How to Be Agile With Business Analytics

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How to Be Agile With Business Analytics

27 March 2015 ID:G00270535
Analyst(s): Alan D. Duncan, Alexander Linden, Thomas W. Oestreich

VIEW SUMMARY
As the demands of IT service delivery shift toward bimodal capabilities, analytics and business
intelligence leaders must introduce increased agility into the business analytics delivery process, in
order to increase the agility of the business decision-making process and maximize business value.

STRATEGIC PLANNING ASSUMPTIONS

Through 2017, 90% of the information assets from big
data analytic efforts will be siloed and unleveragable
1

across multiple business processes.

By 2017, 75% of IT organizations will have a bimodal

capability. Half will make a mess.2

Overview
Key Challenges
While disruption within the business intelligence (BI) and analytics market makes this area ideal
for early adoption of bimodal IT practices, businesses are struggling to achieve the desired levels
of responsiveness and flexibility.

By 2017, most business users and analysts in

organizations will have access to self-service tools to
prepare data for analysis.3

ACRONYM KEY AND GLOSSARY TERMS

"Analytic agility" has three complementary facets, with each facet needing to be considered
differently; and to achieve true agility within business analytics, all facets need to be addressed.
The term "agile" is used within the IT domain to describe a specific category of software
development methodologies, whereas agility within analytics practice, refers to a general
capability to be responsive, flexible and deliver fast time to insight. This leads to confusion.

Recommendations

API

application programming interface

BI

business intelligence

CRAN

Comprehensive R Archive Network

KNIME

Konstanz Information Miner

KPI

key performance indicator

REST

representational state transfer

Analytics and BI leaders should:

Take steps to increase the agility of BI and analytics processes.
Build BI and analytics teams with the process, cultural and architectural capabilities for agility, and
embrace business participation in analytics processes.
Invest in BI and analytic environments for experimentation and evidence-based data discovery.
Then follow up with resilient operationalized analytics solutions where repeatable value is
identified.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

EVIDENCE
1

"Predicts 2014: Big Data."

"Predicts 2015: Bimodal IT Is a Critical Capability for

CIOs."

"Predicts 2015: Power Shift in Business Intelligence

and Analytics Will Fuel Disruption."

4
For further information visit the website, Manifesto
for Agile Software Development.
5

"Gartner Digital Business Baseline Survey 2014."

Based on analyst inquiry interactions with Gartner

clients.

CONTENTS
Introduction
Analysis
Improve Agility of Analytic Processes
Information Portal
Analytics Workbench
Data Science Laboratory
Build BI and Analytics Teams With a Culture of Analytic Agility
Analytic Team Configuration
Team Leadership
Team Makeup and Skills
Data Science Labs Empower Data Scientists
Invest in BI and Analytic Environments for Experimentation and Evidence-Based Discovery
Data Lakes Can Be Side-Line Barriers
Open-Source Tools
Smart Data Discovery Tools
Cloud-Based Analytics Services

TABLES
Table 1.

Agility for Business Analytics

FIGURES
Figure 1.

Analytic Process Agility

Figure 2.

Conceptual Approach for BI and Analytics Capability

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Introduction
The digitalization of 21st-century business and the combination of information, social, mobile and
cloud computing requires increased focus on responding and adapting to change. This requires the IT
function to be much quicker and more adaptive in supporting these changing business dynamics, with
business intelligence (BI) and analytics at the forefront of this shift. Business analytics is a stimulus for
innovation, with evidence-based decision-making paramount in both strategic and operational
business execution. Meanwhile, traditional BI and analytic models are being disrupted, as the balance of
power shifts from IT to the business.
Within this context, analytic agility is the ability for business intelligence and analytics to be fast,
responsive, flexible and adaptable. Time to value is paramount for fact-based evidence that supports
the business decision-making process. Improved analytic agility supports more nimble business models,
even in circumstances where the business decision-making process is not formally defined.
Analytic agility therefore means adopting a bimodal IT approach within the analytics team (see
"Predicts 2015: Bimodal IT Is a Critical Capability for CIOs"). As outlined in Table 1, the development of
analytic agility needs to be developed and embedded across three complementary analytics capabilities
the technology and architecture, the analytic process and the skills of the analytics team.

