Sunday, April 10, 2011

Agile Architectures: Creating and Evolving Data Architectures that Adopt to changing Business


April 5, 2011
Data Architecture - Why don't we go Agile?

            John O'Brien is with BI Data warehousing who has a lot of experience with data architecture and its evolution for the better business practices. His presentation at the "TDWI BI Executive Summit" is mind blowing in a way that it helped me to open my eyes, making me think about data warehouse and the importance of data architecture not only from the technical perspective but also from the organization view - profit making, decision making etc.
            We can use traditional data architecture for our business but with the faster-than-ever changing business environment more business are going agile (Powell, James E). Why do we want our data architecture to be agile?
            Business process is changing everyday and, more and more technology is evolving. By going agile, we can set small targets, making the balance between business needs and the future of the architecture. We can communicate with the business people to know more about the business needs and come up with the solution that is not final; yet, fulfills the basic requirements for the business to run (O'Brien, John).
            It is an iterative process where we constantly perform development of the reusable architecture that we developed to come up with better architecture that would serve our business more efficiently with the change in business needs or the process itself (O'Brien, John). If we didn't go agile and tried to build an architecture that would be solid but would take many years (time) and more money (investment); this may be not suitable to the business because it may not serve the business when it needed the most (return on investment) and may also get outdated with the business process changing (O'Brien, John).
            So, what is the use of such perfect system that the business may not be able to use? Therefore, we need to make a balance between the quick delivery as well as think about the consistency and efficiency of the architecture we are building with the agile method (O'Brien, John).
             Thin slicing by layers is very important when we go agile. First, we need to connect to the sources and then deliver data marts. If we are comfortable, we can directly go to staging. After it gets more complex, we can go to EDL (Enterprise Dimensional Layer). When the requirement gets even more demanding  for changing business needs, we can put data warehouse on the layer (O'Brien, John). Evolution is always on going and we don't go to the advanced layers unless the business really needs it. This is the advantages of going agile.
            Going agile, sandboxing may actually help us create the architecture efficiently. By creating the  sandbox, we would be able to actually play with the actual data by creating a medium sized database server (Singh, Amit). This would help us to explore the requirements for the process of building data architecture by agile methodology (O'Brien, John).
            Other important step going agile is to modularize - being able to create and write codes that can be reusable (O'Brien, John). Communication is very important between the team as well as with the management. As a team, working to create the architecture, we need to set the standards in our coding or applications we write, so that, others would have a value to follow our standards (O'Brien, John.). Over the time, we need someone to play the role of governance because the scope of the project gets huge and there must be someone who helps the team to leverage more of what the team has already delivered (Powell, James E).
            Basically, just like RAD (Rapid Application Development), building architecture for our data, going agile proves to be more practical and efficient in today's world which has so many positives to offer to our business and our changing business requirements.    


Works Cited:
O'Brien, John. "Agile Architectures: Creating and Evolving Data Architectures That Adopt to Changing             Business." TDWI - The Data Warehousing Institute. TDWI, 15 Feb. 2011. Web. 09 Apr. 2011.             <http://tdwi.org/pages/video/lv-wc-ss-videos/video-assets/agile-architectures-creating-and-    evolving-data-architectures-that-adapt.aspx>.
Powell, James E. "Q and A: Agile BI Architectures." TDWI - The Data Warehousing Institute.      21 July 2010. Web. 10 Apr. 2011. <http://tdwi.org/articles/2010/07/21/agile-bi-  architectures.aspx>.
Singh, Amit. "Sandboxing." A Taste of Computer Security. June 2004. Web. 10 Apr. 2011.             <http://www.kernelthread.com/publications/security/sandboxing.html>.

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