Paul O’Rorke

James Taylor, CEO of Decision Management Solutions, gave a talk on “Performance Management and Agility” at the monthly meeting of the SDForum BI SIG on Tuesday, April 20th. He argued that traditional BI and performance management result in dashboards that measure and monitor like instrument clusters in cars. But what is needed is something more like the cockpits in airplanes: there should be buttons and levers and so on that enable the “pilot” to act on the information presented by the dashboard. James argued for combining performance management with decision management (a term he pioneered) so that information supports decision-making that leads to action.
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DJ Patil talked about the “Analytics Behind LinkedIn:  A New Model for Analytics and Business Intelligence” at the SDForum BI SIG meeting on Tuesday, July 21st, 2009.  Patil is the Chief Scientist at LinkedIn and plays several other important roles including Sr. Director of Product Analytics and Chief Information Security Officer.  Patil is in charge of analytics reporting on LinkedIn’s businesses (and has some responsibility for P&L – profit and loss) and also is in charge of product analytics. While many companies including startups strive to be “data-driven” Patil’s presentation focused on LinkedIn’s efforts to build products leveraging data.
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I gave a presentation titled ”Business Intelligence on a Budget:  Open Source Business Intelligence” (OSBI) at the monthly meeting of the SDForum BI Special Interest Group on February 17th, 2009.  The presentation provided a quick snapshot of the current state of OSBI software.  In general, open source software has become an accepted and integral part of many businesses’ core web applications and services. The trend toward open source has accelerated recently in the BI space as well. With open source offerings reaching new levels of maturity and trustworthiness and with total costs on the order of a tenth of the cost of closed source software, open source BI is expected to grow much faster than the overall BI market. The adoption of OSBI software is expected to triple by 2012. With budgets tightening in the ongoing recession, many companies would do well to consider whether they can save money by using OSBI software. (continue reading…)

Todd McKinnon, Senior Vice President for Software Development, Salesforce.com gave a presentation on Force.com’s architecture at the PARC Forum in Palo Alto on December 18th, 2008:  ”The Force.com Multitenant Architecture: Understanding The Design Of Salesforce.com’s Internet Application Development Platform.” Click here for an abstract and bio. PARC posts movies of PARC Forum presentations at the PARC Forum archive. In the following, I will summarize some of more salient parts of the talk concentrating mostly on Salesforce’s advantages and innovations.

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