Amitech Solutions to Host Wayne Eckerson Director of Research at TDWI to Speak in St. Louis on May 21st, 2009

St. Louis, MO, May 15, 2009 --(PR.com)-- Wayne Eckerson to speak at St. Louis’ Data Warehousing Group conference on May 21.

Amitech Solutions a leader in business intelligence, information management, and performance management solutions announced that it will be hosting Mr. Wayne Eckerson, Director of Research for The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI), on May 21st 2009 to speak at The Data Warehousing Group Conference in St. Louis at the Racquet Club Ladue, 1600 Log Cabin Lane, St. Louis on the following two topics from 8:00 am – 11:00 am. Following the conference, Amitech Solutions is offering our clients a private 1-hour consultation session with Wayne to ask questions, bounce ideas or simply to learn about what’s new and exciting in the BI community.

Introduction to Mr. Eckerson:
Wayne W. Eckerson is the Director of TDWI Research for The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI), a worldwide association of business intelligence and data warehousing professionals that provides education, training, research, and certification. Eckerson has 18 years of industry experience and has covered data warehousing and business intelligence since 1995.

Eckerson is the author of many in-depths reports, a columnist for several business and technology magazines, and a noted speaker and consultant. He authored the book Performance Dashboards: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Your Business published by John Wiley & Sons in October, 2005 and is the creator of TDWI’s BI Maturity Model and Benchmarking Assessment service.

Real-time Data Delivery: The Nuts and Bolts of Operational BI

Wayne Eckerson, Director, TDWI Research
Almost everyone understands the concept behind operational BI: let’s speed delivery of data to users so they can spot problems or opportunities as they arise within core operational processes rather than find out after it’s too late to make an impact. The idea is simple but implementing it is complex. Do you re-architect your data-warehousing environment to support just-in-time data? Or do you create a parallel decisioning environment designed from the ground-up to enhance operational decision-making? What are the tradeoffs for working inside or outside the corporate sanctioned data warehousing architecture, and what organizational and architectural factors might dictate which option you choose?

If you decide to enhance your data-warehousing environment to support just-in-time data and analysis, how do you ensure referential integrity and data quality and where do you perform the necessary transformations? How do you recover from errors when data continuously streams into the environment? How do you interface with enterprise service buses, replication engines, or event messaging backbones? How you deliver requisite scalability, availability, and reliability? How do you train users to make accurate decision on atomic data that is always changing and aggregate that may not be in sync with the detailed data on the screen?

If you decide to build a dedicated operational decision making environment, do you use existing BI tools, an operational data store, or a new-fangled event-driven analytical processing platform to deliver the data? What is the impact on data consistency? How do you keep data in synch across disparate decision-making environments? This topic will address these issues and provide some practical advice on how to architect a just-in-time decision making environment that works.

You Will Learn:
- Whether to build a just-in-time BI environment by re-architecting an existing data warehouse or building a new environment from scratch
- Whether to use trickle feed a just-in-time data warehouse or apply micro batches
- What technical and organizational problems to watch out for when building a just-in-time BI environment

How to make BI Pervasive

Wayne Eckerson, Director, TDWI Research
Usage rates for BI tools have nudged up from 18 percent three years ago to 24 percent today, according to TDWI Research. This abysmally low percentage accounts for most of an organization's power users and a handful of very determined casual users. What can you do to make BI more pervasive? This session will use systems theory to understand the dynamics of BI programs and identify the key leverage points for changing an underperforming program to a turbocharged one, specifically usability, project management, and sponsorship. It will then drill into usability and examine its key drivers: design, architecture, change management, and support, and highlight the right and wrong ways to deliver self-service BI.

You Will Learn:
- The dynamics of BI deployments - positive and negative reinforcing cycles
- Key leverage points for reversing the cycle
- The major dimensions of usability
- The role of ad hoc and self-service in making BI pervasive

About Amitech Solutions
Amitech Solutions, founded in 1999, is a management and information technology consulting firm headquartered in St. Louis. Amitech helps enterprises plan, understand and optimize business performance through the delivery of relevant, reliable and consistent information throughout the organization by employing customized Business Intelligence, Information Management, and Performance Management solutions. We support the efficient and effective implementation of these solutions and strategies by providing a full range of strategic, technical and business advice, and consulting resources. Amitech enables innovative and successful decision-making for clients ranging from insurance and healthcare organizations to financial services firms and large corporations to mid-market companies.

To learn more call 1-866-870-8920.

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