Next Gen BI

Boris is one of the driving forces behind Forrester's offerings for Information and Knowledge Management professionals. He is a leading expert in business intelligence (BI) — a set of processes, methodologies, and technologies used to transform raw data into meaningful, useful, and action-oriented enterprise information. Boris delivers strategic guidance, helping enterprises define BI strategies, governance, and architectures, as well as identify vendors and technologies that help them put information to use in business processes and end user experiences.

Boris' current research focuses on some of the latest trends in BI, such as convergence of multiple, formerly separate disciplines of structured and unstructured data, process and data intelligence, real-time BI, and many others into overall enterprise effectiveness and optimization.

Boris has more than 25 years of experience with enterprise software and applications implementation, management consulting, and strategic advisory skills. Most recently, Boris was a managing partner at Textra, a boutique strategic advisory firm serving all IT constituents: users, vendors, and investors. Boris co-founded Textra after spending several years as a VP and a strategic technology advisor at JPMorgan/LabMorgan, where he led many successful internal BI initiatives, as well as advising the bank's large enterprise software clients on enterprise adoption issues and product and marketing strategies. Prior to JPMorgan, Boris served as a senior manager of data warehousing and customer relationship management (CRM) practices at PricewaterhouseCoopers. Boris started his career at Citibank, where, among many other successful projects, he implemented the bank's first global credit risk data warehouse.

Principal Analyst Boris Evelson of Forrester Research will review the evolution of business intelligence and dashboards and discuss the emergence of “context-aware BI”, which has the opportunity to break through the usability barrier of traditional BI and to deliver radical value to end users.

BI dashboards, long the standard for distributing reports throughout the organization, have been plagued by low end-user utilization rates and have focused mainly at sharing findings to known problems. They’ve done little to increase the organization’s decision making power or help workers generate new insights in the data they work with every day. Mr. Evelson will look at the evolution of dashboards from being primarily static and inflexible to being more dynamic and interactive to becoming truly actionable. By embedding next generation dashboards into business processes and allowing them to be generated by the processes themselves, dashboards become “context-aware” and ultimately more valuable to the end user community. In this world users can take action in real time and turn transactions and business events into analytically informed and timely decisions.

Join us to hear Mr. Evelson discuss evolutions in analytics and business intelligence and look at the convergence of BI with business process management and business rules technologies. Learn how these market evolutions and industry convergence will soon be setting the standard for in-process business intelligence.

David Loshin is the president of Knowledge Integrity, Inc, (www.knowledge-integrity.com), a consulting company focusing on customized information management solutions including information quality consulting and training, business intelligence, metadata, and data standards management. David is among Knowledge Integrity's recognized experts in information management, contributing to Intelligent Enterprise, writing a monthly column for DM Review between October 2002 and December 2005, is a quarterly featured columnist for the Data Administration Newsletter (www.tdan.com), and is the channel expert of the B-EYE-Network's Information Quality and Data Integration channel.

David's book, "Business Intelligence: The Savvy Manager's Guide" (June 2003) has been hailed as a resource allowing readers to "gain an understanding of business intelligence, business management disciplines, data warehousing, and how all of the pieces work together." David also wrote "Enterprise Knowledge Management - The Data Quality Approach," which describes a revolutionary strategy for defining, managing, and implementing business rules affecting Enterprise-wide information quality management.

In addition, David has created courses for The Data Warehousing Institute (www.tdwi.org), has presented at the annual DAMA/Meta Data conference, has taught tutorials on data quality at a number of venues, and as a representative of Knowledge Integrity is often called upon to provide insights and thought leadership to the Information Management community.

The development of analytics-based models for business productivity improvement or optimization has always relied on the analyst's understanding of both the data and the tools used for model development. Analytics are the product of a series of iterations in developing theories based on the available variables, seeking correlation or even causality, and then refining the variable set. This iterative nature of the analytic process is too often impacted by the production cycle time for model development, and when the lion"s share of time is spent wrestling with the tool, it decreases the time spent in analyzing and building effective models.

The objective of this webcast is to communicate how using business analytics software such as Spotfire not only simplifies the process of model development, but also opens up the world of business analytics to a more "democratic” constituency in the organization, by eliminating the need for expertise in traditional analytical tools requiring programming knowledge or deep application skills.

Dan Vesset is Program Vice President of IDC's Business Analytics research. Mr. Vesset’s research is currently focused on the business intelligence and analytic applications markets, which encompasses multi-dimensional analysis, end-user query and reporting, data mining and other related business intelligence tools, and supply chain and operational analytic applications.

Mr. Vesset has authored numerous research publications involving business intelligence, analytic applications, and data warehousing. In addition, Mr. Vesset has been published and quoted in numerous business and industry publications, including Forbes, Investors Business Daily, CFO, CIO, DM Review, and Intelligent Enterprise. Mr. Vesset is a frequent speaker at business intelligence conferences and seminars worldwide, and has over 10 years of experience as a user, implementer, and analyst of business intelligence software.

Gerry specializes in BI and CPM. He has over 20 years of experience in software and services. He was Head of Marketing at MicroStrategy and previously Marketing Director at Hyperion Solutions. He is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing (FCIM) and lectures at Thames Valley University in Strategic Marketing.

As the business intelligence market matures, organizations will seek to unlock hidden insights buried in huge -previously inaccessible- volumes of corporate and public textual content.

Join this Spotfire webcast with Bloor Research Senior Analyst, Gerry Brown to review trends around "content intelligence". Mr. Brown, who pioneered this term, will articulate why and how innovative content intelligence technologies can provide breakthrough insights into company, customer and competitor behaviors and intentions. Bringing together data previously separated into silos of enterprise data and text, content intelligence provides the ability to slice and dice, drill down, and report on information as an integrated whole. He will also discuss how content intelligence can also leverage content from online communities enabling users to sense and respond to growth market opportunities and competitor activities before they actually happen.