Table 1. Agility for Business Analytics

Analytic Agility Capabilities

Features Enabling Agility

Technology and Architecture

Features Inhibiting Agility

Reusable

Single Purpose

Adaptive

Specified in Detail

Repeatable

Proprietary

Scalable

Rigid

Iterative

Monolithic Data Warehouses

Open
Modular
Sandbox

Analytic Process

Flexible

Process-Bound

Bidirectional

Constrained

Continuous Learning

Controlled

Use Case Specific

Analytic Team

Responsive

Rigid

Adaptable

Inflexible

Courageous

Risk Averse

Democratized

Centralized

Source: Gartner (March 2015)

Note: In some cases, increased analytic agility may entail adopting agile principles (as defined by the
Agile Manifesto) and associated methodologies, for example, Scrum or Dynamic Systems Development
Method.4 See "Best Practices in Transitioning to Agile: Picking a Methodology" and "Best Practices for
Implementing Enterprise Agile Principles." For the purposes of this research, adoption of agile methods
is not considered a prerequisite for increased analytic agility more generally.

Analysis
Improve Agility of Analytic Processes
Agile analytic processes benefit from leveraging the key principles of agile software development,
adapted to transforming data into insight that supports and improves business decisions. The process
steps of analytic workflows are common across different use cases of analytics, although the way they
are applied can vary for different functions.
The key analytic process steps are:
Identify and understand the business objectives, issues and key questions.
Acquire data, including identifying and getting access to required data sources.
Store and transform the data into data models that can be analyzed.
Process the data and apply analytic methods, algorithms and rules.
Investigate the developed insight and present as data visualizations.
Review and interpret the insight gained.
Execute the required actions; align with the business objectives.

Figure 1. Analytic Process Agility

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Source: Gartner (March 2015)

(See also "Aspire: A Framework for Analytic Business Processes" and "How to Deliver Data Discovery
Projects.")
Gartner recommends setting up a three-tier approach for a BI and analytics capability in order to serve
the different analytic use cases:
1. Information portal
2. Analytics workbench
3. Data science laboratory

Figure 2. Conceptual Approach for BI and Analytics Capability

BI = business intelligence

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Source: Gartner (March 2015)

Analytic agility requires that the tiers do not operate in isolation. Interoperability and compatibility
between tiers is important. BI content and analytic artifacts should be promotable and easily
interchangeable between the tiers, making them reusable.
(See also "How to Architect the BI and Analytics Platform.")

Information Portal
This is usually built upon a central enterprise BI platform and data warehouse, managed by the IT
function. Business users have access to prebuilt reports and dashboards, based on key trusted metrics
and performance measures. Analytic output is the result of a formal development process, with delivery
times dependent on complexity and workload. The information can be trusted and is used across the
organization, but has less flexibility and reduced interactivity.
Within the information portal, increased agility requires an adaptive and responsive technology
infrastructure. Quickly responding to new requirements is based upon:
Master data management processes that ensure consistency of data.
Reusable key performance indicator (KPI) and metrics frameworks.
Disciplined information life cycle management, avoiding oversized and over-complex data
warehouses.
Constant review of existing analytic content and artifacts to avoid redundant reports and
dashboards.
Self-service BI components for business users to perform their own analysis.

Analytics Workbench
This is the workspace used to investigate trends and interactively visualize data. It is the tier where
data discovery and ad hoc query tools are used to explore information with access to a broad range of
data sources. These are typically deployed as decentralized solutions with limited involvement from IT.
The idea here is to give business analysts a high degree of freedom in working with data from various
sources to derive both descriptive and diagnostic analytics.
The analytics workbench largely supports ad hoc requirements. "Where is the problem?" and "Why did
this happen?" are typical questions addressed. Agility in the analytics workbench is based upon:
Business analysts performing all analytic process steps on their own.
Enabling business analysts to easily mashup the data sources and perform data preparation.
Supporting storytelling, sharing and collaborating on analytics with other users.
The capability to promote content developed by the business analyst to the information portal.

Data Science Laboratory

This is the workspace where advanced analytics takes place and is the ideal incubator for big data
initiatives. It is a flexible environment where experimentation, innovation, creativity, trial-and-error,
and "fail fast, fail often, learn fast" are all encouraged. A broad set of technical capabilities is provided
by specialized tools with minimal IT integration, delivering the ability to respond to unforeseen
questions. Users are skilled and experienced, often even more so than the technical resources in IT.
Agility in the data science lab should be achieved by:
Focusing on experimentation, based on hypothesis derived from ideas not following the formal
standard analytic processes.
Performing short analytics processes and multiple iterations.
Running experiments with a fail-fast attitude avoid binding resource too long on a specific
project.
Enabling data science teams to use the best-suited technologies, irrespective of corporate
standards.

Build BI and Analytics Teams With a Culture of Analytic Agility

Overall, success of evidence-based decision making is largely predicated upon the ability of the
analytics team to engage and deliver the analytics services as well as support an evidence-based
culture.

