It was a great 3 days at the Gartner BI Summit and I thoroughly enjoyed attending a conference dedicated solely to Business Intelligence.  It was great to experience the general BI sessions while also getting to sit in on some of the healthcare vertical sessions and hear about the specific BI challenges that the healthcare industry is dealing with.  If you were not able to attend, below is my interpretation of the major trends that were discussed:

Members of Qlikview said in their case study session that one of the most powerful things you can glean from analytics is finding the data you didn't know was relevant and were not looking for.  I felt the same way about the conference, I've picked up a lot of information that I wasn't expecting and have a punch list of new areas to research and become fluent in.  For example, the idea that we need to think about analytical data outside of the traditional rows and columns of a relational database and instead think about how to develop analytics from new repositories of unstructured content.  To hear industry leaders from Gartner, Teradata, Microsoft and Oracle all agree that in 5 years, the majority of analytic data we consume will come from unstructured sources is amazing given where we are today.  New concepts are evolving to help mine this data, and I know I need to spend more time learning about them to continue to be an effective practitioner.

Day 1 of the Gartner BI Summit was energizing.  I started off the day with a great networking breakfast and presentation from Vi Shaffer on Healthcare ACO.  During the networking portion I got to hear about many of same the challenges that my clients are facing.  The question of "what BI tools are you using" got a good laugh from the table.  The unanimous answer was "all of them".  While funny, large healthcare organizations are without a doubt saddled with every product under the sun, primarily as a result of acquisitions. 

Gartner recently released an updated version of the Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms. One quick glance at the new Magic Quadrant and you’ll notice there are a whopping 19 entries this year, with 8 companies making the prestigious leader quadrant.  When compared to the 4 leaders in the Data Integration magic quadrant and 6 in the data warehouse space it is clear there is a lot happening in the world of Business Intelligence.

CapTech was a sponsor at the Gartner Portal, Content, and Collaboration Summit in Orlando last week, and I was the guy running the booth.  I’m sure the product vendors had their own perspectives on the event, but representing a professional services firm most of the questions I was fielding revolved around strategy and governance.

Many organizations have already implemented portal and are struggling with content management and search integration - a real challenge for most companies.  They are also struggling with end-user adoption.