Enterprise Data and BI Conference Europe, London, 2-5 November 2015

Barry Devlin presents a three-hour class on Monday and a track session on Wednesday, as well as signing and selling copies of his seminal book “Business unIntelligence—Insight and Innovation beyond Analytics and Big Data”.

Building a Data Driven Business: Delights and Dangers, Monday, 2 November, 14:00-17:15

Data driven business is becoming increasingly important as social media and the Internet of Things offer ever larger quantities of data about people’s thoughts and behaviours, creating new business opportunities for interacting with customers, anticipating their needs and responding proactively to them. This same data allows invasion of personal privacy, customer alienation and market destruction. These opportunities and pitfalls demand much broader thinking and planning than traditional BI projects.

This workshop covers:

  • Business drivers and sample use cases for a data driven business
  • Architectural approaches, evolution vs. revolution
  • Positioning data, information, knowledge and meaning
  • Context-setting information and the evolution of metadata
  • Technology choices, focus areas for new tools, hype to avoid
  • Defining a roadmap to and implementing a data driven business

On Data Lakes, Reservoirs and Possible Swamps, Wednesday, 4 November, 11:25-12:15

New technology, especially in the Hadoop space, has become increasingly popular in recent years. To make sense of these tools, vendors, consultants and customers have begun to sketch architectures to position and fit the function together. Thus, we have seen the digging of Data Lakes and the emergence of architectural diagrams of Data Reservoirs and Refineries. However, this is still very early days. The definitions remain as varied as their sources and their claims controversial.

This session sheds light on these new analytics architectures:

  • What is a Data Reservoir or Lake and how does it compare to a Data Warehouse?
  • What is a Data Refinery and what is its relationship to ETL?
  • What are the benefits and drawbacks of these new architectural components
  • Do Reservoirs and Refineries replace or complement traditional architectural thinking?
  • What technologies and tools are needed?