Wednesday, August 18, 2010

TDWI Conference – Day 3 Highlights

Well, today marked the end of the BI Executive Summit at TDWI in San Diego.  It was a jam packed 2 and 1/2 days, and I got a lot of value out of the sessions.  As with any conference, not every session was outstanding, but by and large the majority of the sessions were very informative.  Here are the final highlights from the summit:

  • Semantic Intelligence is very important to understand the context of the data you have in your organization.  This is still an immature technology, but front runners will have an edge in finding hidden value in their data.
  • Look at the current tools and technologies you already have, and see how you can leverage it more.  For example, you don’t need to go out and buy predictive analytics technology out of the gate, but you can do a lot of “predictive” functionality using straight database technology.
  • Big theme of leveraging your current BI assets to provide more operational intelligence to your front lines through embedding BI information in operational systems including mobile devices.
  • The rate of change in organizations is increasing exponentially, agile approaches to deliver quicker are very critical.  Favourite quote: “You can’t predict what questions you will get tomorrow”
  • There is a lot of value in using BI to rank peers against each other to foster an environment of friendly competition.  If the sales manager in the region next to you is doing better, then there is a great opportunity to learn from them to improve your results.
  • Operational BI in action: The Virginia Police Department has decreased violent crime by 40% since they exposed operational intelligence directly to officers in their squad cars.
  • Some discussion on solid state storage to delivery blistering fast performance.  Teradata has an appliance that uses only solid state storage.  It is fast but EXPENSIVE.
  • Visualizations are very key, with increasingly large data sets and more complex business environments, only advanced visualizations can handle 1,000’s of points of data and dozens of dimensions.

Attending two sessions on predictive analytics tomorrow as I have had no exposure to this technology.  Should be interesting!

Mark

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