Paul O’Rorke

Salesforce’s CRM analytics architect, Donovan Schneider, presented an overview at the SDForum BI SIG meeting on May 18th, 2010.  Salesforce’s view of analytics is that it should deliver insight that is accessible to mere mortals, real-time, and trustworthy.

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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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Jeff Eastman gave a presentation on Mahout at the SDForum Business Intelligence Special Interest Group’s meeting on April 21st, 2009.  Mahout is a collection of machine learning algorithms adapted for use on very large data sets using the Hadoop map-reduce platform.  Jeff’s presentation “BI Over Petabytes:  Meet Apache Mahout” gave a good introduction to Mahout and a snapshot of the current status.  His slides are available here and in the SDForum Archives. (continue reading…)

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…)