Holy Agile Kangaroo!
We all know that building a data warehouse is painful. It takes months of planning and development, and any changes that are needed (and somehow, no matter how well you plan, there are always changes needed) can increase development time exponentially. Begrudgingly, during this stage, analysts and business users must often make do with using yesterday’s data, today.
Earlier in the decade, InetSoft sought to break with the traditional BI model that required building a data warehouse and was among the first business intelligence providers to develop its software around the philosophy of agility. We were even the first to use the word ‘agile’ in our mantra: Easy, Agile, Robust.
In the BI universe, the term ‘agile’ is often misused and misunderstood. While everyone can agree that the ultimate goal is improving turnaround time for assembling useable information in the form of dashboards and reports, most organizations are merely focused on improving the traditional warehousing approach through automation.
A well known maxim states, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” Frankly, we couldn’t agree more. That’s why we’ve taken a new age approach to an age old dilemma.
So here are the three tenets of InetSoft’s Agile BI philosophy:
1. Feng shui through self-service. Everyone at your company shouldn’t have to possess a degree in computer science or make requests from someone who does in order to use your BI solution. It’s disruptive and wastes valuable energy on tasks that draw away from the main objective. Our agile reporting tools provide a drag and drop designer and interactive data elements that allow analysts and users to mashup different data sources on the fly.
2. Change is unavoidable so remain flexible. How long did it take to develop your last ETL process? A few months? More than a year? Setting up an ETL process is cumbersome and time consuming. Our solution can reduce the resources and overhead cost of establishing an ETL process by allowing users to experiment with new data on the spot. Users can even map out an eventual ETL process for the long-term.
3. Make mashups, not warehouses. What if you could bypass all the suffering of several months of labor and get to the end result directly? InetSoft eliminates the initial data warehouse creation effort through data mashup. Our solution allows users to rapidly add new sources from disparate data sources and analyze data side-to-side by way of dashboards and visualizations.
Our agile BI philosophy truly breaks from the traditional BI philosophy and we think it’s rather unfortunate that so many BI providers choose to remain steeped in the ways of the past when it leads to so much needless suffering. We urge you to free yourself from the routine insanity and take a walk on over to the Promised Land.
