AgileBI Delivery
As a BI Practitioner
I want to understand how to deliver in an AgileBI way
So that I can deliver faster and with less risk
There are a number of Agile focussed delivery techniques that you should implement when deliverying Data, Analytics or Visualisations in an AgileBI way.
There are also a raft of waterfall focussed techniques, that have minimal value in an AgileBI approach and so should be avoided if possible.
The articles below provide more details on both.
Requirements
When presenting, present what counts for your audience first
I have been to a few conferences and presentations this year. A big part of my role is to look to the future to see what is new in the world of Business Intelligence and what it could mean for our customers. So attending these (along with lots of research and...
Sex Sells – What about Advanced Analytics Tools?
When I was working in Presales at Oracle, doing penance by trying to sell Oracle Applications, I got my butt constantly whopped by Peoplesoft. Why? Sex Sells! Yes they had a few features we didn't (date effective GL hierarchies were a killer), but we had "the stack",...
Cloud – The rate of change is going to make administrators jobs …. different
As I read this blog post on an interesting idea around how to get help up-skilling on the the cloud providers (AWS etc) i reflected on the rate of change we are seeing in the software market and what that means to administrators that are responsible for managing this...
The Wellington contractor market is changing – watch out
Its a very interesting time for the contractor market in Wellington this year, a number of major changes by Government last year, coupled with some some other factors has made the market tight for contractors and my view is it will get tighter as we head into 2014. So...
Gartner Magic Quadrant – “Advanced” Analytics 2014
It's that time of year again when Gartner publish their BI related magic quadrants and the vendors all blog. tweet and email the good news of where they sit. This year Gartner released a new quadrant, focussed on Advanced Analytics vendors. Here it is: I'm a...
Webstock – The Internet removes barriers
My current standing joke is: “I have a great product idea i’m about to launch I just have to figure out how to build it and then how to sell it” At Webstock one of the many great presentations was by Spoek Mathambo about how the internet is changing things for music in South Africa. […]
RapidMiner – Unsupported major.minor version 51.0
If you ever try and install RapidMiner on a mac, you might get this little error when starting its engines: Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: com/rapid_i/LauncherJVMOptionBuilder : Unsupported major.minor version 51.0 To get this error...
Webstock – I was blown away!
Webstock is one of those events I have always wanted to attend, ever since it started when I was at Xero. But for some reason or other I never managed to make it. This year I finally sorted my shit and made it and I was blown away! (and now regret not find the time to […]
Constantly providing something for free, its not normal (until now)
When you get offered something for free do you start feeling uncomfortable, looking for the fishhook? For me it depends, if its a Software as a Service app, there are so many that are offered for free these days, its a new norm, so i'm happy to take it (understanding...
It’s ok to fail, just don’t
constantly fail doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome. There is a whole philosophy at the moment around fail fast and fail often. The idea being that by working out what doesn't work, you'll find what does work quicker. And that finding out quickly...
OptimalOrange
Its often not what you do, its how you do it
The other day I redeemed a reward from Flybuys (whoot freebie!) and went into Noel Lemming to pick it up. Flybuys (Loyalty NZ) have made it so easy these days, no more waiting for a piece of paper to arrive via snail mail (sorry NZ Post yet another nail), you just...
OptimalOrange
SFT – Keeping yourself honest, customers will like the experience.
One of our 3 values is "Don't be dodgy". Its a value we don't have plastered on our walls anywhere, we don't have it framed as a picture, but we do use it to test things against when we decide to do them. In the world of Search Engine Optimisation there are ways of...
Mentoring as a Service Experiment
As part of the Agile week at BoostAgile, they gave me a copy of the lean startup book to read. I liked it One of the things I really liked was the concept of creating experiments to prove or disprove an idea or concept. Its one of the things we have been doing...
SFT – The art of Innovation – break it and then fix it
Innovation is a popular word these days in business. Good old Wikipedia defines it as "Innovation is the application of better solutions that meet new requirements, inarticulated needs, or existing market needs." But being innovative is not simple. And often the...
Day 1 – Overview, Vision, Scope and Accountability
So day one is down and it was a day of setting the vision and starting the definition of the scope (the Dev team were off sick, so it was only a 1/2 a day) The Process The day started with a quick whiteboard overview of the entire Agile Scrum Framework and this...
I’m getting flexible – a week of Agile ahead
I love learning new stuff! The six months I spent at Xero has probably been my most intensive learning experience I have had, and in retrospect it was due to the fact it was total immersion, completely focussed on delivery (having Rod Drury walking the floor behind...
Dynamic Data Driven Urls coming in SAS VA 6.3
Kathryn has just spent part of last week mentoring a SAS VA customer in Australia. We love this type of work because we help out customers help themselves (rather than black boxing delivery and forcing them to pay us for every change) and because we always learn new...
SFT – Watch the end of the runway
Often in a project we focus on the wrong things. Lets look at a project with the goal of building a plane that will take off. The challenge is that while we are building the plane it is slowly moving towards the end of the runway. Once we run out of runway the...
SFT – What is cloud computing?
Cloud computing is the latest buzz word and in true IT style, we have invented a raft of TLA's to explain what it is (and isn't) as well as a myriad of versions to confuse people even more. PaaS, IaaS, SaaS, DaaS, public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, BIaaS, How...