Fast forward three years and what I saw was troubling.

First; there appears to be a huge drop off in attendance levels. At the key note addresses, TDWI use to fill the one of the largest of the conference rooms at Caesars. In comparison, over the span of the two keynote addresses this year TDWI barely filled a room that was a third of the size that it use to fill. The first key note was pretty flat in it’s content and didn’t really go anywhere. The second, presented by Russel Glass (LinkedIn), was great, but there was barely anyone in the room.

Second; every session I attended was sparsely populated, to the count of less then half full in most cases. Rooms were set for 40 -50 people in my sessions and the largest was 35. The draw to that one was Wayne Eckerson, and what he was talking about was a book he wrote 3 years ago.

Third; the sessions I attended were a bit dated, and basic. Maybe it was poor choices on my part, but this was my experience. Data Integration featured nothing new… ELT, Master Data Management, and Data Virtualization. The innovation sessions I attended were okay, but they need refined. They tried to cover a lot of content at a high level, but it needed to be a deeper dive on one or two methods. Most of us left feeling unfulfilled and the content got repetitive. Wayne Eckerson’s class was a discussion about the book he wrote three years ago. To prove the point of how dated that was, none of the people profiled in the book still worked in that role or that company any longer.

Lastly, the vendor situation was abysmal; 2 partners of TDWI were in attendance out of a possible 15. The vendors that are here are all just entering the market and trying to make a name for themselves. It’s great those small vendors are here, but without the major vendors and players there is a lack of excitement. When you have the major vendors skipping your conference it sends a very clear message that the relevancy for them was no longer present and there was no value in their attendance.

On a side note, TDWI tried to get people engaged via social media with a hashtag and twitter giveaway, but the population of tweets came from about 20 people where weren’t associated with TDWI or the vendors who were present. It’s worth noting that at a glance the average attendee at TDWI is over 45 (with a few exceptions) and active social media activity and engagement may be beyond the average attendee’s generation.
One of the major themes of the TDWI World Conference was “Innovation” and I’m thinking TDWI needs to put some innovation in to practice.

So how does TDWI, a subsidiary of 1105 Media, evolve to get data professional engaged again? How do they reengage the vendors to make them see the value in the conferences? How do they remain relevant in a rapidly changing landscape that is all about the data? There are more data professionals than ever before, both technical and business people alike, so how does TDWI tap in to that pumping vein of data passionate people?

TDWI was and is known for their educational content, but it seems to be a bit of “retread” now. Same instructors, with the same classes, with the same technologies. I realize that TDWI prides itself on being agnostic when it comes to vendors and platforms, but one possible solution would be providing vendor slanted walk-through or hands on sessions with these platforms. The trick with these would be to force the vendors to not sell the product, just walk use through use cases and teach us the ins and outs of the product. I liked the Short Sessions concept, but the instructors kept running over. They have to tighten up the content and stop on-time. The injection of some new blood in the instructor ranks wouldn’t hurt either. Let’s get some of the leaders in the industry TODAY in the rooms. Get the folks who are blazing the trail in Big Data, Cloud, Data Visualization and Predictive Analytics and have them build a curriculum around their successes and pitfalls.

The receptions and lunch formats needs to change.  I think the “Sticker Grand Prix” needs to end. I realize it’s to encourage people to mingle with the vendors, but let’s face it; if people want to talk to vendors they will, if they don’t they won’t. The other problem was with so few vendors it was a lot of “hello again, give me a sticker” by the third vendor session. I did appreciate the lack of drink tickets in favor of an open bar. If the vendors and TDWI want to give things away, give them away; but you must be present to win. There needs to be more focus on the networking and social aspect of the receptions; that’s really what they are for… but people didn’t attend.

Perhaps on the night of the vendor reception the vendors should set up “hospitality rooms” and get people moving around like they did in previous years. Maybe some live entertainment to encourage people to attend the reception. In years past Microsoft set up a few Xbox 360’s with Kinect and people came in and played games and socialized.

