Welcome back! In the last couple of weeks I’ve had a holiday and moved office and many of you have been to a spectacular AAIR data warehousing conference at Wollongong. By all accounts the conference was a real success with over 80 attendees representing 29 universities. Great work to Nikita and the team at Wollongong.
So what’s new? Well, remember that article on Scrum and Agile? We’re only days away from using this approach for real. I’m woefully unprepared and need to do more reading and self-training but everyone I talk to about this approach reckons it will work so well for BI and is ideal for the small teams that our respective institutions seem to have, so I’m quite excited at the prospect of all that. The office move is part of the approach - we need a bigger space within which to have our daily scrums and to accomodate all the people who will play a role in the process.
I mentioned the approach to our IT Applications manager who has been wrestling with PRINCE2, something wholly inappropriate for much of what we do on a daily basis in IT (hence the title of this post). Scrum seems to have real relevance there, particularly for areas such as web development where requirements also come thick and fast and vary depending on the weather. We’re working on getting someone to come and train a group of us before the end of the year. If you are interested in doing something similar, let me know and maybe we can get a discounted rate for everyone.
After the break I’m going to talk about data sharing, something that keeps being mentioned but is really hard to get off the ground. Please respond to the survey over there on the right just to give an idea of how we feel about this in very general terms.
