cost and increases the available skilled resources

•  InsureTheBox/Netezza; YapiKredi/SybaseIQ; NonDisclosure/Greenplum have major data warehouses with no ETL product


CYPRUS ‘11 MORE DYNAMIC REPORTING TOOLS

•  Reports on your hand held device – Qlikview, RoamBI, PushBI, Tableau

•  Use Dynamic Web Deployed Tools –  Panopticon, Tableau

•  RSS Feeds – Usable by any RSS Reader on any platform

•  Requires dedicated, reactive reporting experts that work enthusiastically with the business users and are willing to go the extra mile


CYPRUS ‘11 DEVELOP REPORTS WITH YOUR USERS

•  De La Rue / Tableau Reporting

•  First 50 reports deployed over 28 days

•  Initially deployed to users from the LSA and then migrated to the data marts

•  Near real-time (fifteen minutes maximum delay) data

•  Averages – Day 5: 17 changes / 5 users – Day 10: 1 change / 42 users – Day 15: 0 changes / 50 users


CYPRUS ‘11 EMBRACE (NOT SO) NEW TECHNOLOGY - MAPREDUCE/HADOOP/NOSQL

•  Software frameworks that supports data-intensive distributed applications and enables them to work with thousands of nodes and petabytes of data.

•  Hadoop is a filesystem (HDFS) and distributed programming framework (MapReduce) whilst a NoSQL database consists of key-value pairs, no joins, data is sharded and replicated, no single point of failure.

•  Notable BI Use (but not the only one): Rapid loading and processing of volume data to create and validate data sets for onward inclusion in the data warehouse whilst doing large scale, near real-time ‘dirty’ analysis

•  Notable Users: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yahoo!, eBay, Amazon, Google

•  Technologies in use since at least 2004


CYPRUS ‘11 EMBRACE (NOT SO) NEW TECHNOLOGY – COMPLEX EVENT PROCESSING (CEP)

•  Complex event processing (CEP) consists of processing many events happening across all the layers of an organization, identifying the most meaningful events within the event cloud, analyzing their impact, and taking subsequent action in real time.

•  Already used for fraud and network management but has applications in customer service and market to fine tune customer interactions in real time

•  Notable BI Use: real-time information alongside existing BI – rather than trying to create an entire real-time solution

•  Technologies in use since at least 1999


CYPRUS ‘11 BUT REMEMBER …

•  Agile is all about approach and people: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan

•  Your management need to be willing to create: A group within an organization given a high degree of autonomy and unhampered by bureaucracy, tasked with working on advanced projects.


CYPRUS ‘11 REFERENCE MATERIAL

•  Websites –  Agile Manifesto

•  12 Principles of Agile – SkunkWorks

•  14 Rules & Practices – Hadoop and NoSQL Myth-busting

•  Books –  Peopleware: Productive Projects & Teams – SkunkWorks: A Personal Memoir – Mythical Man Month: Essays on Software

Engineering


CYPRUS ‘11 THANK YOU

AGILE BUSINESS

INTELLIGENCE

etis11 - agile business intelligence - presentation

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