Tod means Fox

I had the pleasure of attending an excellent TDWI Benelux Chapter meeting in Antwerpen, Belgium last Thursday. Presenting were Steve Hoberman and Davy Nys. Steve discussed the latest trends in business intelligence, including the drivers that influence them. Davy’s presentation, which I’ll talk about in a future posting, discussed the place for open source technologies in a BI environment.

Steve Hoberman

I have been reading Steve’s work for a few years now. I first discovered him in print when I picked up his book “Data Modeler’s Workbench: Tools and Techniques for Analysis and Design”. Unfortunately (for me), I lent the book to a former colleague some time ago, and will likely not get it back! It looks like I’ll need to re-order. You can keep up with Steve at The Data Administrator’s Newsletter website, where Steve is a columnist. His writings are excellent. He offers a great deal of insight and experience into data modeling and related topics.

So what are the trends?

Steve identified five drivers and five trends. I don’t have access to his Power Point slides, so I will do my best in regurgitating what I heard based on my notes and memory. First, the drivers, which include:

• Cheaper storage and computing;
• businesses are more BI savvy and demand more of IT;
• increased pressure for business and IT to perform well;
• struggling global economy; and
• scarce IT resources.

These drivers have contributed to the following five trends:

• The merging of data warehouses and operational data stores;
• increased integration efforts;
• excitement around unstructured data;
• pressure to deliver solutions correctly the first time; and
• the need for BI personnel to wear multiple hats.

Certainly, Steve explained the above with more elegance and grace. Hopefully, I haven’t butchered his thoughts too much.

The point though, is that BI is heading in a particular direction. I’ve had a sense of this for the past couple of years:

• I have witnessed firsthand the merging of DW and ODS.
• I have seen a rise in integration efforts — including application and data.
• Unstructured data and text mining are certainly talked about now as integral to future BI initiatives.
• Because of the fact that business users are now more involved in BI projects (it used to be that IT had to struggle to obtain business sponsorship), the ideas come faster than the ability of IT to implement them, meaning that IT must strive to get them right the first time.
• Lastly, I do wear multiple hats: DBA, developer, integration architect, researcher, business analyst, project manager, etc.

I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on this subject. Feel free to write me at Tod at Blackstone Providence dot com, or simply just make a comment to this post. You can also reach Steve at his website, or visit TDWI for more details on events that might be coming in your area.