Third instalment of my series about TDWI World Conference I attended in Chicago in 2008, coming from my other blog, The Big Integration, which I will close soon because you never read it. Funny, what I saw and learned during that week is now so hype in Web Analytics!
OK, now I’m beginning to understand why people who were telling me that 6 days was exhausting were smiling. I’m starting to feel it in my bones. This was another day packed with information. The day started with Michael L. Gonzales again with a session called “HandsOn-Statistical Analysis for BI”. I have known that I needed to revisit statistics for a while (on Jim Novo’s advice), and I got confirmation again today. Actually, Michael was telling us that BI people as well tend to forget their importance. So, we went over exciting stuff such as descriptive statistics, linear regression, and control charts. I’m not being sarcastic here: it is really cool and exciting stuff. I wish I knew more, and will definitely hit the books. When I asked him about what books could be good, Michael suggested the two tomes in the For Dummies collection, even though he does not like them in general. However, these ones seem to be particularly good for a re-introduction to stats.
The afternoon was spent with Wayne Eckerson, whose book Performance Dashboards, has been an inspiration to me for some time. Although Wayne had way too much material to be covered in half a day, we went over very fundamental stuff in dashboarding: KPIs, business architecture, system architecture, design and layout, etc. I can tell you that dashboarding in BI is very heavy stuff. Projects can run in the hundred of thousands of dollars, given their complexity. This has nothing to do with what our Web Analytics vendors call dashboard. Aren’t we tired of those meaningless graphs we often scroll down over? I actually wish they were all under the tables!
OK, you can tell my the length of this post that I’m fried. Got to go to bed early tonight; tomorrow will be spent on data requirements analysis and profiling. Gulp!