The SQL Users? Group met at the KOIN tower downtown in the Robert Half Consulting meeting space. The material covered was based on the presentation titled ?Crossing the BI Chasm?.
Some of the key points in the presentation:
- You must become knowledgeable about the specific business.
- You must be able to speak at a 30k altitude all the way down to the technical nitty gritty.
- Maturity of reporting; infancy (excel chaos, multiple truths, ad-hoc workarounds), adolescence (dynamic querying tools, etc), mature (scorcards, etc, KPIs)
- ClickTek (anti- data warehouse people because they can get right to the data other ways), DataMart, DataStore, Cubes...
- Maturity levels of culture - infancy (don't understand data, IT overloaded with unrelated work), adolescence (learning what is available, IT starts to know business), maturity (data savvy).
After the presentation there was 5 BI Professionals answering questions from the audience. Questions ranged from how many people are in or would be in a BI project to who is the key person to manage a BI project.
The multiple roles answer depended highly on the project size, which is obvious. However the simple idea of people being generalists, and stepping into the communication hat, the guru hat, and then the learning hat all within a short period of time.
The answers where thorough and informative, with audience and panel members participating.
One answer that came later in the panel discussion was something that I?ll just parallel with props for Agile. One of the main ideas behind Agile is lots of communication, effective communication, based on learning. Always learning, eating, breathing, and living the learning, never stop. To learn, one must communicate and successful BI is not possible with effective and steady unending communication and learning.
Again, part of the rocking Portland technology event! A great night.