Mark is responsible for the overall direction of Ventana Research and drives the global Performance Management research agenda covering both business and technology areas. He defined the blueprint for Performance Management as the linking together of people, processes, information and technology across organizations to drive effective results. Mark is an expert in Business Intelligence and Information Management and directly manages the Workforce Performance Management research practice. As an industry veteran with more than 18 years of experience, Mark worked at companies including SAP, META Group, Oracle and IRI Software before founding Ventana Research. He has experience in banking, consumer products, food and beverage, insurance, manufacturing, pharmaceutical and retail and consumer services.

Despite extensive investment in BI and data, businesses continue to under-utilize their information assets and business users continue to rely on Excel for decision-making. Mark Smith will discuss steps companies can take to harvest existing and new information management architectures -- without significant changes -- to bring the next generation of analytic capabilities to LOB decision-makers.

Next generation business intelligence promises a lot – “BI for the masses” – but can nextgen BI really deliver? What must vendors achieve before they can really deliver on the promise? In this webcast, Louella Fernandes, Principal Analyst at Quocirca, will explore the promise of nextgen BI and the feasibility of putting BI on every desktop.

Neil Raden is the founder of Hired Brains, Inc., http://www.hiredbrains.com. Hired Brains provides consulting, systems integration and implementation services in Business Intelligence, data warehousing and performance management for clients worldwide. Based in Santa Barbara, CA, Raden is an active consultant and widely published author and speaker on data warehousing, business intelligence and information technology strategy. He welcomes your comments at nraden@hiredbrains.com.

NextGen Software or Software for the Next Gen?:
With previous and current generations of workers reluctant to fully accept a life of full immersion in technology, BI vendors made products that were simple-to-use and limited in functionality, with standardization taking emphasis over expertise. In this webcast, Neil Raden requires NextGen BI to address the entire BI experience with interactive, visual analytic applications will change the way business users experience data and information -- in a matter of seconds.

Neil Raden Presents: The Ten Principles of Enterprise Analytics:
Hosts of software vendors—from startups to established midsized companies to major global players—tout "analytics." A check of Google for the term "analytics" yields more than 11 million matches. Despite the wide use of the term, no two vendors seem to define analytics the same way. In addition, clear differentiation has not been made between analytics and other related technologies, such as Business Intelligence or dashboards.

Designated one of the top 10 most influential IT consultants in Europe (by Info Economist magazine), Wolfgang Martin is a leading European authority on BI/CPM; Business Integration; SOA and CRM. After 5½ years with META Group, Dr. Martin established the Wolfgang Martin Team. Here he continues to focus on technological innovations that drive business. In the topic of CPM/BI, he partners with Ventana Research as a Ventana Research Advisor, and he is a Research Advisor at the Institute of Business Intelligence at the Steinbeis Hochschule, Berlin. He is also co-founder and partner of iBonD Ltd.

Traditional Business Intelligence (BI) tools summarize data and display updates for known, pre-determined questions; they can’t keep pace with the dynamic business environment professionals work in today. The Intelligent Enterprise requires enterprise analytics -- a people-centric approach to analysis that is interactive and visual.

Dan has extensive knowledge of BI, systems and database management, and measurement and process engineering. Before joining Ventana Research, he held positions at Hyperion Solutions, Platinum Technologies, and United Airlines. Dan has a BS in MIS from the University of San Francisco.

Industry analyst Dan Everett of Ventana Research will review the evolution of the Business Intelligence industry and discuss how advancements in analytics provide new opportunities for organizations to gain a competitive edge.

Stephen Few has 24 years of experience as an IT innovator, consultant, and educator. Today, as Principal of the consultancy Perceptual Edge, Stephen focuses on the use of data visualization for analyzing and communicating quantitative business information.

The promise of the business intelligence (BI) industry-to help businesses harness the power of information to work smarter-can only be fulfilled by enabling the most effective techniques of data discovery and analysis available. These techniques represent data visually. Much of what goes by the name "data visualization" in software today is poorly designed and doesn't work. Contrary to popular opinion, most visual analysis techniques are quite simple and can be learned and applied by everyday business people.

A distinguished researcher, keynote speaker and award-winning author, Dr. Ben Shneiderman is a leading innovator in human-computer interaction. He is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland College Park, and is a Founding Director of the University's Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory. His many books include Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction. Dr. Shneiderman has consulted and lectured for such organizations as Apple, AT&T, Citicorp, GE, IBM, Library of Congress, Microsoft and NASA. He served as a member of the Board of Directors (1996-2001) of Spotfire, Inc., whose products are based on his dynamic queries and starfield display research in information visualization. He is also a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. More information on Dr. Shneiderman is available at: http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben/

Exceptional tools for information visualization are becoming more widely used to gain competitive advantages, but the best is yet to come. The next generation of interactive tools will enable communities of users to make successful business decisions even more rapidly.

A thought leader, visionary, and practitioner in the rapidly growing fields of business intelligence and customer focused-strategy - Claudia Imhoff, Ph.D., is a popular and dynamic speaker and internationally recognized expert on analytical CRM, business intelligence, and the infrastructure to support these initiatives - the Corporate Information Factory (CIF). Dr. Imhoff has co-authored five highly-regarded and popular books on these subjects and writes monthly columns and articles (totaling more than 100) for technical and business magazines.

Business intelligence has reached a saturation point -- lessening the competitive advantage it once delivered. The new mitigating factor in getting ahead of the competition is now based on speed in decision making. In this webcast, Claudia Imhoff will discuss how the next generation of BI solutions will dramatically speed decision-making, with rapid information insight and actionable intelligence.