Introducing the Information Factory
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Information Factory offers substantial advantages for companies looking for rapid, cost efficient, high quality business intelligence solutions:
- Modeling a solution in business terms and prototyping the solution provides certainty in requirements, standardization in architecture and removes re-work from development cycles.
- Assembling standard BI components is a superior way to build business analytic solutions at an accelerated pace (2 to 3 times faster) and for 50% less expense.
- Internal IT resources are free to provide superior analysis of business trends by rightsourcing the routine tasks involved in developing ETL workflows, datamarts, and report analytics.
- Information Factory provides jobs and career paths for recent U.S. college graduates.
Agile/Scrum Methodology
We have adopted Lean principles to engineer our Agile BI methods. Information Factory is comprised of four key operational stages:
- Business Modeling & Prototyping
- Architecture and Component Deconstruction
- Component Assembly and Testing
- Fulfillment
The scope and complexity of creating business analytics that can drive revenue, reduce costs, improve customer service, and maintain financial controls requires a flexible, efficient development methodology. Information Factory (IF) incorporates Agile principles and Scrum project management to maximize the work effort of the team. These principles include:
Co-operative Development/Testing
Our teams are organized using Agile/Scrum principles to build high-performance development groups. One or more teams of certified BI/DW professionals are formed based on the volume of work. Each team consists of five members:
- Sr. Data Architect,
- Jr. Developers (3), and a
- Sr. Quality Analyst
Central Point of Communication
The scrum team reviews progress daily and addresses any blocking issues that prevent the high-performance teams from completing their work assignments. The scrum master addresses any blocking issues immediately. If the blocking issue cannot be resolved within 24 hours, the issue is escalated to the executive sponsor.
Open, Collaborative Workspace
The scrum team is located in an open, workspace to encourage quick efficient communications and to share information that will lead to quicker process improvements. The team can work either on-site or rightshore at our headquarters located in Columbus, Ohio.
Story Card Work Assignments
Business requirements are gathered and deconstructed into two “Value Chains”; Business value chain (BVC) and Technical value chain (TVC).
The Business value chain contains the requirements for building the presentation, reporting and visualization components. The Technical value chain contains the requirements for building the data architecture and data integration components.
Each value chain is further deconstructed into story cards. The scrum team uses story cards (work packages) that clearly describe the; business metrics, report layouts, source data mappings, the transformation design, the enterprise model and work effort estimate.
Continuous Process Improvement
The scrum team meets each Wednesday to discuss techniques and process improvements that can be implemented immediately to improve the quality/velocity of work. The result of this immediate feedback loop into the design/build process is higher velocity and significantly lower defects and errors.
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