Supporting Agile Data Integration

Those closest to me know that I’m passionate about doing the right thing. Sometimes that means making hard, pragmatic decisions. The right thing is not necessarily the best possible thing – it means the right decision for right now – making a tactical decision in pursuit of a bigger strategic direction.

That’s why the whole ‘Lean/Agile’ software development process resonates so closely with me. I learned a great deal from Nancy Van Schooenderwoert of Lean Agile Partners while working on a large scale data warehouse re-architecting programme, and the lessons have stayed with me ever since. I now find myself looking for ways to eliminate waste wherever I look. This includes deploying, as far as possible, techniques including automated test harnesses (a big and long time theme within Emunio), inspect and adapt philosophies, close customer involvement with the development, multi-disciplined teams, necessary and sufficient documentation, etc.

You’ll understand my excitement about joining Emunio because of the breadth and depth in the quality of the solutions that Emunio offers – especially when using technologies that support the above techniques. Of course it’s easy to get nerdy and geeky about cool tech, but that must offer pragmatic, real, hard value to the business. Technology like Kalido’s Dynamic Information Warehouse (DIW) manages to be really cool from a techy point of view, but also offers massive, demonstrable and credible business value. Using Kalido, Enterprise Data Warehouses can be built from scratch in as little as 8 weeks. Yes, that’s right – 8 Weeks.

How?

Kalido has a semantic technology at it’s core, so the data warehouse build is largely automated based upon a business model. This business model is abstracted from the way the data is stored under the covers so, as the business evolves along with the business model, the semantic abstraction means that changes can be applied much more rapidly than with conventional technologies. Fundamentally, this lends itself very much to an agile delivery method: quickly make changes and get timely feedback from the business (inspect and adapt) = rapid high quality delivery. Kalido allows your data warehouse to change along with your business.

But to get the best out of this great technology you still need to apply it with a mix of great processes and great people. Kalido stand behind over 250 implementations of their software and supply a wealth of best practice processes to complement their best of breed technology. But any data warehouse project inevitably demands a rich mix of data integration skills alongside the agile themes above (automated test harnesses, multi-disciplined teams, inspect and adapt philosophies, etc.). That’s where a data integration partner like Emunio comes in. I’m not afraid to boast about it – we are the data integration experts.

So when your business has to make some hard, pragmatic decisions about building a data warehouse, it’s worth seriously considering Kalido. That way you can do tactical (build quickly and iteratively) and strategic (responsively change the your business model) by making one choice.