Today was the first day of the Microsoft BI conference in Seattle.
The day started with a series of keynote sessions, the first one by
Jeff Raikes, President of the Microsoft Business Division and the second one by Michael Treacy, author of many books on corporate strategy analysis and former MIT professor.
Alex Payne, Group Product Manager in the BI team, introduced both speakers and it was finally good to be able to put a face on a name that comes very often in the Microsoft BI circles..
Jeff Raikes, as usual, made a good presentation and his “BI as a self-service for knowledge workers, using their day-to-day-tools” really resonated (at least with me..:). He was supported by 2 demos, one showing the end-to-end BI story (by Christina ???) and the other one about Performance Point Server by Bruno Aziza. Let me take this opportunity to vent a little bit about something that really bothered me during the demos. Besides, it seems to be a common theme here, as I had the same complaint about other sessions too. Isn’t it well known that when you’re demoing to a large audience, you should increase the fonts size so that the text can be readable from the back of the room? I was sitting about halfway through the room and I could barely read what was on the screen.. I can’t imagine what people sitting at the back could see.. It’s either because I’m too old, or because the fonts size was way too small.. Other than that, the session was good for a keynote session.
I particularly appreciated the second keynote session, by
Michael Treacy. I don’t know if it was because the subject was less familiar to me than the Microsoft strategy/product roadmap or because the tone of the speaker was different from the one used by traditional Microsoft speakers. In any case, I found that his narrations about corporate strategy and productivity improvement were a welcome change from traditional keynote sessions. This made me want to go out and buy his books “
The Discipline Of Market Leaders” and “
Double-Digit Growth: How Great Companies Achieve It – No Matter What”. His theory is that speed of learning, innovation and strategic adaptation to market changes are the ultimate characteristics of companies that can sustain double-digit growth across a long period of time. Among his examples were Toyota (for their reliability efforts) and Microsoft (for their capacity of transitioning to new waves: DOS->graphics, Client-Server, Internet and now BI). This session is one that I’ll definitely watch again when the Conference DVD goes out… The only thing that went above my head was his joke about him being from Boston and something about the Red Skins. I’m pretty sure that only the American part of the audience fully appreciated this cultural joke..
After the two keynote sessions, we went into breakout sessions time.
For this conference, I decided to get more familiar with the Performance Point Server offering. Coming from an AS2005 background, that was a natural thing for me to do. However, I did also want to attend the chalk talks about Analysis Services. Unfortunately, this brought some conflicts into my schedule, as most of the interesting AS2005 chalk talks happened at the same time as the Performance Point chalk talks. For example, at 10:30AM, I had “Real-time BI and advanced process setting for AS2005”, “PPS Planning architecture” and “Large scale AS implementations: lessons learned” at the same time. Because I could catch the PPS talk and the large scale AS talk later in the conference (although not with Dave Wickert as the speaker), I decided to attend the real-time BI CT.
Paul Sanders did explain incremental dimension processing and proactive caching, but I guess I already knew too much about that subject for it to totally capture my interest. I wished he’d talk about slowly changing dimensions and provide more details on challenges around incremental processing, but that was probably too much for the audience. Retrospectively, I probably should have gone to Dave’s chalk talk.. Oh well, I’ll catch him on the conference DVD..
I then went to the “Microsoft Office Performance Point Server 2007 Monitoring & Analytics architecture” talk.. Whff.. What a name!
Russ Whitney did a good job of presenting the architecture of the Dashboard designer and the runtime environment. Based on the questions that were asked, it seems that most of the audience was already familiar with Business Scorecard Manager 2005 and ProClarity Analytics. Myself not being an expert in any of those two products (I only have a theoretical knowledge of both), I sometimes did not fully understand the questions that were asked, but this will change, I swear..:-) I found interesting the ability to bring together structured data and unstructured data in the same scorecard (Actuals in an AS2005 cube with Budgeted in an Excel spreadsheet for example). I definitely have to have a closer look at the CTP2 of Performance Point Server. CTP3 should be availablearound mid-June.
In the afternoon, I had to make a tough choice between
Robert Zare’ session on “Practical Design Techniques for Modeling Common Business Scenarios” and
Chris Webb’ session on “Writing MDX for KPIs”. In the end, I decided to go to Robert’s session because of most of my engagements as a consultant focus on modeling (vs. efficient MDX writing). Boy, that session was crowded… Robert was speaking in the 6E grand ballroom and the room was almost 80% full. This was an interesting presentation of the Adventure Works sample database and its associated BI modeling scenarios. Unfortunately, I thought he went too quickly over certain aspects that, in my opinion, can be the source of many performance issues, such as many-to-many relations, currency conversion, use of measure expressions. When you listen to him, everything seems easy, whereas, in the real life, it’s not.. His session, rated a 200 level, was more of a 300-level session.
To finish my day, I attended
Elaine Andersen and
Rex Parker’ talk on “PPS Monitoring and Analytics”. This session had a good mix of slides and demos. Just starting with Performance Point, I appreciated the demos that built one upon another. Elaine started with the creation of a basic scorecard, sourcing the data from an AS2005 cube. Rex then added integration of a thin chart, an analytic grid and a strategy map. He then moved on adding parameterization to the scorecard before Elaine finally completed the demo with integration of Excel non-structured data (budget information shown along with AS2005 actual data). CTP3 should be exciting with integration of the report types, such as Excel services views.. I can’t wait to download the bits and try them on my laptop!
That’s it for today. Tomorrow will be another full day..
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