BI Goes Mainstream at info360 Conference

This week I presented at the new BI track as part of info360 conference in Washington, DC.  It’s an interesting addition to this long established conference and further evidence of BI going mainstream.

Info360 draws ten thousand information management professionals and has historically focused on content, knowledge, and records management. There are, for example, specific SharePoint and Oracle Enterprise Content Management tracks. Social media was also a hot topic.

The new BI track had a host of expert speakers including Boris Evelson from Forrester on pervasive BI, Colin White on mobile, Mike Ferguson on cloud, Mark Madsen on social media and some from industry including the Office of Financial Stability (OFS). OFS formed to manage TARP following the financial meltdown. When one thinks of government, I don’t think of agile or responsive (sorry, slow and bureaucratic comes to mind), and yet, those were the biggest themes in the OFS presentation.  As I’ve written in my book Successful Business Intelligence, the idea of IT partnering with the business is a critical success factor, and OFS demonstrated that well.

The exhibit hall was revealing in terms of who (from a BI perspective) was there and who was not. Microsoft had a huge presence with SharePoint. However, their booth once again reflected this vendor’s disjointed BI story. In addition to SharePoint being a content management solution, it is positioned as the starting point for BI consumers to share reports, dashboards, and PowerPivot spreadsheets. PowerPivot, however, was not installed on the demo machines. Reporting Services did not work. (Maybe someone didn’t tell Microsoft there was a BI theme to this conference?). The FAST search and navigation looked pretty nice, though.

The BI Pavilion had a number of smaller vendor’s exhibiting; traditional BI heavy weights were absent, which is not too surprising for a new venue. QlikTech was there, and LogiXML. I only occasionally come across LogiXML and was impressed by their dashboards and interactive reports. They say one of their differentiators is their straight-forward server-based license, ideal when reports are deployed to thousands of users. Kudos to them for simple pricing and packaging, in contrast to most other BI vendors complex packaging (as I wrote in this blog).

I’ll end this blog on a note about Washington, DC. It could have-been, should-have been a great venue, with the cherry blossoms blooming and the view of the Capital building inspiring. It’s a city I love and an area that was my home in high school and college. Yet from the get-go, it reflected a brokenness. Homeless people abound and begged for money while I waited for a taxi (yes, I gave, but wondered why this doesn’t happen in New York). I then got kicked out of the taxi at 11:30 at night when I politely asked the driver not to talk on his cell phone while driving (I normally ignore that but had one too many bad highway experiences in the last year to take for granted).  And then there was the alarming, megaphone at 7 am, “Wake up, get out of the hotel now!” Normally I’m up by then, but it was a long day and late night. There was no fire, no emergency, but rather, hotel workers protesting at the hotel next door, all morning and all day.  They had been protesting for months, apparently. Protests have their place, but when they disturb the tourists on which the workers’ livelihood depends, it seemed rude and unproductive. The final frustrating impression was the DC Convention Center that lacked wireless in almost the entire center. Archaic isn’t it?

I’m back in Washington, DC in a few weeks for TDWI’s spring conference. Perhaps the above are all the reasons TDWI picked Arlington, VA, as the actual venue, just across the river from downtown DC. Unfortunately, Washington DC seems better when viewed from a distance.

Sincerely,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

 

Comments

[Colin White]

Hi Cindi,
Good summary of the event. It is interesting to see BI converging with other technologies. There was also a lot of interest at the event in the underlying data management aspects of BI and in analytics on data with ill-formed or unknown schemas (i.e., unstructured data). Content folks now need to become familiar with BI and the new BI track at Info360 is a great way to get that knowledge.