Maybe it’s time to flip the script and TDWI should have a booth at vendor conferences and events to advertise and reach a new audience. But if they are going to make that investment, they need to be ready to meet the needs of the new data professionals, not the old guard still arguing Kimball vs Inmon.

With that said, the bottom line is people aren’t going to come back to a conference that isn’t evolving and valuable, regardless of age. In a day and age where budgets are tight an expensive conference that is showing me the same stuff I’ve seen previously isn’t a high value proposition.

I did share this feedback with TDWI shortly after the conference, but I wanted to share my thoughts publicly now that some time has passed.

It was only a matter of time before this move towards mobility reached the enterprise. I can walk in to any given meeting at work and the majority of the attendees from the business side of the company are sitting at the table with their iPads. My company has adopted mobile, realizing that it isn’t going away, and even more interesting is that they have chosen to be agnostic in regards to platform, which can make security and common application availability a challenge.

 The Key Question: Device Specific or Universal Mobile Apps?

Business Intelligence vendors are beginning to invest heavily in their mobile footprint and it seems that many are heading in the direction of having dedicated applications for each operating system. Today, the majority of tablet users are iPad, but as Android, WebOS, Blackberry enter and expand their presence in the market I question if this trend will continue, especially given tremendous growth that Android devices have shown lately. There are two issues that I see with the “dedicated application” approach to mobile BI. The first is the high cost associated with developing and maintaining what could potentially be five operating systems, not to mention the different versions and capabilities of each. My second, and much greater concern, is the user experience in general as they consume the information being provided. While the operating systems on the surface are similar in the user interface, the underlying systems could potentially be vastly different to the point where features that work beautifully in one OS could may not work in another, or may work, but not as cleanly as they do in other operating systems.

 The Universal Mobile Approach

I recently had a discussion with someone from Microsoft and I asked them when they would be bringing something mobile to market, hoping that something would be coming out with the Denali release of SQL Server. He said that there was currently a passionate discussion happening internally as to how they wanted to approach mobile BI, with the option being the “dedicated application” approach or developing an agnostic delivery approach using HTML 5. To me, it only makes sense that the agnostic approach would be the way to go from a cost savings perspective, but it hinges on the continued standardization and acceptance of HTML 5 as a common standard, and each OS, or 3rd party vendors, would have to develop a browser that met those standards. With that said, you can deliver a better overall user experience with a device specific application, but if they develop for a device that becomes obsolete, they will have wasted a lot of resources. Building device specific apps on the wrong platform may turn out to be like buying a library of Betamax videos back in the 80s – not too useful as the world standardizes on VHS.
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Companies like LogiXML have moved quickly and chosen to go with the universal browser based approach, and other BI software companies like Microstrategy have built robust device-specific mobile applications to deliver BI content. As the evolution of mobile BI continues it will be interesting to watch which path each company will go down for delivery.

The question is “Who is right?” and right now the answer is: it depends on your BI needs and goals. In BI, there is rarely a one-size fits all recommendation, but the pros and cons of each side are fairly clear. If you are comfortable standardizing on only one device, or maintaining apps across multiple operating systems, a highly customizable device-specific approach may work for you. On the other hand, the browser-based approach appeals to be people who need to move quickly, change directions fast, and who want to create mobile apps out of the BI apps that they have already deployed throughout their company.

Regardless of which appeals to you, if you’re like most BI professionals, you’re going to need to pick an approach and move forward quickly.

Shortly after I started my current job, the CEO during a town hall meeting said that he looks forward to the day he can get all his reports on his iPad, and I hope that that day is soon. Do I believe that the desktop is dead and that mobile devices will be the only window into business data? No, not yet, but I do believe that we will continue to see a growing trend towards mobile BI and general data consumption as we live our lives “on the go.”

 An edited version of this article appears as a guest blog for LogiXML.
Thanks to LogiXML for inviting me to write on their blog.