Analytic Team Configuration

Gartner research shows that the biggest challenges organizations face when implementing a digital
strategy are integrating adapting digital capabilities into business processes (58% of respondents) and
5

faster implementation (48%). While fixed, linear delivery and task-oriented planning are suitable
where robustness, operational repeatability and auditability are required, executives need evidence to
inform and guide their thinking and they need it quickly. Yet Gartner clients are still reporting lead
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times of six weeks or more to develop and deliver a new business report. This shows that traditional
"IT factory" models based on strict task-based assignment of jobs and tasks using hierarchical working
practices are not succeeding in achieving the levels of agility that digital business requires. Challenges
include:
Many analytical scenarios that are oriented toward specific one-off management decisions, often in
response to a change or market conditions, or as a new potential opportunity arises.
Timescales, since there may be little time to work out a detailed task-based plan, requiring an ad
hoc approach based on collaborative working, flexibility and problem solving.

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It being likely that the team will be working across multiple analytic models, with conflicting
priorities. It is challenging to evaluate the relative priorities of each of these initiatives; setting one
project against another can create organizational conflict and be counter-productive to the benefit
of the organization as a whole.
To overcome these challenges requires an analytics team structure that enables and encourages the
team to adopt different roles, dependent upon the nature of each specific project. Factors may include:
Depending on the organizational culture and dynamics, the analytic team may either be fully
centralized or else established in a more "virtual" manner with collaborative and cooperative
communities of practice. (See "Organizational Principles for Placing Advanced Analytics and Data
Science Teams.")
That once in place, the analytics team may move to become more self-organizing and make its
own decisions about who will fulfill which role in order to achieve the required project outcomes.
Resourcing levels that may need to be variable to flex with changing levels of demand a core
analytics team augmented by point resources from trusted third parties may be a suitable
approach to bringing skilled resources into the team quickly when required.
The analytics team that may also co-opt other internal resources when required, and work in
partnership with the business community, delivering on the basis of shared values and shared
outcomes.
This flexibility of approach that also enables the team to work on multiple projects in parallel,
shifting work assignment and priority as each item becomes less or more urgent, and less or more
important. (See "Maverick* Research: Fire Two-Thirds of Your IT Organization.")

Team Leadership
Self-organizing analytics teams are not totally autonomous. The analytics center of excellence manager
must create an environment where the team has the delegated authority and freedom to operate
effectively and deliver value.
The manager will set an overall scope and be responsible for any boundary conditions and constraints.
They are also accountable for the team's performance, so monitoring achievement of goals and
redirecting the team's efforts when required are also crucial.
Like other leaders of self-organizing teams, analytics team leaders will display characteristics including:
Relating: Being socially and politically aware; building team trust and caring about team
members.
Scouting: Seeking information from other stakeholders; understanding team behaviors and
systemic investigation of problems.
Persuading: Engaging and obtaining support; encouraging the team.
Empowering: Delegating and supporting the team; flexible decision making; coaching.
(See also V.U. Druskat and J.V. Wheeler, "How to Lead a Self-Managing Team," MIT Sloan Management
Review, Summer 2004.)

Team Makeup and Skills

Members of the analytics team need to have excellent technical skills and be proficient with multiple
tools, packages and algorithms. They will also have a strong affinity for data and quantitative analysis
methods.
However, the success of the team in achieving analytic agility is not solely vested in the team's
technical abilities. Human engagement and an ability to communicate with stakeholders is the factor
that will determine overall level of success. Characteristics of analytically agile team members will
therefore include:
Critical Thinking: The analytics team makeup should consist of staff who are problem solvers
and critical thinkers. They need to be flexible and adaptable, creative and innovative, and have a
capacity to embrace change, learn and adapt.
Communication: The ability to engage, communicate and tell data stories is paramount. As an
advocate for the exploitation of information assets for evidence-based decision making, an analyst
or data scientist will be able to relate the insight gained from data into a meaningful business
narrative, as well as convey the business impact in a way that is meaningful to the business
community whose role it is to then take the desired action.
Outcome Focus: A focus on delivery is also crucial a "can-do" attitude is vital. Behavior,
mindset and a culture of responsiveness mean that members of the team will be outcomeoriented and value-driven. This means real and thorough understanding of the business model
and key processes, paired with an ability to consult, curate, facilitate and coach.
Comfortable With Bimodal Work Practices: Analytic agility requires that team members be
collaborative and open-minded, responsive and adaptable. They will have the ability to work with
speed when needed, and with rigor when necessary. They will be comfortable with "good enough"
since perfectionism inhibits responsiveness and creativity. However, they will also be mindful of
the need for traceability and auditability when appropriate, coupled with the ability to deliver
robustly engineered analytics solutions when required to do so.
Rapid Prototyping: Rapid development of working analytics prototypes using real data enables
enhanced experimentation and "fail fast" approach to innovation insight. Data pipelining is a
primary way of accelerating construction of such prototypes. In this approach, building-block
components present predefined data sources, data preparation functions, data discovery tools,
visualization and even embeddable advanced analytics algorithms. These can be quickly arranged
to meet the functional requirements of the analytic objective. Applying data pipelining, agile teams

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will consciously trade overall precision and perfection against transparency, ability to communicate
to different stakeholders, as well as the reuse and significant acceleration to project delivery.
See also "Bimodal IT: How to Be Digitally Agile Without Making a Mess."

