Agile BI Out Of The Box

Complexity represents one of the toughest challenges facing traditional business intelligence (BI) applications. Multiple components must be considered including data integration, cleansing, modeling, warehousing, metrics creation and management, reports, dashboards, queries, alerts, and many more, with infinite approaches to cobble them together into a useful and meaningful BI application. This multitude of components and complexities makes rapid prototyping challenging at best, impossible at worst. Furthermore, there typically isn't such an option as a "quick change" for a BI application, since so many tightly coupled components are usually affected. To address this challenge, Forrester sees an emergence of a new generation of metadata-generated BI applications that BI professionals should consider — not as a replacement for traditional BI, not yet — but for specific use cases such as complementing traditional BI, generating data marts from the enterprise data warehouse (EDW), and delivering rapid BI application prototypes.