Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference Seattle day 3

Writing by Jorgen on Wednesday, 8 of October , 2008 at 9:38 pm

As happens so often during 3day conferences the second day seems to be less dynamic than the first.  The third can swing both ways. I have seen conferences go out like a candle but I have also seen some interesting fireworks at the end. This morning I did a videocast with Joey Fitts and Bruno Aziza. They both work for Microsoft and have writen an excellent book (now available) called: Drive Business Performance. Enabling a culture of intelligent execution (http://www.amazon.com/Drive-Business-Performance-Intelligent-Leadership/dp/0470259558). Thomas Davenport (Competing on analytics) called this book a clear road mpa for navigating performance management. The books shows how performance management can delivere competitive advantagge, how to diagnoze your organization’’s performance management capabilities and what specific skills and assests your organization needs to mange performance more effectively. It is a practical book with lots of case studies and a self test. I highly recommend it to you. During the interview we discussed what I like to call the 5 i’s of Intelligence: Increase, Integration, Insight, Interactively and Industrialization. The interview will be on the Microsoft Conference website later and on this blog as well. At the end we came to the conclusion that 5 years ago we would have been talking about performance in terms of megabytes, I/O, tables, queries and now we talked about decisions, actions, people and change. BI has come a long way the last couple of years. After that I checked out the session of David OÇonnel from Nucleus Research on the ROI of Performance Mangement. In his session he highlighted how to assess ROI, why metrics matter, where to focus and how to actualy build a business case. The problem with a ROI for BI or PM is obviously the indirect of intangible benefits of better decisions. He concluded the session with a graph (see picture) that shows that indirects benefits have the lowest believability and GROWTH is on the bottom right side. That is scary because growth is one of the most important factors why companies still exist. BI and PM business case therefore must be sold much more on vision than on hard dollar ROI.

The afternoon session of Joey and Bruno on their book was good as expected. They had a panel with clients that were featured in their book. Always a pleasure to learn and recognize other BI people problems. The final session was a disapointment. The speaker - I will not mention his name for obvious reasons - took a hour to explain to us that BI is not about systems and technologies but about end user experienced. Duh! He even thought this was a very prevocative statement. So just as expected the seminar candle slowly dimmed and …. THE END. PS: Overall again a good conference - maybe a little less dynamic than the first - but with some pretty good announcements and speakers. And last but not least: wihout any rain! Can you believe that in Seattle. I guess the gods are with Microsoft.

Category: BI Thoughts

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