A follow up to Delivering Data Warehousing and BI Projects using Agile:

Working as a data architect on an Agile data warehouse project for a financial services client, I had the opportunity to support multiple warehouse delivery “bays”.  Of all the lessons learned, one thing that I would highly suggest to any organization looking to embark on an Agile data warehouse delivery project, would be a solution architected to leverage a tiered data architecture that clearly separates a persistent staging environment from the integrated subject areas of an analytical data warehouse. Decoupling the “base layer” from the integrated subject areas can provide significant advantages to project teams supporting the warehouse build.

Let’s play a word association game. When I say “Architect” you say, what? “Buildings… Cities… Sky scrapers…?” How about “Data”?

More and more professionals who work with data are starting to see themselves as architects.  A quick look in the dictionary shows that the title ‘architect’ is aligned with the design of physical structures. However, a closer look into what it takes to ‘design’ highlights the similar processes involved whether the medium is bricks and mortar or data.