Open Source Solutions

Mary Grush has invited Clarise and I me to speak at the Campus Technology 2007 conference to be held in Washington, D.C., USA. We'll be speaking on Wednesday, 2007 August 1 at 11:15am-12:15pm. In general, institutes of higher learning are only beginning to explore data warehousing and business intelligence technologies, and, in general, they don't like what they're seeing from traditional, proprietary vendors. From our initial conversations with Mary, here's our direction. We'll develop this here in the OSS Blog as much as we can. We would really appreciate any comments to help us refine our talk.

Cost Effective BI/DW Strategy

Abstract

Our strategy for reporting, data management and analysis programs and projects responds to user needs quickly without blowing the budget. Using open source software, project management, and user involvement, this strategy economically and efficiently meets campus-wide and departmental data warehouse, data mart, and business intelligence needs through dashboards, reporting, OLAP, and data mining tools. Cost effective results can be in user's hands in as little as one week.

Points to be covered

1. A framework leading to an economical strategy/BI-roadmap for data warehousing, data management or data analytics programs
2. Program, Project & Risk Management methods
3. Risk and advantages of using open Source Solutions for BI suites or DW/data mining components such as ETL/EAI/ESB, RDBMS & MDDB, meta data management, reporting, OLAP engines, multi-variate analysis (a.k.a. "slice & dice"), machine learning, portals, and dashboards
4. User involvement for determining specifications and implementing quality control
5. Costing, value and return

Take-away Points

1. Strategy and tactics should be separated with a clear iteration plan for quick, economical response to user & organizational needs
2. Agile development doesn't mean a lack of project management nor should it allow scope creep
3. Open source software has matured to the point where it can certainly be used for prototyping and even production