In a recent Forrester post Boris Evelson reveals his Top 10 BI predictions for 2012.  Each of which is an interesting take on the short term BI landscape, but I fear Boris falls short of making bold enough predictions as his take on the future resembles our reality today.  Ironically, Boris references Goldilocks and the Three Bears; perhaps Boris just awoke from a twelve month slumber in a bed just right.  

I had the honor and pleasure of speaking at and attending the PASS Summit in Seattle this year.  CapTech Consulting sponsored my trip to participate in the event, where I presented on two topics: creating a healthcare payer data model and administering SQL Server Reporting Services.

The PASS Summit is an annual conference put on by the Professional Association for SQL Server.  The conference brings together a mix of community speakers, Microsoft employees, and many eager-to-learn attendees.  Located at the Seattle Convention Center, there were two days of pre-conference sessions and three days of community and spotlight sessions.  The 2011 Summit drew a record 5000 registrations.

The summit was even more exciting than usual this year due to many announcements made by both Microsoft and PASS.  Some of the business intelligence highlights are listed here:

Designing an effective dashboard is an art and irrespective of the technology used for building the dashboard there are certain rules of thumb which should not be ignored.

Rule 1 – Understand the audience for the dashboard because that will help determine how the dashboard is going to be used and the expected level of interaction.

Rule 2 - Understand the amount and depth of interaction that will be necessary within the dashboard and make recommendations accordingly to the business.

Rule 3 – Always do an analysis on the best technology that should be used to fulfill the business requirements. There still may be instances when your recommendation may differ from customer’s perception of best technology to use for building the dashboard. Especially in scenarios when the customer’s technological environment consists of multiple BI tools.

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:

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. 

Many things need to happen to have a successful migration from a legacy application to a new system.  There are difficult data mapping decisions that need to be made and data quality concerns to be addressed.  There are the typical challenges of change management and end user training.  In large efforts, entire teams may be dedicated to profiling and remediation of legacy data.  In the midst of all this migration activity sits a critical and often underestimated function – reporting.  What happens to all the analytical, transactional and operational reports the legacy system provided and where do users go for that data in the new world?

It seems like everyone wants to deploy a mobile BI solution these days.  The idea of location awareness and the freedom to access data from anywhere at anytime has generated a lot of excitement.  From a software perspective BI vendors are fueling the mobile BI market with “out of the box” solutions for most of the major mobile platforms (iOS, Android, Blackberry).  At the same time we have had an almost overnight adoption of tablets that make mobile BI more usable thanks to the larger screen size. 

A few fellow CapTechers and I recently had the opportunity to attend on-site training for LogiXML's Business Intelligence tools. While the LogiXML Info and Ad Hoc tools seem fairly comprehensive, there is still room for improvement on the development end of things.

LogiXML's two BI tools are very similar.  While the Info is more geared toward technical power users, the less powerful Ad Hoc option is more business user friendly. This seems to be fairly standard among most companies’ BI offerings and LogiXML is toeing that line fairly effectively. That said, most of our training focused on LogiXML Info and that’s where the majority of this post will focus.

A few months ago I attended a presentation at MicroStrategy which focused on their Mobile product.  The class highlighted how information can be presented on iPhones and iPads in very useful and flexible ways, but one section of the presentation really sparked my interest.  It showed the usage growth of the various technologies as they become current: 

If these figures are to be believed, and I suspect they’re pretty close, then the evolution is continuing and rapidly expanding towards less expensive, more portable and easy to use devices.  For our discussion, let’s assume that Mobile Internet computing consists of phones (iPhone, Android, Blackberry, etc.) and tablets (iPad almost exclusively at this time).

Business Intelligence and GIS software have both been around for many years.  More recently they have become closely integrated, with most BI offerings providing a connection to mapping layers such as MapInfo or Google Maps.  The merger of these two tools provides a powerful visualization for data, connecting massive amounts of data with a visual that most everyone is already familiar with.  For example, a map of New York City overlaid with census data quickly shows us where to find Gotham’s ethnic neighborhoods.  Another interesting example using Google maps shows us where harassment is occurring in