This Saturday, April 12th CMAP (Central Maryland Association of .NET Professionals) will be holding its spring edition code camp. One of the tracks will be Busness Intelligence focused on sessions ranging from beginning to learn Business Intelligence to the more in-depth Business Performance with Monitoring with PerformancePoint. I attend the code camp last year and it was very informative and a great way to network with other developers and professionals who are also interested or working with the same technologies as you. If you are in the Baltimore metropolitan area, I recommend signing up and attending. If Business Intelligence is not your interest (well it should be :P), there are other sessions that include current topics such as Silverlight 2 and Microsoft Expression, Introducing .Net 3.5 "Extensions" ADO.NET Data Services, and Using Features to Modify the SharePoint Environment. You can check out the schedule here.
The code camp will be held on Saturday, April 12th, 2008 at the Loyola College Graduate Center Columbia Campus.
Loyola College Graduate Center
Columbia Campus
8890 McGaw Road
Columbia, Maryland 21045
Yesterday was the kickoff of the Gartner BI Summit 2008. One of the keynote speakers is Kurt Schlegel, a Gartner BI Analyst whose credits include the Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms, 2008 gave an interview to Intelligent Enterprise magazine. Its a very interesting Q & A session and I recommend you read it.
The main topic of the Q & A and the keynote is on three main areas of innovation in Business Intelligence. Kurt hammers home the areas that I believe have the opportunity for future growth in the BI industry.
Like Kurt I believe the biggest driver for BI should be business driven (hence the name Business Intelligence). Too often BI initiatives revolve around the IT side of things, which bog down in technology driven reporting solutions. There needs to be a partnership between the business and the technology with the main star being the business side.
The other area I wholeheartedly agree with Kurt is on data visualization. I believe this is a key factor in BI adoption and making it easier for business people to analyze their data. I believe IT people have been so focused on building and storing information that we sometimes forget that its just as important how we present the information back to the users. A couple of points that Kurt brings out are areas that i'll start to dive into more detail like search. I believe that search is a great area to add value and drive more users into the BI arena. Imagine the power of fully integrating, not just the surface data elements, Microsoft SharePoint search capabilities with the analytics of Microsoft SQL Server.
The last area Kurt mentions is one that I have brought up recently with my company. I recently mentioned about creating more BI into applications themselves. Not only have your BI solution for a look across the enterprise, but having it built into each of the applications with a focus on that application's function. This would allow more users to become familiar with BI processes, driving them to want and use the enterprise level BI solution.
Its a great read and I encourage you to check out the article. I can't wait to here what else comes out of the summit.