BI Pathfinder Requirements Methodology
Exclusive to BIReady Australia
BIReady Australia
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West Pennant Hills NSW 2125
Australia
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BI Pathfinder and the Legacy of Dr. Cyril Brookes.
by Ian Nicholson, October 2014.
Dr. Cyril Brookes was a distinguished professor, engineer, businessman, student, and
author. A lover of travelling, fly-fishing, good wine and spicy laksa, he was the first CIO of
BHP and he made the Bulletin’s list of the 100 Smartest Australians.
Back in 2004, I had the honour and pleasure of working with Cyril, who had then just
founded his new company, EIS Pathfinder.
Cyril recognised the high failure rate among BI projects and discovered that poor
requirements gathering was a key problem. He devised a process he called Pathfinder, which
has been designed to ask the right questions during the requirements elicitation stage of the
project.
Unfortunately, Cyril is no longer with us, but his methodology lives on, and we are proud to
continue its use here at BIReady Australia.
The process is elegant in its simplicity, and the structure of the process is shown here.
Getting the right requirements from the outset is very important. Most Business Analysts ask
the question: “What do you want?” – and that’s the first step on the road to disaster.
The problem is quite simple:- Business users do not know what they do
not know.
Asking a business user what they want, writing some specifications for
them to sign and agree to can be a complete waste of time. Often, it is
only when the user sees the returned report that they begin to
understand their true requirements. By then, of course, it is too late and
the result is another iteration of expensive changes to the data
warehouse and the report.
So how can your business mitigate the risk of poor requirements
gathering?
At BIReady, we believe this problem can be resolved by using three tools
at our disposal:-
1)
Using the Pathfinder Requirements Gathering process
2)
Using an Agile Development methodology
3)
Using a Data Warehouse Automation tool for rapid prototyping and
eventual data warehouse delivery.
Pathfinder’s objectives are to:-
•
Highlight valuable information needs
•
Capture the IP related to BI reports
•
Guide BI designers through the steps of a project
•
Link meta-data of existing DWs to reporting needs
•
Find the missing gaps in existing data resources
Pathfinder isolates the high return information elements making for an effective systems specification. Pathfinder guides the analysts by telling them what to do next
and when to finish, so less experienced staff can review and specify reporting systems effectively.
To find our more about BI Pathfinder, read Cyril’s whitepaper, "A Structured Method for Specifying Business Intelligence Reporting Systems"
At BIReady Australia, we provide our customers with best-of-breed Information
Management solutions. As such, our solutions and services offer advanced expertise
in Data Warehouse Automation, Data Quality, Textual Analysis and Business
Intelligence. Our experience extends across Healthcare, Finance and Retail.
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