Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Agile Business Intelligence Adoption

Generally speaking the term "business intelligence" encompasses a host of business related software and tools. Businesses use these tools to organize and manipulate data from a variety of sources. Organizing the data can take the form of data mining, analytical processing, and or, querying and reporting. Agile business intelligence is a new wave of methodology in the field of business intelligence. Agile BI uses new technologies which make this recent evolution on traditional BI more flexible and more manageable. Data organized on spreadsheets has long been the system businesses use to organize, reconcile, and communicate information to clients and between teams or team members. Agile BI methods are much more helpful to the user than the spreadsheets with which most individuals are already familiar. Agile BI is focused on freeing businesses to identify areas of concern, consider solutions, and quickly respond to any questions raised during any part of this process.

An established system for BI will probably include benchmarks regarding how the processes of database storage and data warehousing are being executed. Applying the same set of standard expectations to an Agile business intelligence system is simply not as straightforward. That being said, it is important to understand how Agile BI can be implemented by a company.

The current business environment requires that businesses maintain immediate access to a tremendous amount of data for the purpose of swiftly making important decisions from the most informed position possible. Businesses large and small are demanding a significantly broader framework for the development of solutions based on all available data. The outright hunger for information and for varied applications drives the migration from traditional BI structures to one of the new Agile Business Intelligence systems. With increased data variety, businesses are asking more specialized questions at a rate never before seen in our new global economy.

Collective, communal applications, which is at the heart of Agile business intelligence (along with flexibility) are molding the new crop of BI analysts, as well as steering the industry toward more interactive and complex processes on the road to custom solutions for any business. Traditional BI methodology fails where Agile BI is proving successful. Agile business intelligence incorporates constant change on a number of different levels in the data storage, warehousing, and integration enterprise. BI teams are leaving behind the presuppositions that initially inspired the long-standing, inflexible solutions in favor of a new paradigm which includes cutting edge technology. Agile BI seeks to help businesses out compete and dominate their market regardless of their particular industry. Now that businesses are asking innovative questions and squeezing every ounce of utility out of every bit of data, Agile business intelligence solutions are replacing the support systems which can no longer keep up with the incredible pace of change of industry today.