Agile way of BI implementation

The rapidly changing IT economy has influenced the Business Intelligence (BI) systems to look at innovative ways to be equally fast and flexible. There is a need to be more intuitive and quick in implementation so as to adapt to the changing environment. One of the ways by which organizations can achieve these goals is by using Agile based BI development models. There are many components in a successful BI solution which include data integration, analytics, data quality, metadata management, enterprise data warehouse, dashboards and so on. Each of these components are critical for an organization, and stakeholders are ready to invest in these. The only issue is how quickly we can provide these solutions and how flexible these solutions are with the changing demands. Traditionally, we have been using the waterfall SDLC model for BI implementations which encourages getting requirements clarity in the initial phases of the projects and having distinct deliverables for each phase. With time the approach has been customized and enhanced to `iterative waterfall approach' where a chunk of requirements is implemented in one SDLC cycle. Though this approach has been successful in the past, the BI practitioners recognize that business requirements are not static and we must be able to effectively mould the deliverables based on changing requirements. Hence, we cannot continue with the Waterfall (or Iterative waterfall) project management approach that is neither fast nor flexible. Applying the concepts of agile development to BI is the intuitive way forward. The aim of this paper is to provide a background on agile project management & development techniques, and suggest some guidelines and best practices which can help in successful Agile BI implementations.