Just putting the luggage away from TDWI's World Conference in Orlando. This was a surprisingly successful conference. I say "surprisingly" because across its repertory of quarterly conferences, TDWI's Orlando event isn't as "hot" as Vegas or San Diego. But this week's conference was better-attended than San Diego in August. What gives?

The general theory is that people are spending their leftover budgets before 2009 slips away. Makes sense. But my observation from talking to attendees is that as they budget for the next fiscal year, they're anticipating some important technology investments and doing their due diligence now. This certainly showed in the questions attendees asked during the week's workshops.

In my BI from Both Sides: Aligning Business and IT workshop on Sunday, there were more questions than usual about a best-of-breed approach to BI tools. It seems that CIOs are driving standardization--often, if you ask me, without considering business requirements.  If you're in IT, fight the blind urge to standardize on a single BI tool vendor. Instead, regularly present new technology solutions to business users who might be ready to evolve their information usage. This gives you the opportunity to transcend the "IT as cost center" mentality and serve as Trusted Advisor to the business.

In our Data Governance for BI Professionals class on Tuesday, my co-instructor Kimberly Nevala and I got lots of after-session questions on data stewardship dashboards and workflow automation tools. It seems that as companies mature their decision rights, they want data anomalies and other discrepancies "pushed" to the desktops of appropriate decision owners, be they data stewards, subject matter experts on the business side, or the data governance council.  MDM vendors are leading the charge with such capabilities, and Kalido, Initiate Systems, Siperian, and DataFlux all offer  workflow functionality.

I sat in on Evan Levy's Introduction to MDM for BI Professionals course on Wednesday morning just as someone was asking about hierarchy management. Seems his company, a name-brand electronics firm, had been writing code to manage the B2B hierarchies on the data warehouse, but realized that multiple hierarchies were exponentially more difficult to manage. Evan explained how MDM tools managed multiple hierarchies and groupings, often leveraging external data providers to not only help resolve relationships but enrich the data in the process.

Evan also did a good job fielding questions from an engaged group in his workshop, Gathering MDM Requirements: A Different Formula. Just when you thought it was safe to engage business users with a structured requirements gathering process, MDM invites a different set of requirements steps, focused again on OLTP-type processing. It was Evan's birthday and the audience of engaged attendees was a nice gift.

I caught snippets of talks by Cindi Howson and John O'Brien--shout-out to Cindi, too, for an inspirational Monday keynote--and got updates from vendors like Sybase, Talend and Paraccel. Some fresh "wins" were evident on the vendor side of things, confirming my theory that 2010 is going to be a Big Year. Hey, 2010, hurry up already!

Technorati Tags: TDWI, business intelligence, business IT alignment, data governance, MDM, master data management, Sybase, Paraccel, Talend, Initiate Systems, Kalido, Siperian, DataFlux