As you can read on the blog entitled Big Data in the Big Apple, we recently co-sponsored a very successful conference here in New York City. It was a great conference and all attendees reported very positively on the conference. We were very pleased to be a part of it.

At the conference I gave a one hour presentation about the emerging importance of the Power Data Analyst. You can read the presentation here on this link.

A key part of our message is how Meta5 is ideal for the “Agile Environment”. This blog entry will introduce this idea of Meta5 in an “Agile Environment”. If you would like to watch me give the full presentation again in our office environment then you are invited to watch the video on this link. (Link not yet provided).

Where are We Today?

IT has long used what is called the “waterfall methodology” for creating applications. This is also used for data warehousing projects in general. You can see why it is called a “waterfall methodology” because that is what it looks like.

This methodology can be summed up in the following diagram.

What is wrong with this picture?

It takes too long!! That is what is wrong with it. The time between “Project Planning” and “Installation and Turnover” is too long. Business people simply can not wait that long any more. The business world is changing too quickly.

In response to this IT has come up with another “spin” on application development that is known as “Agile”. If you would like to learn a little about “Agile” you can click on this link.

When your IT people talk about “Agile” that is what they are talking about, so you can learn a little about it to make sense of their new words like “scrum” and “scrum masters”. No, they are not talking about a form of football popular in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand!

Here is a similar diagram to the one above talking about “Agile”.

Here is another image of “Agile” development that your IT people might show you.

Notice that they are circular rather than the linear representation of the waterfall methodology in the first diagram. The idea of “Agile” is to be fast, iterative, and to learn from experience as you go along. The idea is that by making the cycles much shorter and faster and learning from the experience that the product that is available is better than the “monolithic” waterfall method over time.

Today, IT people are often presenting “Agile” as “new” and “innovative” and “different”. And to many of them it is! Many IT people were trained in the SDLC and trained in the Waterfall Methodology. Even though people have tried to create more iterative development methodologies for Business Intelligence the tools employed have often forced them to continue to use a more waterfall approach even if the length of the project was able to be reduced to some extent.

However, when users of Meta5 listen to an IT presentation on “Agile” they realise they have been doing “Agile” all this time only no one had a name for it!

“Agile” is about developing applications on short iteration cycles and feeding the results of previous efforts in to the subsequent iterations. The desired outcome is that the amount of time between “Project Planning” and “Installation and Turnover” is reduced as much as is possible with a reasonable level of risk. Of course, over compressing the elapsed time can increase the level of risk past what is acceptable. There is a balance to be struck. The tools and methodology affect the balance, they do not remove the need for balance.

Meta5 allows you, the Power Data Analyst, to build your own applications without the need to externalise what it is you want to someone else to do who does not have the same level of knowledge about your business.

The ability of Meta5 to enable and empower Power Data Analysts to develop complex and sophisticated applications without writing code, without the need for written “Requirements Definitions”, without the need to communicate what is needed to anyone else, is one of the major differentiators of our product. It is what makes Meta5 “Agile”. It is what makes Meta5 perfect for IT organisations who are adopting “Agile” as their preferred development methodology for Business Intelligence Systems.

You can build your application piece by piece depending on the results you gain from prior efforts. You can involve a small team of your colleagues to help you build the applications. You can run the cycles of development.

You can do all this, determine the value of the application, and put it in to production without the need to go to IT and invoke the standard System Development Life Cycle process depicted in the first diagram above. Meta5 users have been doing this for 30 years! No wonder “Agile” is not “news” to Meta5 users!

Now that IT has recognised the weaknesses of the waterfall methodology depicted in the first picture above and are promoting highly iterative cycles of development? IT is finally beginning to realise the value that Meta5 has brought to business users all along.

Fast, iterative, feedback based application development projects have always out performed large, rigid, monolithic projects over time. This has been well known for more than 40 years now.

In the area of Business Intelligence the question was how to do this. Most IT people do not know about Meta5 so they were not aware that there was a perfect tool available to perform “Agile” development all along.

Indeed, because IT was so committed to monolithic development methodologies for so long, a tool like Meta5 that enabled “Agile” and placed control of development in to the hands of business users was seen as “negative”. This is because it did not meet the “standards” of the monolithic development projects. How times have changed!

Meta5 was developed with this sort of fast, iterative, feedback based application development in mind. Indeed, this was such a basic idea to our methodology that we had to invent the “capsule” to be able to do it! The fact we have been doing this sort of “Agile” development for 30 years makes Meta5 the ideal product for your company if your IT people are now promoting “Agile” as “new” and “innovative”.

So when you hear your IT people talk about how they are adopting a new development methodology for your data warehouse and Business Intelligence solutions called “Agile”? Please let them know about Meta5 and suggest to them that this sort of “Agile” development is an extremely good match for Meta5s unique capabilities.

Perhaps you might even suggest to IT that it is time for them to take a serious look at Meta5 now they are moving to “Agile”?

It is no exaggeration to say:

Meta5: More Agile than “Agile”!

Thank you for your time and attention.