Andrew White

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Andrew White
Research VP
8 years at Gartner
22 years IT industry

Andrew White is a research vice president and agenda manager for MDM and Analytics at Gartner. His main research focus is master data management (MDM) and the drill-down topic of creating the "single view of the product" using MDM of product data. He was co-chair… Read Full Bio

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Trip Report – Day 1 at Gartner’s BI Summit

by Andrew White  |  March 9, 2009  |  Comments Off

Kurt Schlegal and John van Decker kicked off the Gartner BI Summit with the Key note – entitled, “Overcoming the BIg Discrepancy – How BI Can do Better (with less)”.  The key take-away for me was that despite the importance IT puts on BI (it has been the top priority for IT, according to CIO surveys of the last few years) and the investment in BI, the success of the technology – according to the business, is very low.  Kurt said something like, “BI was successfully adopted by business in 30% or less of environments”.  

 

The speakers highlighted how the Summit would explore this discrepancy in order to help attendees make progress in their business, by increasing the value of BI to the business.  I thought the headlines were practical and seemed to offer various guard rails for users to grasp on to.  The part that I thought was missing was the lack of dialog around ‘decision making’.  The focus was very much on the “supply side” of the argument – how to make BI more valuable.  A focus on how and why firms make decisions would have been (I think) more of a “demand side” argument.  However, knowing something about the content (‘wink wink’) I know that the content is there.

 

Attendance looks good – reportedly over 700 – but the key note was packed with lots of folks standing at the back (including me). 

 

I had breakfast with one chap – a CFO no less, who said he was here with his CIO and another IT person.  This was a firm that was struggling to build the business case for BI tough he felt they needed the technology.  His goal oriented around how to bight off small parts of BI rather than trying to swallow the whole thing at once.  He went on to talk about how, at source, data quality is a real big issue for his enterprise.  He said, “BI is great, but if you don’t clean the data up first, it wont help much”.  This is true – I think – though for many, BI (and MDM) come with their own dose of “applied data quality”.  I guess you could say that data quality is like oxygen: if you lose it, you suffer.  And not much else works at peak performance when you are in short supply.

 

Off to coffee break and a client 1-1.

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