WhereScape RED Builds data warehouses, fast.

We have just put up the archive of a webinar we did last month on a meta data driven approach to data warehouse development.

The webinar description is:

After nearly two decades, databases, development tools, and design approaches have matured greatly to support Business Intelligence. Yet, Data Warehouse projects still struggle to meet the needs of business users and often require resources beyond the reach of many companies. Agile development techniques address the underlying root causes of the roadblocks to success. Unfortunately, most BI development tools were not designed to support this approach. Presenters will illustrate the agile approach, using the industry’s preeminent agile data warehouse development platform, and motivate attendees to consider just how successful agile DW development can be for most businesses, regardless of size.

Why you should attend:

• Learn how to make your current data warehouse nimble and responsive to the dynamic needs of the business.
• Don’t have a proper data warehouse? It’s not as expensive and resource intensive as you think to build one.
• Doing too much via hand coding, without any documentation? A metadata generated approach accelerates the development process.
• Build faster, and manage more effectively by getting agile.

What you’ll take away:

• Free one-hour private consultation focused on your Data Warehousing challenges.
• Data Warehouse Prototyping Whitepaper

To access the webinar yopu will need to register and login here - it is hosted on a third party site.

Enjoy!

I got picked up for tweet I made recently during a webinar.   The webinar was Agile BI Made Easy: Two Proven Paths to Success that WhereScape put on with Composite Software.  This was a new concept for us – while Composite and we believe there are different and smarter approaches to solve common problems, our approaches are quite different, and people will generally end up picking one or other of us rather than both.  Makes for an a more interesting webinar, but that is another story.

Industry analyst Boris Evelson (@bevelson) was the headliner for the webinar, and he made a great pitch for how agile BI can be used in the face of deployment efforts that are often underestimated, have ever-changing user requirements, with a growing user base and rapidly growing volumes and complexity in the data.

I tweeted that it is not the “what” it is the “how” that is changing, which was my take on one of Boris’ slides.  I got picked up on it later by James Kobielus (@jameskobielus), who disagreed and gave a couple of examples that showed the “what” is changing as well.  Now of course he is right – there is a ton of new, innovative ”what” changing out there.  He gave the examples of predictive and current (I am sure he could have given more, but hey, he only had 140 characters).

So yes, he is right, but I still think it misses the point.  Thankfully there is constant innovation being carried out in the business intelligence space, and there is certainly room for a lot more.  But it was great to be actually talking about a problem that has been around for a long time and is generally ignored  – data warehouses take too long to build, and once they are built they are too hard to change.  This is a real problem in the data world.

There are a lot of reasons for this –data volumes, difficulties of scope control in enterprise data initiatives, hard to pin down requirements, refactoring large data sets etc etc.  But that doesn’t mean we should ignore the problem.  The current interest in agile bi and agile data warehousing techniques is overdue and healthy.   

It is great to see an age old issue being exposed and talked about.  And if we can do a better job of building, rebuilding and managing data warehouses it only makes the “what” story even better.

As an aside I can recommend Boris Evelson’s excellent research Agile BI Out Of The Box:  Reduce Development Time And Effort With Metadata-Generated BI Applications , which was the impetus behind the original webinar.  If you would like a copy contact us or leave a comment and we will send one through. 

We recently invited Dr Ken Collier (theagilest.com) down to New Zealand to work with our development team.  As you can guess from the name of his website Ken is an agile kind of guy.  And not one of the crop of recent converts  – he has been working in agile almost as long as he has in information management.

There were some fascinating discussions.   WhereScape has always been a “rapid” development environment, and very much in alignment with the Agile Manifesto:

Manifesto for Agile Software Development

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

And the associated principles:

Principles behind the Agile Manifesto

We follow these principles:

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.

But there are certainly things we can do to better support common agile practices.  As a data warehouse development environment we cannot and should not attempt to provide project management functionality, but we can look to see how we can better enable an agile project.

This is the key reason we are working with Ken, and the first deliverables from these discussions are being worked on now.

Getting back to the title…one of the many things Ken talked about that resonated with us was the concept of being constantly deployable.  To illustrate the point he challenged us with “What would happen if we cut the funding on your project at the end of the week?”  It is a question that really got to the heart of being agile - nothing about scrum, sprints, continuous integration testing etc etc – but a question about BEING agile.

It is certainly a question we will ponder on our own consulting engagement and best practice guides, and one we will use with our customers who want to be more agile. 

Watch this space for more information on how WhereScape will enable agile practices.  We will see what we can do to help you if someone asks…. are you ready to deploy this afternoon?