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

TDWI Conference – Day 2 Highlights

Another great day at the TDWI BI Executive Summit, covered a lot more ground today.  Here is my list of highlights and “a ha” moments:

• Many Data Warehouses only get leveraged for standard reporting, it takes a leap to start leveraging this investment for true analytics.
• An assessment of who does reporting / BI and what systems they leverage is an essential step to understand the requirements for BI at your organization.
• Just having the latest tools doesn’t ensure success in your BI program, you need to engage your business closely to get true value.
• Think hard about what will amaze and delight your end users when it comes to the customer service you provide through your BI team.
• Text Analytics is critical to gaining insight from the vast amount of unstructured data your organization has.  Lots of great applications of how to understand and take action on the feedback from your customers.
• Idea of having people in your BI team be adept at all parts of the technology stack from Database, ETL, and BI reporting (and requirements).  This helps ensure that you implement business logic in the right part of the stack.  For example, a report developer will put the logic in the report, because that is what they know.
• Business Intelligence is a process of discovery, it is worthless to document requirements at the beginning of an iteration because these requirements will and should change.  Document what you have to once you have what the customer wants.
• User happiness is the key to success, the goal of meeting the requirements as documented at the beginning of the project is meaningless.
• Everyone on your BI team needs exposure to the end customer to truly understand their needs, including your ETL developers.  Strikes me that your ETL developers probably know your organization’s data the best, and can bring this knowledge to the conversation with your customer.
• Lots of discussion on data governance / MDM in the afternoon:
• Data quality needs to be part of everything you do, it is not just about a governance model
• Idea of putting the name of the business owner on the report, they should be the ones answering questions about data quality
• Pick your battles, only focus on data quality issues that have significant impact
• You need to link data quality / governance to business process management, they are very tightly linked
• It is not really about garbage data, it is about bringing together multiple, valid formats so they can be integrated and linked.

Tomorrow wraps up the BI Executive Summit with a half day of content focused on future trends in the BI space.  Should be interesting!  Stay tuned for tomorrow’s update.

Mark

TDWI Conference – Day 1 Highlights

It was a long day at the TDWI BI Executive Summit yesterday, my head was spinning with everything that I heard.  Here are the highlights or “a ha” moments that I captured:

• Lets change the term “data acquisition” to “data provisioning”.  I work for a Telecommunications company and a big part of our business is provisioning customer equipment to turn on their services.  Love the idea of us “turning on” our business partners ability to make good decisions by providing good quality data.
• We need a “BI Review Board” that includes the front lines of our organization from the business through to IT to be involved in approving new standard reports.  This way you ensure more areas of need are met through one standard report.
• Said it before, Agile BI requires a lot of discipline to maintain quality while delivering faster, better, cheaper.  Invest time in your enterprise data architecture as this is the baseline for everything.
• Opening up the development of BI reports to your business is like sending a child out into the world for the first time.  You have to rely on the effort you put into developing your child (i.e. standards, best practices) to help guide them on their way (taking on their own development)
• Avoid the HiPPO when making business decisions (Highly Paid People with Opinions).  In the absence of good data, the HiPPO rules.
• Put more effort into asking good Questions than providing good Answers.  We need to understand the business challenge to use our data knowledge to provide information, rather than simply responding to a question.
• How many of your BI reports are forward looking vs backward looking?  If you are reporting on what happened yesterday, your program is reactive; you need to look to the future.
• We need to do more “A/B Testing”!  Experiment with a new idea on a small piece of your business, then analyze the results before rolling it out across the board.
• Big theme of decentralizing your BI team to meet the needs of specific business units.  How do we do this and keep the standards and best practices that keep your Total Cost of Ownership low.
• Unstructured data is growing exponentially faster than structured data (think social media), your BI program must take this hidden gold mine of data into account.
• Statement: If you don’t have an analytic database capability, then your competitors do!
• Visualization techniques are vital to understand patterns and value in large data sets.  The only way you can get 10,000 data points on one page and have it still be effective.
• Visualization is still mostly a science, but you need that artistic ability to make it appealing and useful.  Struck me that a background in GIS will be very valuable in this space.

There of course is a lot more, but these are the ones that stuck out.  Definitely getting a ton of value out of this conference!  Highlights from Day 2 coming later this evening.  Any comments / questions, please let me know.

Arrived at the TDWI World Conference

Just arrived in San Diego at the August 2010 TDWI World Conference.  Really looking forward to a week spent opening my mind to what is going on in the industry.

The overall theme for the conference is “Agile BI”.  Pretty much every BI article I’ve seen over the past 6 months has something to do with Agile.  Somebody must have heard me complaining about how we haven’t embraced Agile in BI!

I will be attending the BI Executive Summit, so looking forward to the presentations and especially the panel discussions.  If you are interested here is the agenda:

http://events.tdwi.org/events/san-diego-bi-executive-summit-2010/home.aspx

My intended outcomes for this conference are:

• Learning about how other organizations are getting their BI programs more Agile
• Learning about BI Competency Centres and how other organizations structure their BI teams
• Making 10 new contacts to expand my network

I will be posting updates via this blog and real time from my twitter account (http://twitter.com/markcudmore).  Would love to hear your comments via twitter, comments to this blog or by email at mark.bibrain@blogspot.com (with that many choices you have no excuse).

Mark

For What It's Worth - My 2009 Predictions

I recognize that I am a little behind the ball on predictions for the BI space in 2009.  We are technically not a full month into the new year, so I'll sneak this in.  I have to admit that I have had the opportunity to read a number of other posts on this topic, so I have late bloomer advantage.  I'll focus on areas that I think will have a large impact on us all.

Drum roll...  2009 BI Predictions

• The Big 4 (SAP, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle) will continue to gain market share in the Business Intelligence and Performance Management spaces.  This will be driven by the ongoing consolidation and integration of the various home grown and acquired technologies to deliver a more cohesive user experience.  These platforms will be attractive to the IT organization due to the ability to consolidate licensing with one vendor and to have one set of management tools to support.
• Open Source BI platforms will spread BI below the $500M in revenue organization.  The cost of mainstream BI platforms can be prohibitive for small to medium size companies.  Open Source platforms will open up the power of BI to these organizations, allowing for zero cost proof of concepts and a lower TCO for a supported enterprise solution.  Expect these platforms to deliver 80% of the functionality at 20% of the cost.
• Business Intelligence becomes a core requirement.  Given the uncertainties in the market, we will see an increased awareness of the importance to have the information to make the right decision.  In a strong market where people are buying products and services, it is easy to roll with the times and accept positive results without really knowing why.  When times get tough, risk tolerance becomes much lower.  This risk is mitigated by having the best possible information to make the decision at hand.

No matter what, it should be an exciting year!

For an exhaustive list of BI predictions for this year, visit the BI Questions Blog for a consolidated list.

BI Questions Blog - The Complete List of 2009 BI Predictions?