Building upon his earlier book that detailed agile data warehousing programming techniques for the Scrum master, Ralph's latest work illustrates the agile interpretations of the remaining software engineering disciplines: - Requirements management benefits from streamlined templates that not only define projects quickly, but ensure nothing essential is overlooked. - Data engineering receives two new "hyper modeling" techniques, yielding data warehouses that can be easily adapted when requirements change without having to invest in ruinously expensive data-conversion programs. - Quality assurance advances with not only a stereoscopic top-down and bottom-up planning method, but also the incorporation of the latest in automated test engines. Use this step-by-step guide to deepen your own application development skills through self-study, show your teammates the world's fastest and most reliable techniques for creating business intelligence systems, or ensure that the IT department working for you is building your next decision support system the right way. - Learn how to quickly define scope and architecture before programming starts - Includes techniques of process and data engineering that enable iterative and incremental delivery - Demonstrates how to plan and execute quality assurance plans and includes a guide to continuous integration and automated regression testing - Presents program management strategies for coordinating multiple agile data mart projects so that over time an enterprise data warehouse emerges - Use the provided 120-day road map to establish a robust, agile data warehousing program

You have to make sense of enormous amounts of data, and while the notion of "agile data warehousing might sound tricky, it can yield as much as a 3-to-1 speed advantage while cutting project costs in half. Bring this highly effective technique to your organization with the wisdom of agile data warehousing expert Ralph Hughes. Agile Data Warehousing Project Management will give you a thorough introduction to the method as you would practice it in the project room to build a serious "data mart. Regardless of where you are today, this step-by-step implementation guide will prepare you to join or even lead a team in visualizing, building, and validating a single component to an enterprise data warehouse. - Provides a thorough grounding on the mechanics of Scrum as well as practical advice on keeping your team on track - Includes strategies for getting accurate and actionable requirements from a team's business partner - Revolutionary estimating techniques that make forecasting labor far more understandable and accurate - Demonstrates a blends of Agile methods to simplify team management and synchronize inputs across IT specialties - Enables you and your teams to start simple and progress steadily to world-class performance levels

Using Agile methods, you can bring far greater innovation, value, and quality to any data warehousing (DW), business intelligence (BI), or analytics project. However, conventional Agile methods must be carefully adapted to address the unique characteristics of DW/BI projects. In Agile Analytics, Agile pioneer Ken Collier shows how to do just that. Collier introduces platform-agnostic Agile solutions for integrating infrastructures consisting of diverse operational, legacy, and specialty systems that mix commercial and custom code. Using working examples, he shows how to manage analytics development teams with widely diverse skill sets and how to support enormous and fast-growing data volumes. Collier's techniques offer optimal value whether your projects involve "back-end" data management, "front-end" business analysis, or both. Part I focuses on Agile project management techniques and delivery team coordination, introducing core practices that shape the way your Agile DW/BI project community can collaborate toward success Part II presents technical methods for enabling continuous delivery of business value at production-quality levels, including evolving superior designs; test-driven DW development; version control; and project automation Collier brings together proven solutions you can apply right now--whether you're an IT decision-maker, data warehouse professional, database administrator, business intelligence specialist, or database developer. With his help, you can mitigate project risk, improve business alignment, achieve better results--and have fun along the way.

Agile Data Warehouse Design is a step-by-step guide for capturing data warehousing/business intelligence (DW/BI) requirements and turning them into high performance dimensional models in the most direct way: by modelstorming (data modeling + brainstorming) with BI stakeholders. This book describes BEAM✲, an agile approach to dimensional modeling, for improving communication between data warehouse designers, BI stakeholders and the whole DW/BI development team. BEAM✲ provides tools and techniques that will encourage DW/BI designers and developers to move away from their keyboards and entity relationship based tools and model interactively with their colleagues. The result is everyone thinks dimensionally from the outset! Developers understand how to efficiently implement dimensional modeling solutions. Business stakeholders feel ownership of the data warehouse they have created, and can already imagine how they will use it to answer their business questions. Within this book, you will learn: ✲ Agile dimensional modeling using Business Event Analysis & Modeling (BEAM✲) ✲ Modelstorming: data modeling that is quicker, more inclusive, more productive, and frankly more fun! ✲ Telling dimensional data stories using the 7Ws (who, what, when, where, how many, why and how) ✲ Modeling by example not abstraction; using data story themes, not crow's feet, to describe detail ✲ Storyboarding the data warehouse to discover conformed dimensions and plan iterative development ✲ Visual modeling: sketching timelines, charts and grids to model complex process measurement - simply ✲ Agile design documentation: enhancing star schemas with BEAM✲ dimensional shorthand notation ✲ Solving difficult DW/BI performance and usability problems with proven dimensional design patterns Lawrence Corr is a data warehouse designer and educator. As Principal of DecisionOne Consulting, he helps clients to review and simplify their data warehouse designs, and advises vendors on visual data modeling techniques. He regularly teaches agile dimensional modeling courses worldwide and has taught dimensional DW/BI skills to thousands of students. Jim Stagnitto is a data warehouse and master data management architect specializing in the healthcare, financial services, and information service industries. He is the founder of the data warehousing and data mining consulting firm Llumino.

Contains a six-stage plan for starting new warehouse projects and guiding programmers step-by-step until they become a world-class, Agile development team. It describes also how to avoid or contain the fierce opposition that radically new methods can encounter from the traditionally-minded IS departments found in many large companies.

Strategies for leveraging information technologies to improve customer relationships With E-business comes the opportunity for companies to really get to know their customers--who they are and their buying patterns. Business managers need an integrated strategy that supports customers from the moment they enter the front door--or Web site--right through to fulfillment, support, and promotion of new products and services. Along the way, IT managers need an integrated set of technologies--from Web sites to databases and data mining tools--to make all of this work. This book shows both IT and business managers how to match business strategies to the technologies needed to make them work. Claudia Imhoff helped pioneer this set of technologies, called the Corporate Information Factory (CIF). She and her coauthors take readers step-by-step through the process of using the CIF for creating a customer-focused enterprise in which the end results are increased market share and improved customer satisfaction and retention. They show how the CIF can be used to ensure accuracy, identify customer needs, tailor promotions, and more.

The Data Vault was invented by Dan Linstedt at the U.S. Department of Defense, and the standard has been successfully applied to data warehousing projects at organizations of different sizes, from small to large-size corporations. Due to its simplified design, which is adapted from nature, the Data Vault 2.0 standard helps prevent typical data warehousing failures. "Building a Scalable Data Warehouse" covers everything one needs to know to create a scalable data warehouse end to end, including a presentation of the Data Vault modeling technique, which provides the foundations to create a technical data warehouse layer. The book discusses how to build the data warehouse incrementally using the agile Data Vault 2.0 methodology. In addition, readers will learn how to create the input layer (the stage layer) and the presentation layer (data mart) of the Data Vault 2.0 architecture including implementation best practices. Drawing upon years of practical experience and using numerous examples and an easy to understand framework, Dan Linstedt and Michael Olschimke discuss: - How to load each layer using SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), including automation of the Data Vault loading processes. - Important data warehouse technologies and practices. - Data Quality Services (DQS) and Master Data Services (MDS) in the context of the Data Vault architecture. - Provides a complete introduction to data warehousing, applications, and the business context so readers can get-up and running fast - Explains theoretical concepts and provides hands-on instruction on how to build and implement a data warehouse - Demystifies data vault modeling with beginning, intermediate, and advanced techniques - Discusses the advantages of the data vault approach over other techniques, also including the latest updates to Data Vault 2.0 and multiple improvements to Data Vault 1.0