Post-conference seminar with Wayne Eckerson and Cindi Howson

Want to get the most out of the gurus while they’re in Oslo? Would you like to have a deep-dive seminar with BOTH keynote speakers? Attend the GOBI post-conference seminar on June 11th.

Secrets of Analytical Leaders: Insights from Information Insiders Wayne Eckerson, Principal, BI Leader Consulting

How do you bridge the worlds of business and technology? How do you harness data for business gain? How do you deliver value from BI and analytical initiatives? Based on Wayne’s book, “Secrets of Analytical Leaders: Insights from Information Insiders,” this session will unveil the secrets to success of top BI and analytical leaders from companies such as Zynga, Netflix, US Xpress, Nokia, Capital One, Kelley Blue Book and Blue KC, among others. The session will cover both the “soft stuff” of people, processes, and projects and the “hard stuff” of architecture, tools, and data required to create and sustain a successful BI and analytics program.

You Will Learn:

• How to organize a BI and analytics team for optimal performance

• How to deliver value quickly and earn credibility among business sponsors

• How to translate insights into business impact

• How to create and deploy analytical models

• How to create an agile data warehouse

BI Market Update and How to Choose a Visual Data Discovery Tool Cindi Howson, founder of BI Scorecard

As the face for the data warehouse, the BI tool is the most visible component to business users. BI tools continue to evolve to be more appealing, to reach new classes of users, and to speed the time to insight. At this session, BI tools expert Cindi Howson will offer strategies for managing your BI tool portfolio. She will highlight recent trends, the state of the market, differences in core modules, with a focus for selecting and deploying the right tool for the right user. The second half of the seminar provides an evaluation framework for evaluating dashboards and visual data discovery tools.

You Will Learn:

• State of the BI tools market and key trends

• State of BI standardization, motivations and challenges

• User segments, use cases, and tool positioning

• Differences in core modules

• Dashboard and visual data discovery use cases

• Strengths and weaknesses of leading products

The post-conference seminar is open for both GOBI-participants and others. Attend both GOBI main event and post-conference seminar and get discounts.

The post-conference seminar will take place at Dronning Eufemias gate 16, Bjørvika (Visma-bygget), on June 11th.

Agenda:

0800-0830: Registration
0830-1200: Wayne Eckerson: Secrets of Analytical Leaders: Insights from Information Insiders
1200-1230: Lunch
1300-1630: Cindi Howson: BI Market Update and How to Choose a Visual Data Discovery Tool

TICKETS AVAILABLE SOON!

Check out GOBI website www.gurusofbi.no for tickets.

BIG Data

BIG Data: Is this about data at all?


Inspired by: Rafal Lukawiecki’s seminar about Business Analytics and Big Data, Microsoft Norway

Intro

Wikipedia defined BIG Data as a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools or traditional data processing applications. But this definition does not include the main reason why Big Data is actual nowadays and what was the purpose to re-invent this technology. Here is a visualization map for BIG Data and how is that large amount of data is generated:

Fig1. Big Data visualization by WIPRO

As you can see from the figure, Big Data aims to represent a large set of data with a single point (a value or a expression) so that make sense for us.

BIG DATA: how big is World data?

Big Data is one of the most famous words around the world describing a new technology that will handle the big amount of data that is generated every day for analytic purposes. But, anyway handling Big Data is not any problem because we are witnessing everyday that hardware capacity expands as data volume expands and also hardware is getting cheaper day by day. So the definition BIG is not at all the case of Big Data, so the hardware capacity can hold whatever BIG Data can be. The average data set of the whole World is calculated to be 1.5 GB and that is an average memory stick, even though an average RAM (in-memory) capacity.
Anyway, if the case is not capacity and size then what is it?

BIG Data: what about data?

Data is important part of BIG Data, but is this meaning of the concept behind the BIG Data? The answer is NO and to be correct BIG Data is just a meaningless buzzword created only for masses. Behind this name does not exist any concept of the Big Data. If you look at the data you can’t say nothing than is big or small, has 1, 2, 3 … n sources and is rapidly/slowly expanding etc…, but that is not what BIG Data is interested to solve at all. If you think the size is the matter, then you are wrong again, so Big Data is not about BIGness at all.

BIG Data is interested to answer the users and not developers, is not an optimizing tool but it is actually an answering machine.

BIG Data: The real case?!

The real deal in BIG Data is that BIG Data tries to generate a single answer (I like to call: the single truth) from a huge input of data. If the answer is the only output of BIG Data processing, so logically BIG Data is dependent on QUESTION. So, the real deal behind BIG Data is the question itself. If you are in a dilemma whether to choose or not BIG Data technology over traditional database technologies you should look not in the size and not in the data itself, but simply in your queries that you are going to use on that set of data. So, I agree totally with Rafal when he says that the reason existence of Big Data technologies are in the answer that we want to get from BIG Data.

Conclusion
BIG Data is just another buzz word without having to deal with the contest itself, but better when we know before we use it. Even thou, we can’t change the trends for this buzzword; at least we can support and use the technology as much as we can.