Data Science Labs Empower Data Scientists

In organizations where data scientists are employed, these roles are typically scattered throughout the
enterprise and operate in a localized and uncoordinated manner. In contrast, the notion of a data
science laboratory proposes to create better empowerment of data scientists by establishing a "critical
mass" of capability that can drive agility through:
Sharing of data engineers (for data sourcing, and data preparation).
Discussion of common goals (for example, data governance).
Acknowledgment of common principles and technologies.
Vetting new projects.
(See also "Extend Your Portfolio of Analytics Capabilities.")

Invest in BI and Analytic Environments for Experimentation and EvidenceBased Discovery

There are several choices with regards to analytics architectures, infrastructures and tools that will
further drive and support agility in the analytics center of excellence.

Data Lakes Can Be Side-Line Barriers

Data lakes are free-form, nonschematic data repositories, where the contextual definition of data is
inferred programmatically at the point of need from the content of the dataset. This is done using a
machine-executed solution a "schema on read" approach. (This is in contrast with scenarios where
data is already presented in a readily structured form by writing the data to predefined underlying
logical and physical data models or schemas. This "schema on write" approach has been a predicate
condition of traditional data warehousing and business intelligence architectures.)
This sort of late-binding gives tremendous flexibility and makes data lakes a must-have for any agile
analytics or data science team (see "Hype Cycle for Advanced Analytics and Data Science, 2014"). Data
lakes facilitate ad hoc and cross-functional inductive analytics on a level of detail that would be virtually
impossible via data warehouses. Especially, inductive analytics requires very granular, cross-functional
data and access to novel datasets, which data warehouses most often will not provide.
However, caution should still be applied, as such capabilities are still largely immature and only weakly
supported by vendors. In particular, the security concerns of largely ungoverned centralized data
repositories must be approached with caution. (See "The Data Lake Fallacy: All Water and Little
Substance.")

Open-Source Tools
Extremely agile teams currently have a strong emphasis on open-source tools such as Apache Hadoop,
Apache Spark, R, Python, KNIME, and RapidMiner. These can offer significantly lower cost outlays for
core software and also are at the forefront of new advances in techniques such as deep learning. New
open-source function libraries are made available much more quickly (for example, the Comprehensive
R Archive Network [CRAN], scikit-learn) than the well-policed corporate packaged applications.
The inquiry feedback Gartner receives from our advanced analytics clients is consistent:

"open-source R or Python allow me to do the same things or even more in a

much more flexible environment, while saving often millions of dollars in annual
software licenses, which I can spend on expanding my agile team"

Smart Data Discovery Tools

Smart data discovery tools facilitate the discovery of hidden patterns in large, complex datasets,
without building models or writing algorithms or queries (for example, Ayasdi, BeyondCore, Emcien,
IBM Watson Analytics, SAS Visual Analytics).
With smart data discovery, less experienced data scientists can still benefit from advanced analytics to
highlight and visualize important findings, correlations, clusters, links or trends in data that are relevant
to the user. User interaction and exploration is provided via interactive visualizations, search and
natural-language query technologies.
Analytic teams should give consideration to these tools because they can free up data scientists in two
specific ways:
1. Relief from tedious programming through advanced analytics platforms or using the open-source
stack.
2. Allowing other "citizen" data scientists to take on some of their work, for example, initial
exploration of data.
(See also "Predicts 2015: A Step Change in the Industrialization of Advanced Analytics.")

Cloud-Based Analytics Services

The cloud has much to offer in the area of analytics, especially advanced analytics. The evolving
orchestrated analytics ecosystems will provide significant opportunities for much greater agility (with,
for example, Microsoft Azure Machine Learning cloud at the forefront):
Seamless upscaling the required processing power.

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In-the-cloud provided with the ability to trigger/monitor/control time-consuming events overnight

and over the weekend and from wherever you are.
In-the-cloud provides scattered teams across the globe easy access to the same data science
experiments.
The deployment features of in-the-cloud only require the publishing of a representational state
transfer (REST) API, together with the consumption of the same REST API on the receiving side of
the analytics models.

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