Blog: Claudia Imhoff

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A Different Kind of Conference

For the past five years, I have been privileged to participate in Scott Humphrey's highly anticipated Pacific Northwest BI Summit. Without a doubt, this is the highlight of my year. Read on to find out why and what we discussed at the comfortable and charming Weasku Inn (pronounced We Ask You Inn... Cute huh?).

First the players. The pacific Northwest BI Summit is made up of:

1. Four industry leaders -- myself, Colin White, president of BI Research, William McKnight, Senior Vice President of Data Warehousing, and Jill Dyche, partner with Baseline Consulting.

2. A group of outstanding vender representatives -- Frank Dravis from Business Objects (formerly FirstLogic), Brian Staff from StrataVia, Steve Smythe from Celequest, Donald Farmer from Microsoft, Val Rayzman from Informatica, Kim Dossey from Teradata, Jeff Dandridge from InfoCentricity, and Kim Stanick from Baseline.

3. Media representatives-- Dave Stodder, Editor of Intelligent Enterprise, Ron Powell, publisher of the B-EYE-Network (and my blog!), and Shawn Rogers, Executive Editor from the B-EYE-Network.

4. And our terrific host -- Scott Humphrey. For those of you perhaps not familiar with Scott, he is one of the best in BI Public Relations.

The Summit is two days over a weekend -- yes, weekend -- in which we have frank, informal, and informative discussions about the state of BI -- its current and future state, emerging trends, new problem areas, complications, successes, and even failures. This year, we focused on 3 main areas. You can listen to podcasts of our opening statements introducing the topics by clicking here.

1. Master Data Management (MDM) and its sub-application, Customer Data Integration (CDI). Colin White and Jill Dyche started the discussion for these topics. The discussion demonstrated rather clearly that there is still a good deal of confusion about what MDM and CDI really are. Applications? Software? Hardware? Fully managed environments? Just a storage hub for cleaned up and integrated data?

My own thoughts track along with Colin White's in his recent blog in which he states that "master data integration doesn't always equate to master data management. There are many good CDI solutions out there, but many of them don't have sound management capabilities for supporting master data hierarchies, master data versioning, historical master data, master metadata, data lineage reporting, and so on. Many CDI deployments have evolved from customer ODS and/or customer analytics projects. My concern here is that CRM and data warehousing designers and experts are frequently driving these projects in isolation. They often don't have the required knowledge, business transaction expertise, and enterprise perspective to move the CDI project toward true enterprise MDM, and the result will be therefore be a CDI silo." I think as the MDM projects begin to unfold, we will see the need to elevate MDM from just an integration project to a fully managed data integration environment.

2. The second topic was presented by William McKnight -- a most interesting and, at times frightening, overview of RFID and its usages. He pointed out that RFID technology will have a profound impact on most data warehouses due to the immense increase in volumes of data. Think of all the ways that RFIDs can impact your life, your kids' lives, the lives of terrorists and citizens alike. It makes for thought provoking discussions on security, privacy, and other such hot topics. We will have to wait for a while to see what futuristic applications will come from these tiny transmitters because they are still too expensive for most applications -- but it won't be long before "Big Brother" can truly peer into your life...

3. The last discussion was mine and was a good follow-on to William's talk. I discussed Operational BI or the push today to speed up BI analytics and to integrate them into the operational processes. I brought up three areas where I see potential and real problems with implementing operational BI. First, BI implementers must understand the operational processes, something that we have not studied much before. If operational BI is to be useful, it must be integrated at the appropriate points in our operational processes. Second, we must understand the impact of integrating operational BI into the operational systems. Some of these systems are fragile, possibly inflexible, and mucking around with them trying to interface our BI analytics with them could cause real damage to their performance and functionality. Tread lightly until you understand the landscape. And finally, for operational BI to be completely immersed in operations, the operational personnel may need retraining or retooling so that they understand when, how and where to bring these new services into play.

The weighty topics were then followed by an afternoon of sheer entertainment. Saturday, we took a fast boat ride down to the impressive Hellgate Canyon on the Rogue River (see Shawn's blog --- complete with video!). What a spectacular sight to behold. Then we were treated to a wonderful cookout on the porch of the Weasku. Sunday afternoon, Scott really put us to the test by having all of us paddle down the river in kyacks. My arms will never be the same! Gotta get to the gym more often...

The conference ended Sunday night with another wonderful meal at the Weasku and a lot of late night discussions on the health and well-being of BI, MDM, technologies, and what we want to do at next year's conference. A hearty thank you, Scott, for delivering yet another fantastic and enjoyable Summit. I can't wait for next July's event!

Yours in BI Success.

Claudia

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