Agile by Design

Introduction

We live in a data-driven world. The analysis and business use of information is no longer a nice-to-have, but has increasingly become integral to our customer-critical business processes. Not only has data become a differentiator among businesses in terms of profitability but also in viability and longevity. While many organizations have relied on analysis and analytics for years, if not decades, the integration of insight into operational environments has not kept pace.

For some time, we've seen analytics move out of the basement and into the boardroom, as executives increasingly understand and embrace the role that information plays in their business. However, the execution (or operationalization) of that insight has not fully taken hold in the domain of IT. Part of the problem is that analytics groups have largely operated under the radar—their need for business agility and flexibility results in shadow IT organizations. Many analytic teams create and manage their own infrastructure. While this approach may offer some level of agility and flexibility, it doesn't create a sustainable path for growth or scale. In fact, many analytics groups become the victim of their own successes—creating mission critical predictive models or insight that cannot be easily ingested by the organization. Since they've been left out of the process for so long, IT teams tasked with supporting these new analytic projects struggle to keep up with what's needed for the projects; how to ...