I've had a few quiet days with the onset of the holidays and that has given me time to read and write. It's given me time to think. About what? Well, a colleague of mine asked me to think about ways to evolve our approach to capturing requirements and doing analysis for our business intelligence projects. We have a dedicated group that delivers outstanding EDW and BI initiatives and this colleague wanted me to see what tools/techniques from my advisory services practice could be leveraged in our BI work. I've been thinking about this since he mentioned it to me late last week and wanted to get some thoughts down to help evolve my thinking.
To do so, let's look at something unrelated to technology. Building a house. When building a house, you spend a considerable amount of time capturing requirements. Once you are done, you had those requirements over to the various trades people and they go off and build your house. This makes sense to us and it lends itself into the tech world to application development or web development. When I am engaged by clients to build websites or web-based applications, we often spend a lot of time capturing the requirements. It is absolutely critical. Like building a house, once you've captured those requirements though, they are handed off to graphic designers, developers, testers and away they go. They build what was needed based on the requirements.
This approach however doesn't apply to business intelligence initiatives. I've witnessed this first hand on projects I've observed. It is often complex to capture requirements, and that can be true of web development projects as well. The difference, however, is that BI requirements seem to be a constantly moving target throughout the project. That makes it challenging. It would be like handing blueprints to the trades people building a home, and then, once they have the framing done the unexpectedly find out that the physical properties of lumber have changed on them and they now need to reconsider things. That of course doesn't happen when building a home, but in BI projects, this kind of shifting does happen. The question is why?
As I puzzled on this I recalled a wonderful article that Peter Thomas wrote where he used an excellent metaphor for BI projects, equating them more to an archaeological dig than building houses. The point of his article is that as you begin an archaeological dig you find unexpected things under the ground so to speak. No amount of requirements gathering is going to tell you what you will find once you start digging down into the data.
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