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July 23, 2007

Catching up with alpacas and yoga

I've been busy, even to the point of looking at www.ilovealpacas.com once or twice.

I have a speaking enagement with SetFocus in Parsippany, NJ and available via a live stream on Friday, August 10. The title is "Modernizing and Advancing Information Management across the Enterprise" and the abstract is below.

Next week, I'll be at the "Bilderberg of business intelligence" - the Pacific Northwest BI Summit. Link to last year's event. It's hosted by Scott Humphrey, who I strongly recommend for any vendor in this space seeking the highest quality public relations. I will speak on RFID business intelligence and also take the opportunity to torture some members of the BI community. I know - I already do that frequently with my blog postings. However, this torture will come in the form of leading yoga sessions.

Continue reading "Catching up with alpacas and yoga" »

Posted by William McKnight at 8:06 AM | | Comments (0)

March 1, 2007

Pacific Northwest Business Intelligence Summit is coming

It's time for information executives and vendors interested in staying current and gaining insights in the field of information management to consider the Pacific Northwest Business Intelligence Summit, coming again to the Rogue River in Oregon in July. Scott Humphrey is crafting the limited attendee list for this so to see if it's right for you, contact Scott.

You can read about it here. As it says there, this is an annual weekend retreat which assembles the top industry thought leaders in the data warehousing, business intelligence, data integration and CRM industries in an informal setting to discuss the latest trends in BI.

The BI Summit is headlined by four of the world’s leading experts — Dr. Claudia Imhoff, president of Intelligent Solutions, Colin White, president of BI Research, William McKnight, senior vice president, data warehousing, Conversion Services International, and Jill Dyche, partner with Baseline Consulting.

A small, diverse group of vendors fill out the attendee list, taking taking advantage of the rare opportunity to mingle with these true industry experts in an intimate, relaxed setting. Hosting the event is Scott Humphrey, president of Humphrey Strategic Communications.

Here is my blog entry from last year's event.

Posted by William McKnight at 9:01 AM | | Comments (0)

August 28, 2006

Scott Humphrey Pacific Northwest BI Summit

A few weekends ago, I had the privilege of taking part in the annual Scott Humphrey Pacific Northwest BI Summit. This event boasts the highest repeat attendance possible for any form of “conference” I’ve ever been a part of. To call it a conference though would be misleading. It’s more like a fire-hose of information exchange, both formal and informal, between people from all sides of this industry. Fellow b-eye bloggers Claudia Imhoff, Colin White, Jill Dyche and I were the featured attractions, bringing the topics and sharing our opinions.

Attendees are listed in Claudia’s blog, where she has way beat me to the punch in summarizing the event. During the roundtable sessions, the 4 of us each introduced a topic. My topic was RFID and I previously posted the link to the first 15 minutes of topic introductions. All 4 of our topic introductions are podcasted and available at the link, as are interviews with each vendor representative. Discussion followed onto the introduction for about an hour for each topic, but the chosen topics, and more, were discussed throughout the weekend.

The chosen topics actually fit together quite well, with, for example, RFID data needing master data to be understood and operational BI to perform the proper action. I found it interesting that here we were, 4 people who gained prominence with data warehousing, all hyper-involved with master data management with a book, a full-day TDWI class, an industry report and, most importantly, advisement and architecture of numerous of the first customer MDM applications under our belts. It’s all information management, a twist on current data warehouse architectures and using constructs that we had begun to implement for our clients already anyway.

I find operational BI interesting and blogged about it co-existing but taking cycles away from the data warehouse here. There certainly is more of an emphasis on business intelligence these days that does not necessarily involve the data warehouse directly.

Other opinions I brought had to do with the emergence of EII, projects on localizing economies, data mining gaining traction with a wider base, various activities taking cycles away from the data warehouse, how information security conscious the industry has become, how great Crystal Xcelsius is, Project Megagrid, and other topics that the attendees needed to be aware of.

Fun was had as well as only Oregon and Scott can provide – jet boating and kayaking. Colin showed us the stars with his magnificent telescope, laser pointer and knowledge of the sky. And I led 2 torture - I mean Yoga - sessions. I’ll post the stealth pictures I took of the attendees doing yoga over time as necessary. ;-)

Industry analysts, vendors, press and information executives should make it a priority to try to get invited to next year’s event. If it’s hard to think that far ahead, I’ll be posting a reminder in about 6 months.

Posted by William McKnight at 6:06 PM | | Comments (1)

August 2, 2006

RFID podcast

I'm back from the Pacific Northwest Business Intelligence Summit where the energy and information sharing on our industry was at an all-time high. The topic I introduced from the panel was RFID. I know I've been blogging a lot about it, but if you want to hear about a 15-minute speil on RFID for the BI professional, check it out right here on the B-eye-network. I tried to distill an introduction to RFID, still needed for most BI professionals, and some learnings from my RFID-sourced BI projects into this podcast.

I also conducted the interview with Jeff Dandridge, President and COO of Infocentricity, found there. If you're interested in analytics, you can hear what he has to say about the industry there. Other podcasts from the summit are there as well.

Posted by William McKnight at 10:26 AM | | Comments (0)