Blog: Claudia Imhoff: And a Good Time Was Had by All at TDWI...

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And a Good Time Was Had by All at TDWI...

This week the Data Warehousing Institute held their Summer conference in lovely San Diego, CA. The theme this time around was bringing the business and IT organizations together. The attendees, vendors and presenters alike learned a great deal about how to do this. In addition, I tried my hand at pod casting... Read on to find out more.

TDWI's education director, Dave Wells, started the show off Monday morning with a keynote address concerning building the critical business and IT relationships so necessary for a successful BI environment. This was followed by an entire track dealing with forming and maintaining the business-IT relationships in support of BI initiatives.

In my own track -- Six Steps to Building a Successful Corporate Information Factory -- we discussed the need to recognize that a BI environment must be governed as a program not as a series of loosely related projects. We discussed the need for business sponsors, a steering committee (or as one of my attendees put it - a "Clarity Counsel"), and business involvement in the design and ultimate rollout of the final deliverable. This was in addition to the normal project management activities used to construct the CIF.

Then I got to do a really fun thing -- I interviewed a whole slew of vendors attending the conference for around ten minutes each. These mini-interviews were then made available as pod casts by the wizardry of Shawn Rogers. Not sure what a pod cast is? Think it has something to do with aliens invading human bodies? Well, so did I until this week. Now I am - like - so savvy, dude.

Pod casts are audio vignettes that you can download to your iPod or other MP3 player and listen to at your leisure. Just click here to see the list of available pod casts done live from TDWI! You will learn as I did all about what TDWI is up to from Wayne Eckerson, the real story to Microsoft's SQL Server launch, and what's new at FirstLogic, IBM, Cognos, Teradata, ProClarity, SAP, Trillium, QlikTech, CSI, and RightOrder. I hope you find these interesting and entertaining! I sure had fun doing them. Look for more at the next TDWI conference in November.

Until then --

Yours in BI success,

Claudia

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