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The Traditional Development Approach

Since BI is an enterprise-wide evolving environment that is continually improved and enhanced based on feedback from the business community, the system development practices of the past are inadequate and inappropriate.

In the past, systems were never designed or built with integration in mind. Every system had a beginning and an end, and every system was designed to solve only one isolated problem for one set of business people from one line of business. The old “single-swim-lane” development practices were suitable for such static stand-alone systems. However, they are not well suited for integrated BI initiatives because the old practices do not include any cross-organizational activities necessary to sustain an enterprise-wide decision-support environment. In the past, cross-organizational activities were not only deemed unnecessary but were also perceived to stand in the way of progress because they slowed down the projects.

For nonintegrated system development, conventional waterfall methodologies are sufficient. They provide enough guidance for planning, building, and implementing stand-alone systems. However, these traditional methodologies do not cover strategic planning, cross-organizational business analysis, or evaluation of new technologies with every project; nor do they embrace the concept of application releases. Traditional methodologies typically start with a functional business need, then concentrate on design and development, and finally end in maintenance, as illustrated in Figure 0.2.

Taken from : Business Intelligence Roadmap- By Larissa T. Moss, Shaku Atre