Webcast: Agile Business Intelligence – Proven Techniques that move BI Development into the Agile World
As more and more organizations embrace agile development methodologies, tools and agile processes are becoming more mainstream and almost transparent to the developer; however, the problem of embracing agile development is still an issue for those working on Business Intelligence projects. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that tools for BI development haven’t quite caught up to the unique problems presented by Business Intelligence development. This session will discuss Agile techniques as they relate to Business Intelligence Projects, with a particular focus on Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) and Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) development. Attendees will learn how to adapt the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) for Agile process template for Business Intelligence, and will show how to integrate Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server into your agile BI projects. Attendees will leave this session with a good understanding of how agile can apply to the BI world.
Presented by: Ted Malone
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> Live date: 10/27/2010 at 12:00 Pacific
Do You Have Control Of Your Data?
I was reviewing a discussion regarding Power Pivot and the implications to SQL Server. I started wondering what the impact might be to the integrity of your data.
For example, we have Master Data Services today as a technology responsible for maintaining the "TRUE" value of a fact within your entire organization. However, spreadsheets or reports produced with Power Pivot may not be up to date without some sort of user interaction. Some users may not have permissions to perform the necessary refresh of underlying data.
Granted, we have the same issue with previous tools. Users can run a canned report, export it to Excel or a PDF, and we now have a data store that is not synchronized from that point on with the authoritative data store. It is clearly a snapshot in time.
This isn’t a bad thing. Sometimes we need to stop Time for a moment in order to gain perspective and make decisions. I’m thinking more about the social/end user practices; the potential for providing stale or inaccurate data. With Power Pivot it is possible for an end user to pull data from a validated source into Excel, massage it in some form, and share it with the rest of the organization through SharePoint or some other medium. They will do that because they were able to "Get It Quick" without a 5 year wait for IT to write a report. Now the company can act appropriately.
But was it correct? I would predict it may often be correct. These are generally the people who know the business rules that establish the requirements for IT. The thing that is missing is the vetting process that IT has struggled with forever. In a good development shop there is some form of QA. Will that still be the case in a self help Power Pivot world. Who reviews the formulas and assumptions made in generating the report. The user is not restricted to simply formatting.
What do you think? What have you experienced? Share your thoughts and comments with us here. I’d love to hear from you.
Cheers,
Ben