Forrester’s recent research report on BI governance, Divide (BI Governance From Data Governance) and Conquer, highlights a dilemma faced by BI organizations:

Agile BI applications and shadow IT environments are multiplying like rabbits.  While they are flexible and responsive, they are hard to govern.   Is it possible for organizations to have both agile BI and BI governance?  

The report mentions that properly executed BI governance is a key success factor for agile BI.  When done right, the Forrester report highlights the following benefits with client examples:

• Better alignment between business and IT
• Fewer BI silos
• More efficient and effective BI environments

So, how do you create an agile BI environment with BI governance?

The analyst team led by Boris Evelson recommends a five-step approach consisting of Monitor, Inform, Enhance, Harden, and Re-Architect.  An important step is hardening business users’ self-service BI applications without disruptively taking over or locking it down.  The report mentions BI connector as a data virtualization tool to harden Tableau and Microsoft Power BI based agile BI applications by providing governed connectivity to Oracle BI (OBIEE) and MicroStrategy data sources.  Hardening of agile BI applications also enables you to re-architect apps that do not scale into scalable enterprise BI apps.

If you are a Forrester client, you can access the report here.  You can also read Boris’ blog on this topic here.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts on agile BI and BI governance.

— Shankar Radhakrishnan