Blog: Jill Dyche

« Personal Details About Jill, Part Deux | Main | CDI and MDM Hit the Road »

Highlights from Microsoft BI 2007

In which Jill honors Microsoft’s first ever BI event—and delivers a hearty shout out to her peeps.

Well I was wrong. I mean, I knew the Microsoft BI conference would be a first-rate affaire. In fact, I wanted to go. But I hadn’t considered being a speaker. I imagined the Seattle Convention Center teeming with Access programmers and Sharepoint specialists. Maybe a couple project managers involved in DTS-to-SSIS conversions and a data miner or two. When we received the call for papers, Baseline offered up one of our IT specialists.

But Microsoft assured me that there would be a business audience. In fact, there would be an entire track dedicated to the business value of BI, which is sort of my specialty. So there I was on Tuesday afternoon presenting to crowd of 300+ Microsoft customers who were interested in Master Data Management. Microsoft and MDM. Who knew? After my talk a variety of project managers, knowledge workers, business analysts and even a few executive sponsors came up to chat. This was only one of many pleasant surprises during the 3-day conference:

• I’ve heard Michael Treacy, author of The Discipline of Market Leaders, talk before. But his keynote admonishments to use BI to change the status quo seemed particularly apt.

• Microsoft’s Bill Baker, General Manager of BI and Microsoft Distinguished Engineer, moderated a lively panel of two CIOs and one CTO who were refreshingly honest about BI’s place in their IT food chains. “Our biggest challenge with BI is getting around the people who control the flow of information,” said a panelist as heads in the audience nodded in unison.

• Microsoft engineer Donald Farmer introduced SQL Server data mining add-ins. Donald had an auditorium-sized space but he was the only one surprised at the standing room-only turnout of both business users and technologists eagerly anticipating predictive analytics embedded right into Excel.

• Our friend Jim Walch provided a clear lens into Microsoft’s BI Competency Center. Jim painted the picture of the organization’s mission and even had a custom Sharepoint demo at the ready. But it was particularly intriguing to hear how Microsoft’s BI Competency Center plans on leveraging MDM. “This is non-trival work,” Walch said of Microsoft’s MDM architecture, “and it is core to our BI strategy.”

• The surprise wasn't that the vendor exhibits were plentiful (echoing the conference's"ubiquitous BI" idiom) but that there were lots of vendors I didn't know. This proves not only that BI is hot but the market is being represented across the spectrum of infrastructure and tools, large companies and small and, yes, business people and practitioners.

Microsoft refuses to underestimate its customers, and we were all the better for it last week in Seattle. The company is clearly positioned for enterprise and non-enterprise class BI. I’d like to thank Alex Payne, Angie O’Hara, and Kirk Haselden for their support, and congratulate them on the first of many stellar BI conferences!

Technorati Tags: Microsoft BI, ubiquitous BI, Microsoft MDM

Share: