MicroStrategy World 2010 - What did You Learn

Had a great week Las Vegas this week at MicroStrategy World 2010.

Michael our VP Consulting and I went down with very different objectives, so I thought I would share with you the evaluation of how I did against objectives (rank is out of 10 with 10 being high).  Maybe you could share yours as well.

1. Spend Time and Support our Partner - MicroStrategy - Rank: 9
2. • Spent time with our alliance manager and the Canadian folks. 
   • Really enjoyed the time and opportunity to drive some good conversation both personal and professional
   • Started some discussion on strategy in some areas
3. Exposure to New Ideas and Concepts - Rank: 8
4. • Mapping and Visualization - really like the new opportunity to overlay with location
   • • BigDataLabs
     • Visual Crossing
     • KXEN
     • Agile BI
5. Discuss BI with Various Companies and Vendors - Rank: 7
6. • Customer Presentations
   • • Citi - MarkHubbard - talked about the SaaS architecture and their implementation.  It was good as he shared some good best practices on dealing with multiple stakeholders as well as some of their lessons learned.
     • McCain Foods - Roman Coba - talked about his Teradata and MicroStrategy vision.  He also did a great job discussing how he broke the re-platform project into it's components to allow for strong iteration in BI as well as standardized metrics.  Also interesting conversation on how he sold the approach to the business and got them on board.
     • A variety of other really interesting conversations throughout on best practices, challenges and general thoughts on BI in their organizations
7. Show Michael more about this area of our business - Rank: 9
8. • I think he almost fell off his chair when he saw the vision of BI.

Comments

[mip]

To your point #8 and it's sub-bullet - you are right. Something at the conference (perhaps all the exposure and the different uses I saw) made me realize one important thing.

BI (and MicroStrategy as the platform in BI) is NOT ABOUT REPORTING. That is what I have felt in my mind that it was, but the conference showed me otherwise. It is really about moving Business Intelligence into the hands of the users. Reporting is one way to do it, but there is a lot more. That is really what excited me.

Was a great trip/conference. I look forward to flushing out my thinking on this and continuing to develop the consulting side of the Project X BI offering.

[Jim]

I think in these conferences if you come awy with one or two good ideas and reinforced some good connections you have done well. I would say you both get a 10.

I was wondering if you heard any ideas that would increase your thinking on rapid results. I mean results for the business not the BI implementation. I think sometimes we forget it is breakthroughs for the business that provide rapid results.

I think the breakthrough come in business insights that are a derivative of the information. For example, a re-examination of a data definition or a business rules can create breakthoughs.

What do you think?