This article describes Barry Evelson as saying “agile software development methodology — which relies on prototyping rather than specifications…” If he really says this, then I take strong exception to his point of view. Agile development (including Agile BI) is NOT about prototyping. It is a focus on the early and continuous delivery of high-priority, production-quality, working features to business users – and adapting to their feedback in order to build the right thing. In other words, we work in short iterations (2-4 weeks), delivering small increments of business value, and evolve the solution in close collaboration with our business users.

The benefit of Agile BI for IT leaders is that they meet the actual needs of business users early in a project cycle rather than those long 12-36 month horizons that we’ve seen in the past.

One last thing. Agile DW and BI has been tried and proven to work well. We have to adopt some different approaches for handling large data volumes, dealing with legacy systems, and evolving systems that are in production. My book, [A href="http://www.amazon.com/Agile-Analytics-Value-Driven-Intelligence-Warehousing/dp/032150481X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1307722937&sr=8-1"]Agile Analytics: A Value-Driven Approach to Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing[/A], is now available on Safari (rough-cut) and will be on shelves in July.