In which Jill summarizes what was discussed—and what was imbibed—at the Pacific Northwest BI Summit.

Hey, who’s that dude? He looks familiar. Didn’t we meet him over cheap rosé at one of those mega-vendor conferences? The one where some executive was talking about The New Age of Information, Part Deux.? Or maybe it was someone who looked like him. They all blend together after a while, don’t they, collapsing under the weight of so much spin?

Then there’s the Pacific Northwest BI Summit, which Claudia Imhoff once anointed “an event like no other.” This invitation-only affair is hosted by PR powerhouse Scott Humphrey, President of Humphrey Strategic PR. Scott represents many of the hottest players in the BI and data integration spaces and as the event’s impresario, he hand-picks a guest list replete with leading vendors,  prominent media, and industry experts who, when it comes to industry vision, bring it. (They bring the tequila, too. More on that later.)

This was my seventh BI Summit and it was the best one so far. The vendors were a collection of both emerging visionaries and established players:  IBM, Lyzasoft, Composite Software, Predixion Software, DataFlux, JackBe, WhereScape, Paraccel, Talend, QlikView, Teradata, and SAP all represented their philosophies and product directions, not to mention some trenchant industry insights.

Speaking of which, fellow expert panelists William McKnight, Colin White, Claudia Imhoff, Merv Adrian, and Shawn Rogers all offered observations on the latest industry trends and buzz. Here are summaries of our more lively discussions:

• Customers will have more control over their own data—even if it means lying. Shawn Rogers, formerly a co-founder of B-Eye-Network and now an industry analyst with EMA, anointed Facebook as “the new white pages.” As such, the behemoth social site is learning more about its members—and could share more data about us. Distrustful of sites that track their information and behaviors, social media users are increasingly misrepresenting themselves on-line, or, as William McKnight called it, “gaming their data.” Companies will increasingly be at the mercy of customers’ willingness not only to share their data, but to share the truth.

• Companies are still immature when it comes to their use of social media. Shawn Rogers and Lyzasoft’s Tamara Dull are the savviest social media experts I know. Our social media conversation focused on what companies are doing—and what they’re not. In the days after my CRM book was published I maintained that companies that don’t have a culture of listening to their customers wouldn’t start just because they’d adopted CRM tools. Ditto social media.

• As cloud adoption continues, data integration will remain a challenge. Bob Eve of Composite Software observed that the cloud was freeing his CIO customers from having to track their back-end systems. Commodity or no, the cloud introduces new challenges to IT departments. Getting data into and out of the cloud requires standards, not to mention solutions companies might not yet have. New cloud solutions can actually exacerbate data integration challenges by introducing new data in new formats that companies that don’t have the hooks in place.

• Big data is as much about “other data” as it is about BI data. As we know from the adoption of Hadoop, parallel execution has allowed companies to handle more and more data. Merv Adrian presented some use cases for big data (or, as Gartner calls it: extreme information), including industry-specific applications, pattern discovery, and horizontal apps. Colin White put it well when he said that big data is about “data workloads we couldn’t support before.” But these workloads might not be geared to BI. As clickstream volumes skyrocket the data may not ever make it onto the data warehouse. Thus the BI Competency Center should only engage in the ownership of big data if it’s necessary to deliver a business capability in the context of analytics.

The post-session offline discussions were just as entertaining, lubricated as they were by some high-end tequila. Another of the many debates not directly won at the summit was the throw-down between the Clase Azul Reposado—smooth, lovely aroma, beautiful bottle—and the Don Julio 1942—smoky caramel flavor with a vanilla finish and…I can’t remember the rest.

02 Aug This entry was published on August 2, 2011 at 8:00 am. It’s filed under business analytics, business intelligence (BI), data management and tagged BI Comptency Center, BI Summit, Big Data, business intelligence, cloud computing, collaborative BI, Don Julio 1942, Jill Dyché, SaaS BI, Scott Humphrey, social media. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.