Posts Tagged ‘Agile Software Development’
The Big Bang Approach is Long Dead
The days of locking a bunch of smart people in a room until they understand and deliver on a static set of narrow requirements has been over for a while now. But if there was ever any doubt, the cross-functional, politically charged, somewhat esoteric requirements of business intelligence should put an end to the debate. And if that doesn’t do it for you, how about the insane number of BI projects that fail every year due to lack of communication and coordination between IT and the business. (Need to read more? Try here or here or timeless truths from a few years back, here.)
I would suggest that one reason why so many BI efforts fall short (or outright miserably fail) is that they are approached fundamentally wrongly. In my mind, all the articles cited are saying similar things: there was too much “lock smart guys in a room” and too little “collaboration between IT and the business.”
*pounds table*
I want process agility.
I want continual interaction with the end user community, business requirement drivers, and project stakeholders.
I want more communication, milestone sign-offs, RAD modeling, and the like.
Maybe you could get away with writing your Visual C++ app in a vacuum 12 or 13 years ago, but those days are long gone. If you don’t put the business guy on the development team (he’s called the Product Owner … feel the Agile software development love … see also here and here), 
make cross-functional business teams responsible for the requirements, the priorities and the data (read: governance), and develop software incrementally in short iterations, then I submit hitting the fast-moving target of the organization’s requirements for BI will be next to impossible.
