Gartner BI Summit 2012: The yin and yang of business and IT on the agenda

London, 6 and 7 February 2012

The Gartner BI Summit ended last week with a presentation of the famous Magic Quadrant. Rachel was one of approximately 600 participants at the event, virtually 100% of whom stated for the Magic Quadrant presentation at the end, a testiment to the level of engagement and interest in the presentations. Rachel wrote a full length piece for the French Bime blog which can be found here and find a summary of some of her thoughts below.

London, 6 and 7 February 2012

The Gartner BI Summit ended last week with a presentation of the famous Magic Quadrant. Rachel was one of approximately 600 participants at the event, virtually 100% of whom stated for the Magic Quadrant presentation at the end, a testiment to the level of engagement and interest in the presentations. Rachel wrote a full length piece for the French Bime blog which can be found here and find a summary of some of her thoughts below.

What I took away from the event: on the whole it was a positive. Quality sessions, researched, documented, well presented, on specific topics with many examples. Gartner analysts were accessible and participants (mainly “large companies”) were keen to discuss the emerging trends.

Having interviewed some of them, it was apparent most CIOs/CTOs attended the event to seek a benchmark and to exchange ideas and information with peers, for example I spoke to Peter Fressonnet, BI technical infrastructure manager of a large French account, he commented:

“Participation at the Gartner BI Summit enables me to get a snapshot of the up-to-date, market trends and best practices in BI, In two days, we can also evaluate relative to other companies (fast benchmarking).”

As was to be expected from a Gartner event there were plenty of statistics reflecting the state of the BI industry. One we found particularly interesting was that in 2012 30% of businesses will be fed by data from outside of the business and by 2013, 15% of BI deployments will combine collaborative BI and ‘social’ applications, “those who achieve this will be the winners”… sounds good to us!

The “new black” to paraphrase Karl Lagerfield is the concept of Business Analytics with its BAT – Business Analytics Team so that it supersedes the BICC – BI competency center… in short BI has to be lots of different things. The ideal marriage is that Business Users & IT team, working together more than ever to achieve a useful BI. On this note the BI Excelence Awards was awarded to Medway Youth Trust for their ability to analyze structured and unstructured data to help more young people find employment. As Timo Elliott quite rightly insisted, he loved this use-case because it was “a story about making a difference!”.

We particularly loved the panel discussion with IBM, Qliktech, SaS, SAP and Teradata. This involved, a moderator who didn’t hold back with his questions, asking them: “What is your failure rate?” and “What is your most demanded improvement?” among other questions.

Read Rachel’s summary of the event by numbers write-up of the event in full on the French blog (in French).

We’ll leave you with one of the many tweets from Timo Elliott during the event : “What’s missing in BI? I’d say “more magic”, using technology to make BI something that “just works””

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(Published with the authority of Dan Sommer, the slide below speaks for itself)