Business Intelligence

This question has been asked several times in various forums and the standard answer from most of the respondents are "It depends".  I thought I will go a little further and help those who would like to get a rough idea about how much it costs to implement a typical Business Intelligence solution. From my estimation for a typical BI system it can cost anywhere between 2 million euros to 5 million euros for a 5 year period. You can definitely have a BI system built for less than 2 million euros or for more than 5 million euros depending on your requirements, location, tool selection, timelines, support level, high availability expertise of the team etc.  Obviously no one can provide an estimate without knowing the requirements so the best I can offer is to provide an estimation template to estimate the cost of Business Intelligence. The BI Cost Estimation Template provides estimation in euros  but should work for any country, just remember to change the number of team

Please find below the results of the best ETL tool from a developer's perspective survey carried out between 1st Nov 2016 till 16th Dec 2016. Survey link was shared on LinkedIn and on this site.  Thanks to all those DWH/BI developers who took part in this survey. Also thanks to all the members in LinkedIn groups like Data Warehousing (Business Intelligence, ETL) Professional's Group who provided their inputs via comments. Results from the Survey  Results based on comments in LinkedIn, as of 18th Dec 2016 is given below  Survey Result Analysis 425 responses were collected through the survey between 1st Nov 2016 and 16th Dec 2016. Informatica is the most popular and the best ETL Tool from a developer's perspective based on the survey results. Out of those respondents who have experience in multiple tools including both DataStage and Informatica, 20% consider DataStage as the best and 46% consider Informatica as the best ETL tool. Out of tho

This article aims to clarify some of the topics related to business intelligence. Starting with the definition of business intelligence. Business Intelligence There is no one single agreed definition for business intelligence. Below are the ones that I believe are the widely used definition. Gartner - BI is an umbrella term that includes the applications, infrastructure and tools, and best practices that enable access to and analysis of information to improve and optimize decisions and  performance. Wikipedia - BI can be described as "a set of techniques and tools for the acquisition and transformation of raw data into meaningful and useful information for business analysis purposes". Forrester - A set of methodologies, processes, architectures, and technologies that leverage the output of information management processes for analysis, reporting, performance management, and  information delivery. My Version - BI is the process* of deriving information fro

Do you think KABI would work for self-organized teams? I believe KABI is one of the best methodologies for self-organized teams. As every team member takes responsibility to ensure KABI works there is no one-man show like in the case of Scrum where Scrum master has to ensure that the processes are followed by the team. Can KABI be used for non BI project? I believe KABI can be used for any software project where progress can be visualized on daily basis. Why do we have weekly status reporting and not any other frequency of reporting? In a project with lots of unknowns, dependencies, unpredictable work load and team members have to support additional topics on unplanned basis, there is no point in having monthly or quarterly plans and reporting because by the time a month is passed plans may change. The daily reviews, it looks like there is micromanagement, isn’t it? Actually, there is no management. Team is only reviewing the product as part of the daily demo and not th

A solution for scheduling BODS jobs sequentially and conditionally is described in one of my earlier blogs in SCN  http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-34648  ( https://blogs.sap.com/2012/12/25/scheduling-bods-jobs-sequentially-and-conditionally /) . This was valid for version BODS 4.1 and older. It may be valid even now but as I no longer work with BODS I cannot comment. A post explaining combination of BODS repositories to be setup in a project is published in SCN. Link is here  http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-56264  ( https://blogs.sap.com/2014/06/29/bods-repositories/ ) . This was valid for BODS 4.1.  It may be valid even now but as I no longer work with BODS I cannot comment.

Context Our primary goal was to build a BI solution for our division from scratch. A totally greenfield project. We also had some additional responsibilities such as; Support unavoidable high priority ad hoc report requests from various teams Support existing OLTP production reports including handling incidents  Support non-report incidents from time to time Production data analysis  Responding to RFIs/RFPs Third party BI supplier coordination All that we had in place was a set of requirements that I had created before the team was formed based on analysis of existing reports, analysis of previous and on-going report requests, understanding source systems and data and envisaging what could be provided to management and customers based on previous experience and feedback collected from stakeholders. Almost all of the development teams in the organization were working using agile process and scrum was the chosen methodology. Naturally, when we started forming a new tea

KABI is a new agile software development methodology useful for achieving quicker implementation of Business Intelligence (BI) solutions. The methods defined in KABI can also be used in full or in part for any other non BI projects that share similar characteristics as BI development projects.  The word KABI is created by combining "KA" from KA nban and "BI" from B usiness I ntelligence. KABI is a lightweight, iterative, continuous feedback based agile software development methodology that enables every team member to work to their full potential even when there are several unknowns, resource constraints, dependencies and unpredictability of work load. Thereby KABI ensures optimal team productivity throughout the project duration. At the heart of KABI is " Peer Inspiration ".  Every team member plays an important role and every team member works in an exemplary way. They do their part of the job so well that it inspires the whole team. " Mutual