This year's BI Leadership Summit, hosted by TechTarget at the New York Hilton, was an event not to miss. As fate would have it, New York City was in the midst of its first Nor'Easter, and I was among hundreds who trudged on through the raw cold and rain to attend the summit. I am glad I did as it was certainly worth it.
I arrived to hear Wayne Eckerson, the keynote speaker, delivering a thorough explanation of the components comprising business intelligence (BI) and the often opposing stakeholders involved in BI's development/delivery and use. Mr. Eckerson's address included a discussion of the organizational architecture surrounding BI from a historical perspective. The BI organizational architecture sub-topic lead into the notion of a "BI Center for Excellence" which includes a BI Framework. (See Oracle's whitepaper on BI Competency). With regards to BI architecture, both the conceptional and logical components were illuminated where, consistent with the tenets of Hardoop, the conceptual architecture maintains data coupled with business intelligence in a staging area from which data can be extracted to meet the requirements of various BI tools and provide maximum flexibility.
Following the keynote address, various vendors presented some of the tools currently available for use in harnessing the power of Big Data and delivering BI. Vendors present at the Summit included MicroStrategy, Sisense and Actian.
Overall, the theme resonant with each of these three vendors was the software's ability to integrate with multiple data platforms from MS Excel to MS Access to DB2 and Oracle. This is a great selling point as currently data can reside in many different forms on many different platforms. The challenge then becomes how to consolidate all this data in order to funnel it into one place from which BI techniques can be applied in order to see the 'Big Picture' and meaningful trends.
Another excellent selling point made by these vendors is the reality that business has largely adopted a self-service nature wherein business users do it themselves, i.e., casual, non-technical business users are inclined to not wait for report analysts, but prefer instead to create their own reports. Driving this self-service trend as well is continued effort at cost reduction where, in this case, if the business user is able to produce reports independently, the overhead of having a report writer can be eliminated.
Each of these vendors, MicroStrategy, Sisense and Actian, has a trial version which I will shortly be putting through the paces and report back here. While Gartner, in its February 2014 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Report measures 17 categories of expertise, the initial goals of my trial will be:
| Can non-technical users create reports without knowledge of database structures such as SQL, joins, primary and foreign keys? |
| What kinds of dashboards does each software produce and how easy is it to refresh that data? |
| If dashboard functionality exists within each software, does it only take the form of canned, out-of-the-box or is customization possible, and if so, at what cost? |
With regards to dashboards, I had the opportunity to speak with MicroStrategy's Shyam D. Chaware who mentioned that MicroStrategy's dashboards are somewhat portable i.e., can reside on the web, can be emailed and open onto the web, can exist in the mobile world. My trial of MicroStrategy will look to confirm this. I will also look to confirm Sisense's contention that the average, non-technical user can create their own reports using Sisense's drop and drag feature. While I am far from a casual non-technical user, I will enlist the help of non-technical volunteers during the Sisense trial for the purpose of verifying this contention. Actian's latest version seeks to enrich customer data by surrounding the Hadoop lake with tools. I am curious to see how this translates.
Apart from the vendor demonstrations, the summit also included talks from industry experts such as Lee Feinberg who spoke on Effective Visualizations. Mr. Feinberg's particular discussion focused on practical, but often overlooked considerations with regards to media used to communicate results of business intelligence. The discussion included tips on the choice of colors and charts as well as the need to understand what the user really wants, and using "W" words (why, were, when, how) to engage the user to get a clearer idea of the problem the user seeks to resolve and any constraints driving delivery time.
Other topics presented during the Summit included Forrester's Boris Evelson, who spoke on 'Creating an Agile Analytical Architecture in the Age of Big Data,' 'BI Adoption,' presented by Dow Chemical's Mike Masciandaro and Tony Baer who spoke on 'Why SQL, NoSQL and Hardoop are No Longer Either-Or Choices.
Overall, it was time well spent and I am glad I had the opportunity to attend. TechTarget did a fantastic job of cohesively pulling together related presenters albeit from different sub-fields. If their goal was to energize attendees I, for one, am hooked and I look forward to discussing the subject of Business Intelligence and Big Data in subsequent posts with a special, more in-depth discussion of how each interacts with and is enhanced by the mainframe.
Bye for now,
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