BI Conference - European TDWI Conference

Today I want to advise you for a big and very interesting conference that will take place at Germany between 14th and 16th June... The 10th European TDWI conference! This conference will provide both business and technology professionals significant opportunities to learn and understand best practices across a wide variety of BI topics.

I can assure you that the conference will be very interesting as well as the country itself that is fantastic! I was there last November 2009 to take the CBIP exams and it was amazing. If you are near Germany or even in Europe don’t waste this opportunity. I hope someday organize CBIP/TDWI exams here in Portugal for all the BI Portuguese professionals interested on this certification. Regards, Pedro.

BI Certifications - CBIP/TDWI Certifications done!

I started writing this post on the return trip to Portugal. It was a very enriching and experience trip, which I reached one more objective I had in mind for more than two years. I passed the four exams and got the specialization in Business Analytics and Data Management provided by The Data Warehouse Institute (TDWI - www.TDWI.org)

To whom I dedicate this achievement...I'd like to dedicate the achievement of this goal, besides of course my family and girlfriend who accompanied me on this trip to Germany, two very special persons. Firstly, to Mrs. Maria José Trigueiros for all messages and follow that gave me along the master. Secondly, to my master adviser Mr. Orlando Belo, who accompanied me on a daily basis during the dissertation. These two persons, directly and indirectly supported me in the last two years, and for sure without them, it would be difficult to maintain my motivation and strength to deepen my knowledge in this amazing world of Business Intelligence.

The exams…Relating to the exams, what I felt was that in fact, the level of difficulty is high and mainly because there is less than a minute to answer to each question. There are 110 questions to be answered in 90 minutes ... Each question has 4 possible answers, where two of them are usually very similar and can be confusing ... When the "mother" language is not English, is even more complicated because some questions and their answers are long.

Fortunately, I was lucky to begin with the apparently the less complicated exam to make, and it allowed me to understand the time management that should be looked at, in order to do other exams. To get an idea, in the first exam when I had only 5 minutes to finish, I had 20 questions to answer... it was an authentic stress and the last question was answered over the last second ... There's no time to think and go back to review the answers ... that is, or you known the answer and quickly respond to a question, or it will be better to go ahead to next question!

It is difficult to describe the best way to prepare for the exams ... Normally the scope of a normal exam it’s a well-defined scope and the issues are related to the context and usually reading a book or two is enough. But in CBIP/TDWI exams it is quite different... you need to have a real-world experience and read several (many) books. But for the preparation and bibliography to make the CBIP exams, I’ll prepare/describe in a future post.

I made and passed in four exams: Information Systems (core), Data Warehouse (core), Business Analytics and Data Management that turns me a specialized professional in Business Analytics and Data Management. The more complicated exam was the Information Systems which is too much technical and detailed.

TDWI Germany Centre...It all started at 8:00 in the morning of last Friday (06-Nov-2009)... in the TDWI Germany centre, located about 30 km’s from Cologne (Germany) where I was accommodated with my girlfriend Joana. The facilities of the centre are very good and the staff really fantastic, especially Simmone and Mr. Guenter Fuhrmeister, CEO of SIGS DATACOM (TDWI Partner) ... They both received me very well and they greatly reduced my stress caused by so many tests on the same day. In addition to all the sympathy and coffees, snacks, drinks, and others... they offered me an amazing book that I will start reading during this week, wrote by Frank Buytendijk. (Click on the book image to preview the book)



The Cologne city...Cologne (German: Köln) is Germany's fourth-largest city after Berlin, Hamburg and Munich, and is the largest city both in the German Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia and within the Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Area, one of the major European metropolitan areas with more than 10 million habitants. It is one of the oldest cities in Germany, having been founded by the Romans in the year 30 BC.
Cologne lies on the Rhine. The city's world famous Cologne Cathedral (Kölner Dom) is the seat of the Roman Catholic Archbishopric of Cologne. The University of Cologne (Universität zu Köln) is one of Europe's oldest universities and internationally renowned for its economics department.

(reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cologne)

The party...At the end it was the party where my princess Joana was waiting for me at the in Cologne... we started enjoy this fabulous city with some of the advices given by Simone. We were focused mainly in the shopping area and near the Rhine river. It is a beautiful city with an intense movement of people not only in the shopping area, but also in the restaurants and bars area. We attend, almost every day, to a Cuban bar where we drank exotic drinks as capiroska, mojito and others!


My sensation is that I’ll return to Germany to take the other CBIP specializations very soon... I hope this post was helpful to you.

Regards,

Pedro

BI Certification - CBIP Exams

Dear friends,
Passed almost a month after the last time I wrote here ... In fact last month has been very hard… and the next also promised with several projects in mind. And one of these projects that I've been thinking for more than 2 years… is the world Business Intelligence certification (CBIP) provided by TDWI.

The TDWI (The Data Warehousing Institute™) was founded in 1995 and provides education, training, certification, news, and research for executives and information technology (IT) professionals worldwide.

Next 6 November 2009, I’ll be in Germany to take the CBIP exams for at least one of the 5 key specialities.

– Leadership & Management
– Business Analytics
– Data Analysis & Design
– Data Integration
– Administration & Technology

I’ll try 3 specialities exams, plus 2 other exams that are required and common to all specialities:

Information Systems
Data Warehousing

I have a lot of subjects to write… I’ll promise (once again) that I’ll be more often writing here…
Regards,
Pedro

TDWI - The importance of BI Standards

As you have noticed from previous posts, I appreciate a lot all the work that is being doing by TDWI ... not only for their great organization but also for its importance in the creation of standards that everyone can follow and speak the same "language". As I have already said earlier, I am currently preparing for the global certification of TDWI Business Intelligence in Germany ... when I feel prepared I take a flight and go to Germany and make the exams… of course with my princess because Business Intelligence only makes sense to me with the unconditional support of my princess Joana.

But not moving too much from the main reason of this post, I want to share with you some interesting posters from TDWI that you should print. Attention… follow this mind map or other posters from TDWI but not be a fundamentalist… you don’t need to follow all this approaches in details, because each project is different and the requirements as well.

TDWI's BI Usability poster visualizes all the elements that contribute to making a BI solution "usable." The mind map clusters the attributes into four categories, each of which has multiple branches that support related attributes. The four categories of usability are: Change Management, Architecture, Support and Analysis/Design.

The poster also depicts the dynamics of BI growth and decline using a model from systems theory. The model shows that usability is one of several key leverage points that BI managers can use to alter systems dynamics and move a program from a negative reinforcing loop to a positive one.

Request your free copy

Also take a look to other posters from TDWI:

Master Data Management

Business Intelligence Maturity Model

Regards,

Pedro