Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending the IDC Business Intelligence and Analytics Forum at the Marriott Marquis hotel in New York's Times Square. Overall it was a terrific conference; somewhat different from search-oriented conferences in that there was a strong focus on how organizations use the tools and the value they create, in very concrete terms.

Sue Feldman, VP Search and Discovery Technologies, and Henry Morris, SVP Worldwide Software and Services Research, both from IDC, opened the conference with an excellent two-part keynote. Both focused on the emerging trend of unified information access and management. Sue came at it from the search side, showcasing the recently updated results on time spent by knowledge workers. (Not surprisingly, too much time is still spent on finding, manipulating or integrating content - far more than spent on analysis, let alone what she referred to as "thinking time".) Later she showed how unifying information can free up a lot of this time. Henry then came at the same problem from the BI and analytic perspective, showing how adding unstructured data to a traditional data warehouse has significant limitations, and presenting a new architecture for UIA. It was a great setup for the rest of the presentations.

Jay Morreale, CTO and First VP at Merrill Lynch, then presented a series of stories about the evolution of analytic systems. Using a series of implementation stories and use cases, he explained how analytics have become more flexible over time; however, he also showed how access to analytic output has not become more pervasive, something he believes needs to change.

I then presented on the topic of Integrating Unstructured Data into Analytic Environments. My main point was to show how value can be created. Among other things I spoke about an expert location system we are developing; the system analyzes the concepts and entities that are being talked about in digitally published material, including especially Enterprise 2.0 (i.e. user generated media behind the firewall) content. The content is not indexed in the traditional sense; instead, the output of the analysis is structured, analytic data - triples, really, identifying who publishes, consumes or requests information on various topics. I also showed off a 360 degree view of the customer we have implemented for a financial services firm. A true UIA application, it brings together CRM, ERP, news, email, IM, internal documents and the results of a number of web services that analyze the customer's holdings (from the ERP system) and use a variety of analytics to make recommendations. A single query brings back all of the content, from all of the sources, for any given customer (or household) and presents it in an easily navigable format.

Next up was Sandro Levati, Director of IT for Ferrari North America, who focused on something really unexpected: simplicity! He presented a very simple architecture that allows users to analyze data on their own in real-time and either report on it or build a personalized dashboard. My favorite line from his presentation was something along the lines of "new features rarely make software simpler".
We then broke for lunch, and I was delighted to participate in a lively and wide-ranging roundtable discussion lead by Dan Vesset, Program Vice President for Business Analytics at IDC. We started out talking about the value of "analytic orientation" in companies; a forthcoming study provides great insight into both the value and best practices for making use of analytics more pervasive. From there, the discussion morphed into a discussion of sources of error in analytics, the difficulty of diagnosing "multiple versions of the truth" in reports and dashboards, and eventually the excellent book [Black Swan|] by uber-quant/epistemologist Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Following lunch were lively presentations about...

• How JetBlue brings together email and survey data from customers along with other transaction data and reports on it as it if were structured.

• How NYSE Euronext has implemented complex and stringent compliance requirements to dramatically reduce the time and effort required to generate reports.

The day wrapped up with a lively panel discussion about improving decision making throughout the enterprise via "pervasive BI". My sincere thanks to Sue, Henry, Dan and all the presenters for putting on such a great show.

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