Faster BI time-to-value in 2012

A few ideas for your 2012 project portfolio:

Sponsor an Analytics as a Service project

Find a project with rapid business value and a small number of end-users.  This might be a simple project to do internally.  Don’t.  Find an outside provider to supply the whole stack - analytics, implementation process, software stack, hosting - Merced in Incentive Comp or Call Center Performance, RetailDriver or AcceleratedAnalytics for POS, etc.  Being able to manage entitlements, data security, and integration while utilizing an outside analytics application provider is a key driver for increasing agility.

Use Hadoop and Python for an Extract/Load project

Yes, Hadoop can enable incredibly large scale big-data projects.  But new technology and new business solution at the same time is not a good equation.  Try piloting Hadoop on a plain vanilla (albeit maybe large) ETL project.  Not only are the tools free, but the utilize horizontal build-out infrastructure. Whether its done internally or using a cloud Infrastructure provider, take an Oracle PL/SQL or Informatica BRTE SQL team and cross-train them on the new stuff.

Conduct a storage Audit

Converged storage? Maybe not yet.  But portfolio management? Absolutely.  Every large organization has vertical build-out storage SANS that are running fine but could be replaced with low-cost horizontal-build out SANS for less CAPx than the electricity + maintenance costs.  If you can consolidate at the same time, all the better.  Look at cost/TB and cost/IOPS of existing SANS just based on maintenance + power.  You’ll find lots of low-lying fruit.  Look at EMC VNXe, CorAid,  HP for leadership.

Have some key technical leaders swap jobs - and form a cloud architecture council.

Have storage and analytics project managers swap jobs.  Maybe application deployment and QA also.  Look at the key aspects of your application life-cycle and find a group of technical leaders who can break down some institutional walls and identify commonality in your cloud architecture requirements.  Virtualizing slices up the work differently anyway - why wait for a re-org, cross train now.

Deploy an data discovery/visualization app entirely on tablet or smart-phone.

The users are there.  Think about sales productivity - people can often use a tablet or smartphone where they cannot use a laptop in the middle of a meeting.  Consider the incumbent BI provider first - primarily you are looking for feedback on presentation layer + portability, not necessarily building around a new OLAP tool. Microstrategy and Qlikview have leading iPad apps.

Try to minimize wheel spinning internally

Unless you work at it, this is going through your BI leaders heads:

Hadoop will change how we do ETL.  Do we choose a cloud stack provider first or do this stand-alone? What does Hadoop have to do with cloud anyway? If we choose Greenplum will they have a support issue on our NetApp clusters? Maybe we should do this as a cloud pilot at the same time?  Amazon has support for Cassandra...we should do a Eucaltyptus pilot!.....

Your leadership through MBO’s and other tools is needed to make the conversation be:

How can I get projects out the door more quickly? Which projects have been most successful? Where are my team's skills weak? Where can I retire some expensive legacy sw or hw and save maintenance costs? What is my road-map to achieving more rapid time-to-value for our users?