The purpose of this paper is to describe how Agile methodologies can be deployed to conduct a business intelligence/business analytics project that provides Navy leadership with improved decision making capabilities. Day in the Life scenarios are then used to help qualify and quantify the positive impacts this transformation will bring. Leading organizations are proving that the ability to run Advanced Analytics on their vast amounts of data delivers significant value across the enterprise. The Economist found that three-quarters of top performing executives attribute their success in part to data-based decision-making. Navy leadership has likewise issued a call to shift from managing data to using it for decision-making. A key reason that data analytics initiatives are quickly maturing across many verticals, including financial services, manufacturing, and government, is the adoption of Agile methodologies as distinct from traditional "waterfall" development methodology. Agile methodologies, commonly used in software and system engineering to decrease time-to-value, enable organizations to rapidly build a scalable platform, produce a proof of concept, and then convert it into production-quality data products. They also reduce the burden of data transformation through automation, provide a future-proof channel for data integration and persistence, and enable the continuous evolution of data retrieval and analytics use cases. Applied to Navy maintenance, for example, Agile methodologies could be leveraged to utilize real-time and time-now information and produce analyses of ship maintenance. This paper describes a data-fueled approach that relies on frequent communication between the implementation team and the mission users while leveraging a proven data management architecture. This would allow the Navy to correlate relevant data pertinent to a business problem from the array of data sets within the organization, apply algorithms to logically connect the data, and build an organizational culture that values data-driven decisions. This approach rapidly puts a powerful capability into warfighters' hands and promotes organizational agility to meet anticipated demands and changing mission requirements as events dictate.
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