It has become very common for any Microsoft speaker - or for
any public speaker for that matter - to say that he is ‘super excited to
be here’. So common, that Alex Payne had to add an extra ‘I am extra
super excited to be here’… J
I thought that was funny as I recall saying exactly the same thing when I gave
public presentations.
Onto the first keynote speaker. I did not have the pleasure
of knowing Ted Kummert. He joined the Data Storage and Platform division
long after I returned back to the French Microsoft office. But his keynote
session made me want to know more about Katmaï, the next version of SQL Server.
Ted has a clear and concise way of presenting things, and a pace and tone of
speech that makes him very understandable by non-American people (such as
myself). Some might say that I have a bias towards Microsoft speakers, but
that’s simply not the case. In my 17+ years at Microsoft, I’ve
attended numerous conferences and heard many Directors, GMs and VPs address
large audiences. I could name a few who were simply boring to death (no, I
won’t be giving any names..).
In contrast, Ted managed to keep my interest, although he
was covering a subject that I knew quite well, pervasive BI. He painted a clear
picture of the Microsoft BI stack and its evolution over the years and
described it as an extensible platform that a) enables a broad reach of
applications to be developed and b) empowers the end-user to make more informed
decisions.
He was supported in his presentation with a demo by Donald
Farmer (former Group Program Manager of Integration Services). Donald gave
a very good demonstration of the Data Mining add-in for Excel 2007, first
showing the integration with Excel (detect meaningful groups in a population of
customers then publish back the information to a SharePoint server) then going
on to showing the integration of the data mining technology in SSIS. I’ve
seen this demo many times but in my opinion, Donald clearly highlighted the two
facets of Data Mining: Collaborative tools for Information Workers and technology
for IT pros. It makes a compelling argument for exploring data mining
capabilities with Office12 and AS2005.
Ted came back on stage to talk about the upcoming release of
SQL Server, code name “Katmaï”. 5 years went by between SQL Server
2000 and the release of SQL Server 2005. He wants to shorten the interval
between two release cycles to something closer to 24-36 months. As I mentioned in
yesterday’s report, it remains to be seen whether or not the market can
absorb more frequent releases of an enterprise product like SQL Server.
However, Ted made the point that Katmaï would extend the capabilities of Yukon
in 4 areas:
- As an enterprise data platform, with a unique declarative
management framework
- By extending the platform beyond relational, with the introduction
of new data types, such as filestream or location-based types (think GPS coordinates)
- With better productivity for the developer with dynamic
development using LINQ and a new entity data framework, that would allow a
developer to manipulate business objects and create a layer of abstraction from
the relational model.
- With pervasive insight, with the integration of the
SoftArtisans technologies to create, view and edit reports directly in
Microsoft Office.
To illustrate his talk, François Ajenstat, Director
in the SQL Marketing organization, came on stage to show a preview of the
integration of the SoftArtisans technology and do the 1st public
demo of Katmaï. He demonstrated the use of the new GEOMETRY data type with a
demo showing restaurant density by zip code. The integration of spatial queries
in a Virtual Earth mockup was interesting and opened the door to a new breed of
applications, but will it prove to be a compelling argument when selling the
SQL Server platform and architecture against Oracle, DB2 and the likes? Time
will tell, but this reminded me of the (numerous and long-running) discussions
we had when I was working on (now defunct) WinFS applications…
Anyway, Ted concluded his keynote with the message that it
was the best time to be in the data business and that there were tremendous
opportunities to extend the reach of BI technologies. With that, I can only agree..
J
The next keynote speaker was Dr. Robert Kaplan, Professor
at the Harvard Business School and developer of the concept of activity-based
costing and balanced scorecard. I really like the concept of inviting external
speakers to talk at Microsoft conferences. It gives a very different
perspective on the technologies that come out of the product groups and provides
a foundation for understanding and explaining the features set of the products
we are advocating to our customers. But this presentation brought me back 20
years in time, and reminded me of the lectures I used to have when I was a
student. There is absolutely no question that the content was well thought and
well presented. It is just the that the slides (black font on white background)
looked like the ones we produced 20 years ago and had nothing to do with a modern
PowerPoint presentation where colors and catchy graphics might sometimes make
up for poor quality content. Here, every word had meaning and the quality of
the content primed over the esthetics of the slides themselves.
This being said, his talk was divided in three parts:
- Definition of a balanced scorecard and how it fits into a
corporate strategy
- The role of an IT organization in creating strategy-focused
organizations (hint: IT is an enabler of business units and corporate strategy
and must move from a culture of basic competency (read: operational efficiency)
to a culture of business partnering with other business units within the
organization).
- The role of software in strategy management.
By far (at least for me), the most interesting part was the
description of what it takes for a corporate strategy to be successful. People interested
in the subject should definitely listen to the talk when the conference DVD
becomes available. A rough summary is given below in the 5 points below:
- Strong executive leadership is required for success in
executing a strategy
- The strategy has to be translated in operational terms.
Strategy maps and balanced scorecard (available in PerformancePoint Server) can
bridge the strategy implementation gap between the leadership team and
front-line employees. Strategy maps articulate what a company is trying to
accomplish while balanced scorecards measure efficiency of the action plans.
- Align the organization to the strategy. Dr Kaplan compared
the efficiency of an 8-men row team with a company with 8 business units. All
rowers have to be aligned along the same goals in order to succeed
- Motivate to make the strategy everyone’s job
- Link the strategy to operations and monitor the rate of success
(or failure) of the strategy at regular intervals, using KPIs, dashboards,
balanced scorecards and other time-driven ABC reports
Again, like Michael Treacy’s talk, I thought this one had
a different flavor from traditional Microsoft presentations, and I praise the
organizers of the conference for inviting external speakers. Definitely an
experience to reproduce for future editions of the Microsoft BI conference.
