Justification for Using This Project Lifecycle Guide

It has been said in the industry that "a paper airplane can be constructed with little forethought, but a jet airplane cannot." Similarly, a stand-alone system that has only a handful of business people using it can get by without a set of carefully planned and executed project activities, but a cross-organizational BI initiative certainly cannot.

As the BI decision-support environment evolves over time, it is imperative that a strong foundation exists to support such expansion. To build a strong foundation, many things have to be considered and many tasks have to be performed by many people. It is irresponsible to casually "make up" who does what and when along the way. That type of ad hoc development approach would put the organization's large investment at risk and would pose an even bigger risk for losing business opportunities. There are quite a few casualties in the trenches of lost opportunities!

The question is not whether or not a set of formalized guidelines must be used but what type of guidelines to use. A waterfall methodology is not suitable for the iterative releases of BI decision-support applications, but an agile and adaptive development guide specifically geared toward BI decision-support applications is. Business Intelligence Roadmap is such a guide.