TDWI 2016 Chicago Conference, 8-13 May 2016

Barry keynotes the conference on Monday, May 9, with “Information Everywhere – Ethics and Economics Emerge” and teaches a full-day course “From BI to IoT – One Architecture, Many Technologies” on Tuesday, May 10.

NEW! Speaking at the Executive Summit on Monday, May 9: “Modernizing Data Ecosystems Alone Is Not Enough!”

Keynote: Information Everywhere – Ethics and Economics Emerge

The mantra “If You Can’t Measure It, You Can’t Manage It” has driven business and business intelligence for many years. From a few gigabytes of business transaction data in the 1980s to multi-petabytes of real-time behavior and events today, we are finally reaching information nirvana. We can now measure almost everything, so managing should be straight-forward. Right?

Wrong. In fact, information has become so pervasive that it is undermining the very foundations of work, management, business, the economy and, indeed, society. In this provocative talk, Dr. Barry Devlin, a founding father of data warehousing, steps beyond the myth that technology will solve all problems and explores some of the enormous challenges that all-inclusive information is creating.

Posing many questions and offering some unexpected answers, this talk invites information management professionals to take responsibility for the brave new world we are creating together.

Exec16 Session: Modernizing Data Ecosystems Alone Is Not Enough!

Business value comes from actions taken… which come from decisions made, based on insights gained, through understanding information, gleaned from—amongst other places—data ecosystems. The road from the ecosystem to value is thus long and winding. It meanders through the process of how organizations—from teams of two to corporate boards—actually move from data to action. It walks the people of the organization from intent to intellect, pausing at the doors of intuition along the way. Gathering more data in more systems may actually make that road longer and even more winding. So, how will it lead to business transformation?

You will learn

  • A new model bridging data to meaning and escaping the trap of metadata
  • Novel approaches to supporting decision making at team and organization levels
  • The role of neurobiology and sociology in all decision making and why rational thought is only part of the process

Full-day Class: From BI to IoT – One Architecture, Many Technologies

With the Internet of Things we complete the journey from internally-focused, largely historical data warehousing to externally-driven, real-time decision making. New business opportunities and modern technologies grab the limelight. But are the needs so dissimilar that we need to rip and replace? Are the new technologies so different that we must forget all we knew about information management? If you accept the stories of some vendors and consultants, you need to adopt new technology, architectures and methods wholesale.

The real answer is that we need a well-designed, modern architecture that can and should include all business needs and technical platforms, old and new, to deliver true cross-enterprise decision making support. Dr. Barry Devlin draws on thirty years of experience to define and describe this common architecture, tooling choices and implementation methods, based on his seminal book “Business unIntelligence—Insight and Innovation Beyond Analytics and Big Data”.

You Will Learn

  • Business drivers and sample use cases – what is new and what is the same
  • Conceptual and logical architectures – evolution instead of revolution
  • Data, information, knowledge and meaning – from metadata to context-setting information
  • Data warehouse, data lake, data reservoir – the good, the bad and today’s real solution
  • The necessity for a pervasive process-driven approach
  • How real people in real organizations make decisions
  • Technology – good choices, focus areas for new tools, and hype to avoid
  • A roadmap to moving from today’s BI-centric world to an all-inclusive new architecture

Geared To

CIOs and chief data officers, IT program managers, business sponsors and tech-savvy end users, BI program management and BI COC/COE staff