Big Data, Big Mobile, and a Big New Year
Happy New Year to everyone in the TDWI community! I wish you an enjoyable and prosperous year. Squinting down the path ahead, it is indeed going to be a busy year at TDWI as we roll out our World Conferences, Summits, Forums, Seminars, Webinars, Best Practices Reports, Checklists, and more. The next World Conference is coming up February 12-17, in Las Vegas. This event is always one of the major gatherings of the year in business intelligence and data warehousing, and I am looking forward to being there and interacting with attendees, exhibitors, TDWI faculty, and a few croupiers here and there.
In Las Vegas I will be helping out my colleague, Philip Russom, who is chairing the BI Executive Summit, February 13-15. This conference has a theme of “Executing a Data Strategy for Your Enterprise” and will feature a great selection of case studies, expert speakers, and panel sessions. Check out the program to see if this event is important for you to attend.
In Vegas and throughout many of our conferences this year, you will have the chance to learn about big data analytics, which is a big topic for TDWI. Big data is getting increasing airplay in the mainstream media, as evidenced by this recent New York Times column by Thomas Friedman (read down a bit, to the fifth paragraph, past the political commentary). Friedman points out that big data could be the “raw material for new inventions in health care, education, manufacturing, and retailing.” We could not agree more, and are focused on enabling organizations to develop the right technology and data strategies to achieve their goals and ambitions with big data in 2012.
Coming up for me on January 11 is a Webinar, “Mobile Business Intelligence and Analytics: Extending Insight to a Mobile Workforce.” This is coordinated with the just-published Best Practices Report of the same name that I authored. The impact of mobile devices, particularly tablets, on BI and analytics made nearly everyone’s list of key trends in 2012, and with good reason. The potential of mobile devices is exciting for furthering the “right data, right users, right time” goals of many BI implementations. Executives, managers, and frontline employees in operations such as customer sales, service, and support have clear needs for BI alerts, dashboard reports, and capabilities for drill-down analysis while on the go. There are many challenges from a data management perspective, so organizations need to examine carefully how, where, and when to enable mobile BI and analytics. I hope the report provides food for thought and perspectives that are helpful in making decisions about mobile.
I expect that this will be an exciting year in our industry and look forward to blogging about it as we go forward into 2012.
Posted by David Stodder on January 5, 2012