Blog: Jill Dyche

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Highlights from TDWI Orlando

In which Jill gives long-tailed cats a bad name--and in the meantime manages to have some fun!

Usually I make some time for recreation (read, beer) at TDWI events, but at last week’s TDWI conference in Orlando, I was as busy as a long-tailed cat in a rocking chair factory. How busy is that?

On Monday I taught my anchor class, BI from Both Sides. Attendance hovered around eighty for most of the day and the vast majority of participants had done just enough BI work to grab people’s attention. My students (really, my collaborators since we all learn from one another) understood that BI is often only as successful as the last project delivered and were curious about how to sustain BI as a bona-fide business program. I hope they came away with some tactical next steps.

On Tuesday Evan and I co-taught our new class: CDI and MDM in Practice. This is a heavy-duty, daylong look at how MDM works. The requisite consultants and vendors were there, but so too were some notable firms from financial services—including four different brokerage firms, what’s up with that??—a handful of health care providers; three BIG companies from “entertainment and media;” and a trucking company and airline thrown in just to keep things interesting. The common denominator was the need to operationally reconcile master data.

I broke away from the CDI and MDM class in the afternoon to speak at the Data Governance Executive Summit. Once again an interesting and eclectic crowd, and the proportion of business executives in the room was a pleasant surprise. (Who says TDWI is a victim of its brand? This company draws some heavy-hitter executives!) Kudos to Phil Russom for an awesome speaker roster.

I also got a chance to sit in on James Masuoka’s class, MDM Architecture and the Vendor Landscape. James works for Baseline now but used to work for META Group, which means he’s unbiased and ultra-savvy when it comes to the MDM vendor compare-and-contrast.

Some other fun stuff from last week:

 ParAccel launched. I’ve mentioned ParAccel before in the context of a data warehouse appliance vendor, but the company seems to be biting off a bigger chunk of the data warehousing pie since it the product can be leveraged as either a standalone solution or as an “accelerator” to provide an existing DBMS environment with more horsepower. The company also announced an alliance with Sun, giving rival Greenplum a run for its money. Congratulations to Marketing V.P. Kim Stanick and her crew for a high-octane debut!
 Informatica unveiled release 8.5 at the conference to great fanfare. With 8.5 Informatica is walking the data integration walk, and features like real-time changed data capture and data quality at the point-of-entry mean that Informatica’s customers can cover diverse fronts in the data integration battle.
 Our friends at Zoomix were troopers, despite the fact that their booth arrived late. The bare-bones display didn’t deter interested attendees from inquiring about the company’s self-learning technology--Zoomix introduced its Accelerator at the conference--that includes a knock-em-dead data steward user interface.
 Evan and I signed copies of our CDI book, courtesy of DataFlux. We meant for the first of the two signing events to be exclusive for the participants in our workshops but someone spilled the beans and the line for complimentary copies buzzed and swirled across the exhibit hall like an electrical cord. As people waited in line, they got a chance to see the Version 8 family of data quality and data integration solutions in action via some live demos. Atta-boys all ‘round to James Goodfellow, Barb Carmellini, and Brett Dorr for handling the crowd—and us.
 TDWI Orlando was Dave Wells’ swan song conference. Dave has been TDWI’s Director of Education for the past five years. Time flies when you’re having fun, Dave, as the poster photo of you in the kayak floating down the river makes abundantly clear. I know we’ll be seeing you soon in other capacities, and we’re looking forward to continuing the conversations.

I’m presenting at TDWI in Las Vegas next February, and this time they’ve given me a Wednesday slot in an obvious attempt to keep me from the blackjack tables on Tuesday night. Nice try, TDWI, and congratulations on another full house in Orlando!

Technorati Tags: BI From Both Sides, ParAccel, Informatica, DataFlux, CDI, MDM, Master Data Management, Data Governance

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