This coming weekend, 330 dogs will pack Pier 94 in New York City to compete in the Westminster Kennel Club’s Masters Agility Championship. The dogs will dive through rings, weave through poles like slalom skiers, navigate high walkways (please, don’t call them catwalks), slink through tunnels and leap over hurdles, racing against the clock. Dog agility competitions are great fun to watch – Fox Sports 1 will broadcast the finals on Sunday – in part because, with the right skills, even the puniest pooch might become top dog.
The race for agility isn’t confined to canines. Enterprises constantly strive to be agile, because agility helps organizations quickly and effectively respond to changing conditions. Business Intelligence (BI) should be agile, too; a recent report from Forrester Research, Drive Business Insight With Effective BI Strategy, proclaimed that “the future of BI is all about agility” and noted that Forrester “tracks more than 20 technologies that can make BI environments agile.” If there’s one thing you can take away from that statement, it’s this: Agile BI is important, but it’s not simple.
To help you make sense of this complicated topic, Actuate (now OpenText) has invited the author of that Forrester report, vice president and principal analyst Boris Evelson (@bevelson), to present a free webinar on February 24 at 11:00 a.m. PT. Titled “Leverage Agile BI to Deliver the Next Wave in Business Intelligence,” Evelson’s presentation will cover four critical steps that enterprises should follow when strategizing BI efforts to achieve business goals:
- Prepare for your BI program: In noting the importance of preparation, Evelson’s report urges companies to “Understand that BI is a journey toward a moving target – and not just another project.” In the webinar he will elaborate on the ways organizations can prepare themselves, both in processes and technology, to succeed with agile BI.
- Set the right strategy: Forrester has long advocated a “discover, plan, act, optimize” methodology – the basis of its Innovation Playbook – for enterprise IT projects. Evelson will explain how Forrester’s step-by-step methodology can streamline BI strategy.
- Build an open, agile, and scalable environment that enables OEMs and SaaS providers to embed BI insights into apps and devices: An agile BI environment requires more than technology; its success also hinges on staffing, organization and processes. In his presentation, Evelson will talk through some of these requirements and put them in context for Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) and Software as a Service (SaaS) providers who embed analytics and BI in other products.
- Continue to measure and optimize your BI environment: Evelson is an advocate for “applying BI to BI” – that is, using reporting and metrics rather than subjective, qualitative measures to gauge the efficiency and effectiveness of BI efforts. He’ll talk about some of the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that should be measured to help an agile BI program to continuously improve.
Evelson will wrap up his presentation with a question-and-answer session. Any queries that aren’t answered in the time allotted for the webinar will be addressed afterward via email.
Whether your company is the alpha dog in its sector or a scrappy mutt at the back of the pack, agile BI can help you improve your game. Companies that want to ensure a successful agile BI strategy should sign up for Everson’s webinar today. (If you can’t attend, sign up anyway to get a replay link after the webinar is completed.) Registration is free; we won’t make you jump through hoops.
Photo of a beautiful dog posing on an agility course by Bill Garrett. Boris Evelson portrait courtesy Forrester Research.