In January 2013, David Stodder from TDWI Research issued the report Achieving Greater Agility with Business Intelligence. The report was based upon the results from 408 survey respondents, interviews, vendor briefings, and other TDWI research reports.TDWI provides education and research in the business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing (DW) industry. The following are some data from the report.

• The top three business factors driving the need for increased agility: Increased competition, economic/global instability, and shorter decision cycles.
• Reporting requirement change at least monthly for a large percentage of respondents while the DW does not contain the data needed for those reports for nearly a third of the respondents.
• The top three most difficult components to change in the BI, analytic, and DW environment: adding/integrating unstructured data or content, new, or updated operational systems, and level of data quality.
• The top three user and project changes that make it difficult to adjust the BI/analytic/DW environment: project goals or missions, structural or operational changes, or business rules and/or processes.
• The top three technologies that are already implemented for BI/Analytic/DW agility: Data quality and cleansing, data modeling, and ETL processes/data integration.
• The top three technologies that respondents plan to implement for BI/Analytic/DW agility: agile data warehousing methods/tools, data quality and cleansing, and master data management.
• Scrum (with or without XP [Extreme Programming] elements) followed by a custom method with too many influences to name one are the top agile methodologies implemented for BI/Analytic/DW projects.
• A team size of 6-10 people was most frequently reported as optimal for an agile BI/Analytic/DW project.
• More than half the respondents reported improvements in productivity and stakeholder satisfaction from implementing agile methods.

The full report contains additional survey facts and recommendations for making BI/Analytic/DW projects agile.

Reference

Stoddler, David. Achieving Greater Agility with Business Intelligence. TDWI bet practices Report, TDWI Research, First Quarter 2013.