MSBIC 2008 Day One

General Session

In brief - disappointed. Microsoft had, IMO, a truly unique conference last year with regard to the keynotes. This year, they dropped the bar back down to the standard "infomercial to a captive audience" that I've found typical of vendor sponsored conferences. Not to say that there wasn't useful information, or a couple exciting announcements and demos, but they took up two hours of my life that I'll never get back to do it. Last year they were able to cram that into an hour, and left the second half to what I thought was the most valuable part of the conference. This year, there wasn't any "business thought leader" sharing why Business Intelligence was a "great thing"... And "oh yes, Microsoft can help you do that - but I don't care what vendor(s) you use - but dammit DO IT, or you will lose your competitive advantage."  Last year's conference started from the get-go as a Business Intelligence conference. This year's has started as a "Microsoft technology preview" conference.  I talked to some Microsoft reps, and the concensus was that attendees to the show last year complained about the preponderance of "business" content.  Sigh.

Next time Microsoft, (hopefully by tomorrow morning with ex-economist Ben Stein) please pay more than lip service to the ultimate goal of BI: Business Value. Most of the time, when they "sell" their wares, they should focus on the geek - no question. They pooched Vista by not doing that - it's floundering because the geeks weren't sold on it, and new technology is usually vetted by geeks.  BI is different!  Business guys should be in the driver's seat!  Appeal to them, get them excited, and you'll find them beating down the doors to their IT departments and consultants - and that will drive your sales and market penetration.  Right now (remember I convinced an executive of my company to attend,) I'm bordering on wondering if I have a black mark near my name. (Paranoia, my rational side is thinking, but it's a nagging thought.)  He thought some of the stuff looked interesting, but he heard nothing about why he should care about this topic at all.

High Points of the Day
Donald Farmer's demo of project "Gemini" - an add-in for Excel that looks like it will allow unseasoned business users to mash together unvetted data.  Due out in H1 2010...

From the Gartner "Trends" session, where Bill Hostmann related an example of challenging "conventional wisdom" with fact-based BI in Richmond, Virginia.  A couple years ago, Richmond was in the ten worst American cities in terms of crime rate.  The new police chief was convinced assets weren't being used appropriately, and challenged a prevailing belief that Christmas was the lowest crime rate day of the year. That assumption translated into staffing and deployment decisions.  Using a DW and BI, he found that in fact, the lowest-crime day in Richmond was Superbowl Sunday.  Makes sense when you think about it - even petty criminals will take that day off to sit in front of the boob tube.  That kind of challenge by the chief turned Richmond from one of the "bottom ten" crime-ridden cities in the US into the top quartile.

From John Welch's "Custom Components in SSIS", and Matt Masson's "Advanced Lookups in 2008": A great set of Chalk Talks where John reviewed the (relatively undocumented) basics of programming custom components in SSIS, and Matt showed me that the new 2008 Lookup was far superior to the 2005 version.  But the real highlight was talking to them after their presentations.  I never realized how tied the Microsoft employees' hands were in relation to even looking at externally developed code.  For example, of the few custom components available on CodePlex or elsewhere, the most Matt was allowed to do was review the front page description of the component.  It was forbidden for him to look at the source code, lest he inadvertently copy some of it and land it inside a commercial release or component of SQL Server or its tools.