Rick van der Lans’ Take on BI Agility
March 19, 2012 3 Comments
Is BI too slow? Rick van der Lans thinks so. Author of the upcoming book “Data Virtualization in Business Intelligence Architectures: Revolutionizing Data Integration for Data Warehouses,” believes “The biggest challenge facing the industry today is how to develop systems that have an agility level that matches the speed with which the business evolves.
How Slow Is BI Today?
According to the TDWI Benchmark Report: Organizational and Performance Metrics for Business Intelligence Teams, on average it takes eight weeks to add a new data source and another seven to develop a new complex report.
- How can BI become more agile?
- Will agility come from new BI tools?
- Or will the answer come for the new approaches to data integration such as data virtualization?
Look to the Data, not to the BI Tools
In a recent white paper, “Data Virtualization for Business Intelligence Agility”, Rick advises IT organizations to think broadly about their BI agility challenge. “It’s not simple to pinpoint why most of the current business intelligence systems are not that agile. It’s not one aspect that makes them static. But undoubtedly one of the dominant reasons is the database-centric solution that forms the heart of so many business intelligence systems.”
Long Chain of Data Stores Reduces Agility
The architectures of most business intelligence systems are based on a complex chain of data stores starting with production databases, data staging areas, a data warehouse, dependent data marts, and personal data stores. Simply maintaining this complexity is overwhelming IT today. In addition to Rick’s description of this chain in the white paper, he also addresses the same subject in a video chalk talk.
According to van der Lans, “While these classic systems have served business well for the last twenty years. However, considering the need for more agility, they have some disadvantages:
- Duplication of data
- Non-shared meta data specifications
- Limited flexibility
- Decrease of data quality
- Limited support for operational reporting:
- Limited support for reporting on unstructured and external data”
Data Virtualization Delivers BI Agility
Rick van der Lans’ white paper discusses how data virtualization products can help to make business intelligence (BI) systems more agile. According to Rick, data virtualization simplifies and thus improves BI time-to-solution in through aspects such as:
- Unified data access
- Data store independence
- Centralized data integration
- Transformation and cleansing
- Consistent reporting results
- Data language translation
- Minimal data store interference
- Simplified data structures
- Efficient distributed data access
The financial benefits of these data virtualization capabilities are significant. And they can be applied flexibly to fund additional data integration activities and/or other business and IT projects.
Learn More from Rick
Rick will headline the March 20 broadcast of The Briefing Room discussing “Stay Flexible: Five Ways to Harness Information Assets” at 4pm ET. Go here to register for the March 20 Briefing Room broadcast.
You can also watch Rick’s three data virtualization videos at http://www.compositesw.com/resources/videos/.
I was at Rick’s seminar in London a couple of weeks ago on new technology and architecture for DW/BI. It was a fantastic seminar, and Rick is a great presenter. At Compassion, we have been using Composite’s DV tool for about three years, although only seriously for half of that time. I recently saw a statement that development with a DV tool is five times faster than with an ETL tool. I would say we have seen at least that magnitude of improvement in our time-to-market plus we are seeing more reliable data than ever before. Of course, there are downsides to this. First of all, success has led to a flood of customer requests, so we’re STILL having a hard time keeping up with demand. Secondly, where I used to look at anything I had developed more than six months ago and grimaced, wishing I had known then what I knew now, today that cycle is even shorter. We iterate and develop at such a velocity that our learning curve has vastly accelerated, and now I find myself shaking my head at work I did a mere six weeks ago.
Rick is doing a seminar on Data Virtualization a couple of times later this year with IRM in the UK (http://www.irmuk.co.uk/events/105.cfm). He also has a book on data virtualization coming out in July. Discussions my coworkers and I have had with Rick over the last couple of years have been invaluable to the development of our DV architecture. I would heartily recommend either of these resources to anyone interested in really getting the most out of data virtualization.
Andy – I think you and your colleagues at Compassion International (CI) have found the unique combination of a great advisor in Rick van der Lans, a great data virtualization product in Composite, a great willingness try new things in pursuit of your mission, and a great mission overall. Your business customers and the million plus children CI supports are blessed to have the CI IT team behind them.
Yes, God has really blessed us by bringing the right tool and the right technical mentors. It has been quite amazing for us to see what God has done.