BI Conference - Self-Service BI with Rafal

Finally I found some time to describe the session that Rafal, following Microsoft invitation, held here in Portugal. As I already wrote in previous posts, Rafal in their specialty is the best in the world. A simple and objective way to show the concepts of Business Intelligence reconciled with several practical demonstrations are fantastic. Of course I attend these moments with great intensity, because they contribute, not only to continue learning, but also to mark and remember these moments. I will describe, in my opinion, the more relevant key points of the presentation.

The first point was approaching the concept of BI as a tool for self-service, where users are rewarded by a high level of autonomy for their daily needs for information.

The second point was the interesting and comical suggestion to be followed by consultants, when they want to sell their Data Warehousing solutions... they should not try to sell a Data Warehouse, but try to sell KPI's... this advise should be follow because the managers do not understand much of these technologies and are more attracted by KPI for making a mapping between their business and technology

The third point was the OLAP off-line functionality, which although this functionality already exists since Excel 2003, only now is beginning to gain more strength with the increasing importance that Excel is having nowadays. (These offline/Local cubes can be browsed by most OLAP client tools)

The fourth point is on the increasing quality of data mining Microsoft products. The feeling is that there is still a little more to move on this matter to “fight” against some competitors such as SAS (Enterprise Miner)... But it promises ... and in my BI thesis I'll show until where

The fifth and final point to highlight is the explanation of the strategy for Microsoft Performance Point Server product... especially on the discontinuation of the Planning module and the inclusion of the monitoring module through SharePoint product... soon will be called the Performance SharePoint Services.

I hope you have left with the feeling of having been present

Regards,
Pedro