Recreating BI and DW— New Architecture and Advanced Technologies, Rome, 9-10 November 2015

Barry Devlin presents a two-day seminar defining a new architecture for IT that emerges from modern business uses of big data, analytics and the Internet of Things and drives the use of advance technology throughout the entire IT system.

Attendees will also receive a copy of Barry’s seminal book “Business Intelligence: Insight and Innovation beyond Analytics and Big Data”.

Business is transforming, rapidly and dramatically. Retailers and supply chains react in real-time to changes in the market, even to changes in the weather. Telcos predict the likelihood that certain customers may churn, based on their Tweets. Logistics companies change routes in response to real-time traffic patterns. Insurance premiums are calculated based on driving behaviour as reported by sensors in your car. Police predict crime and position units accordingly. Health care professionals monitor at-risk elders remotely and react quickly to any emergency. Such changed and reinvented business processes offer cost savings, increased profits and exciting new opportunities.

Modern technology is everywhere driving all this change. It generates enormous quantities of data —Big Data, Social Media and now, most importantly, from the Internet of Things. Sensors, already in smartphones, automobiles and aircraft, are expanding into almost all mobile and many fixed devices. From wearable exercise monitors to food packages that measure freshness, smoke alarms to refrigerators, these devices are connecting to one another over the Internet, and storing exabytes of data in the Cloud. This Internet of Things is allowing us to record and track events, messages and measures on a scale never before imagined. For good or for ill, the world is being quantified. And business must respond, react and anticipate. In such a time of change, decision making becomes both automated and data-driven at one extreme and deeply intuitive at the other.

The rise of these and other advanced technologies over the past half-decade has utterly changed the landscape for business intelligence and data warehousing. From Hadoop and NoSQL to Appliances, In-memory Databases and NewSQL, the data foundation for business is undergoing a fundamental re-architecting. Predictive and Operational Analytics are supplementing the traditional reporting and querying supported by the original Data Warehouse architectures of the 1980s and 1990s.

Business is moving from separated decision making and action taking to fully integrated processes, closely linking information and activities from all areas of the enterprise. Decision making and action taking are becoming ever more tightly bound. Business cycles are dramatically shorter and span company boundaries. We need a new business vision and architecture to reap the very real business benefits promised by new technologies. Business and IT must work closely together in a tightly-integrated approach that I call the “biz-tech ecosystem”.

IT today needs a new architecture that reintegrates all decision making and action taking into the overall processes of the business. That incorporates all of the technological advances above, as well as the long-standing topics of spreadsheets, SOA, metadata, distributed access, web technologies, content management and specialised databases and appliances. This new architecture must provide a comprehensive structure for the full enterprise IT integration demanded by modern businesses. Of course, it directly addresses current data warehousing issues, such as operational BI, executive decision-support, comprehensive information discovery and innovation, and enterprise-wide decision management. And, although novel, the new approach must be an evolution from current data warehouse, operational and collaborative technologies to facilitate adoption.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

  • Business drivers and technical rationale for a new architectural approach
  • The possibilities and challenges of new database and data management technologies, including Hadoop, NoSQL, column stores and other analytic appliances
  • Using data virtualization and ETL as tools for integration of all types of content and data
  • Positioning and using Web, Enterprise 2.0 and collaboration in support of decision-making
  • The importance of user context and roles in decision processes
  • Structure and components of the new architecture
  • Practical steps to grow and improve your current data warehouse to the new architecture

WHO SHOULD ATTEND

  • Enterprise, systems, solutions and data warehouse architects
  • Systems, strategy and business intelligence managers
  • Data warehouse and systems designers and developers
  • Data and database administrators
  • Tech-savvy business analysts