This was my first conference with Gartner. Arranged very well with succinct agenda. It’s a good place to be in if you are looking for cues on next wave of technology. I attended it with mixed sense of what I’m going to get out of it; however its not the place you want to be in if you are looking for exact technical information on application of BI and analytics.
As it was impossible to attend all the session – I opted for a few that interest me. Here is the list:
9th June
1. Master Data Management (MDM) for Beginners
Guido De Simoni
It was mostly common sense. However liked below representation of different data types in an organization.
2. Gartner Opening Keynote: Crossing the analytical divide: New Skills, New Technologies
Ted Friedman, Kurt Schlegel, Rita Sallam
They provide a very high level of information, centered mostly around management, governance, architecture and flow of information. Most of the attendees are middle level and executive managers. Speakers/analyst at Gartner are great speakers with liking for dramatics. I got its taste in the opening keynote where the main theme was around three main subjects:
After presenting, which they do rather well, the bottom line emphasized was – use Bi-Modal mechanism. There is no final and identified cookbook on how to run a BI and analytics org. Its requires a little of everything e.g. while IT could be a centralized org with all businesses coming to it for solutions, there is a need for some decentralized pockets within company to focus on specific business use cases. There are no certain solutions, the solution/tools space is very vibrant with multiple offerings from numerous vendors, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. So you might have identified a certain solution for now; but its not going to be long before a disruptive technology barges right in industry and makes you look old fashioned. While organizations are betting big on sharing their data publicly, hosting data in external cloud services, there is a skepticism and risk lurking around, so protect the data that is life blood of the organization. Above messages were passed through three short movies with Gartner team casting. Fun to watch techies taking on Hollywood.
Below picture explains the bright and dark sides of these dilemmas.
3. Industry Panel: An Expert view on Business Intelligence, Analytics and Information Management
Ian A Bertram, Neil Chandler, Donald Farmer, Deepak Ghodke
4. Building a Successful Business Analytics Strategy
Douglas Laney
5. Applying the Big Data Ecosystem
Arun Chandrasekaran
I couldn’t attend the full session. I went in in last 20 minutes but what I heard was very informative. I also got a chance to speak to Arun and discuss some of my current ideas and issues. Although he didn’t point to any specific solution, he helped me gain confidence on what I was doing.
6. Workshop: Foundation skills of a BI and Analytics Change Agent Leader
Ian A Bertram
Spoiler alert. If you are going to Gartner event, don’t expect technical knowledge transfer. the topics discussed in this workshop were no where related to BI or analytics. The ideas were very generic and common for any kind of change. It was about how to handle change, convince people to change and manage situations.
7. Interactive visualization: Insights for everyone
Rita L Sallam
A very informative session. Rita is a very seasoned speaker. Here are the my key takeaways from this talk.
8. The High functioning Analytics center of Excellence: As analytics now pervades every corner of your organization, coordinating, collaborating and governing business intelligence and data science functions has become critical. Many such CoEs are well-intentioned but lack key ingredients.
Douglas Laney
A waste of time. It is a very important subject, however short time and diversity of views resulted in a very immature discussion.
10th June
9. Gartner Magic Quadrant Power session: Data Integration, Business Intelligence, Advanced Analytics, DBMS for Data Warehouse
Ian A Bertram, Ted Friedman, Alexander Linden, Rita L Sallam, Roxane Edjlali
10. How to Monetize Your Information Assets
Douglas Laney
Not exactly a rocket science but a good session for beginners. Laney was able to convince on how “Infonomics” is gaining ground and may become part of balance sheet asset in future.
11. Workshop: How to Develop and Evolve an Enterprise Information Management Strategy
Guido De Simoni
I could have rather skipped it. But it was a good session for those who don’t have a defined dictrine on how they want to mange data in the organization.
12. The Enterprise Information Management Framework: Building Blocks for IM Success
Michael Patrick Moran
This session was an extension of the previous session. It was a content rich session with clear guidelines on how an EIM framework should be created and nurtured.
13. Innovating with Analytics: 40 Real World Examples in 40 Minutes
Douglas Laney
A very fun session. While we have been hearing many different use cases, Laney was still able to fill in some awe. Here’s the favorite one.
14. Big Data Discovery – The Next Generation of BI Self-Service
Rita L. Sallam
My most favorite session. This is exactly what I was looking for in whole two days and it came in last. Neverthless, full of information. The most interesting part is, she talked about exactly the same things that I’ve been thinking for quite a few days. It’s the tipping point. There are not many days left when people will get over big data fever and start taking note of the remainder of the data.
Besides these, there were two more sessions. One by Ketan Bhagat, he’s younger brother of popular author Chetan Bhagat and an author too. He spoke about “Operant Conditioning”. It was more of a book launch event. There was also a Closing keynote but nothing worthwhile in it.
I also noted some keywords that are going to be buzz words in analytics industry in coming years. they are:
Citizen Developer, Analytics Continuum, Data Lake, Lambda Architecture, Citizen Data Scientist
overall it was time well spent. Made great connections.
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