Given my desire to focus on PerformancePoint for this
conference, I had high expectations for the next session I was attending,
called “PerformancePoint Server Business Modeling and Planning”. Peter
Bull, Group Program Manager, gave the talk but his speaking pace (too fast)
combined with his slides (way too crowded) made it (very) difficult (read:
impossible) for me to follow. He was certainly very knowledgeable on the
subject, but I couldn’t listen to him and read the slides at the same
time. By the time I was done reading the slide (with a font size so small, I
had to make extra efforts to read), he’d moved onto another topic. I must
admit he lost fairly quickly and although I listened carefully and stayed until
the end of the session, I am not sure I understood half the words he said…
A sensation unfamiliar to me, I did welcome the end of the session…
As an AS200x consultant, the chalk talk about “Solving
business problems with MDX” brought me back into more familiar
territories. Richard Tkachuk, Akshai Mirchandani and Robert
Zare hosted this CT during lunch time. Although I do recognize the speakers
for their knowledge of the product (and they’ve helped the BI community
many time over), I have mixed feelings about this session. I am not convinced the
format of the session (chalk talk with open questions) was very conducive to
solving real problems. I think a formal breakout session with carefully
selected issues and well-documented solutions that people would use as a
reference would be a better conduit for exposing and solving business problems.
This being said, there are a couple of take aways from this
session:
- Loops in MDX. There is no such thing and MDX is not like
T-SQL or C#. However, loops can be simulated in multiple ways: a) use PASS
calculations, b) use GENERATE to create a set and iterate over that set, c) use
a stored procedure that calls out to the AS object model
- Use of subSELECTs: they are used in Excel 2007 when you use
a filter. However, one thing to keep in mind is that if the Sub-SELECT refers
to something outside of the sub-SELECT, Visual totals are turned off. We always
return the grand total.
- Best practice with parent-child hierarchies: Hide the key
attribute of the P/C hierarchy (the child attribute) and only allow the parent
to be visible. Hiding multiple attributes can lead to unpredictable results
- Rolling 12 months measure: 1) define a calculated member in
the time dimension that can be used with multiple measures (this is the way the
time wizard works) or 2) create a named set with the last 12 months and SUM on
this set
- Can’t do multi-SELECT on calculated members in Excel
2007. You have to switch Excel 2007 to be in compatibility mode
- Reference dimensions do not behave the same way as regular
dimensions with regards to AUTOEXISTS. Apparently, there is no easy way to do
this in MDX. It was suggested that may be EXISTS on a measure group could be used.
- Emulate semi-additive measures when using Standard Edition
of AS2005. The only way is to write an MDX script to determine the last non empty
child.
- Non_Empty_Behaviour and calculated measures. I did not really
like the answer that was provided that basically suggested that we should avoid
using it or at least be VERY careful when using it, as it was misused most of
the time. Calculation times can really go off the chart if the Non_Empty_Behaviour
directive is not used, and I expected more than this vague answer. The
performance guide and Mosha’s blog were mentioned, and I agree these are
to-date the most knowledgeable sources of information on this topic, but the AS
team should have provided a little bit more that what they did during the chalk
talk.
“Delivering intelligence through MOSS 2007” by Peter
Petesch, Enterprise Technology Architect at Microsoft, promised to be an
interesting session and there were certainly a number of people who agreed with
me, as the session was pretty well attended. However, the demos were very
simplistic. Peter sometimes only showed the available options in the menu, and
did not even use them. The various sections of the presentations seemed like a
collage of each product datasheet.
His talk covered Reporting Services integration, ProClarity
integration, Excel Services integration, BSM/PPS integration and AS
integration. Maybe I am being overly skeptical, but I did not understand what
made SharePoint 2007 so special. OK it can render data that comes from
different sources, so what? I left the session uninspired and a little bit
disappointed, without a really good understanding of all the fuss around MOSS.
There must be something special about MOSS, otherwise people would not be
rushing to try/implement it. Peter’s session just did not convey that
excitement…
The same cannot be said about the last session of the day: “BI
Hour” with Bill Baker (GM, OBA), Donald Farmer (PM), Brian
Welcker (GPM), G. Taylor (Hitachi Consulting) and another member of
the BI team that I did not know (I apologize for not having caught his name
when it appeared on the slide). The theme of the session was “no slide,
demos only and a (moderately organized) chaos. The idea was to use demos to
present in a fun way the various Microsoft BI technologies.
- Donald Farmer presented his “Magic 8-ball” SSIS
package, in an attempt to measure the quality of a data mining algorithm. You
ask a random question and the magic 8-ball provides an answer that can be
compared to the one out of a data mining algorithm…
- Brian Welcker showed his implementation of a custom
reporting services control that surfaced in a fun way (a tic-tac-toe game) the
sales results of the AdventureWorks sales people
- Hitachi Consulting presented a Reporting Services mobile framework
solution that took BI to mobile devices
- The youngest member of the BI team (which name I did not
catch) managed to have Bill Baker wear a blond wig (photos will undoubtedly make
the rounds on the internet. Stay tuned!), put a stocking on his head (or what
looked like one from where I was seating) and showed a PerformancePoint
implementation of the Deal/No deal game.
Between each demo, they threw goodies (at) to the audience.
People who showed the more excitement were more likely to be thrown something,
so you can imagine the atmosphere in the room… At the end of the session,
I managed to get a BI Power Hour T-Shirt. I would have preferred the more
discreet black BI Conference polo the speakers were wearing (which you can wear
while visiting customers), but hey, I’m super excited (…) I got the
BI Hour T-shirt. This one will surely become a collectible!
That session was an awesome way to finish the day and I
really enjoyed the concept of demoing technologies while having fun. Kudos to
the team for thinking of this!
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