4e Salon Business Intelligence in Montreal
Yesterday, Dominic and I attended the 4th Business Intelligence Conference held in Montreal (4e Salon Business Intelligence in Montreal) and despite the situation with the economy we were pleased to see that the number of attendees was fairly similar to previous years. Talking with people who have been attending this yearly conference since the beginning, the organization of the conference was better this year and the quality of the speakers has apparently improved.
While visiting the various booths in the exhibit hall and talking to other attendees, we were very surprised to see how few people actually thought of using Agile principles in the Business Intelligence / Data Warehouse arena. Interestingly enough, those who knew a little about agility were convinced that Agile and Scrum could not be applied to BI, yet they couldn’t explain why.
As I was reconciling this perspective with an interesting statistic presented by Jean-François Ouellet from HEC Montreal (only 12% of the companies in Quebec are satisfied with their Business Intelligence application) I realized that an Agile Business Intelligence practice will be an uphill battle but I believe the industry needs a better approach in order to increase the success rate of BI projects. I am confident we have something good to offer.

