Date for your Diary – How to go from data to decisions

A key part of business intelligence is the collaboration between the business user and the BI IT professional and so Microsoft are running a one day seminar addressed to both of these audiences.  The well renowned BI guru Rafal Lukawiecki is running this on 26th March at Microsoft’s office in Cardinal Place, Victoria London.  Hopefully you can pair up with you opposite number on the business side and use this event to help shape your current thinking and improve that vital collaboration.  

I think this is is going to be very popular so you really need to register here asap

Agenda:

0830-0900Registration

0900-0920 Welcome by Microsoft and Introductions of the Day

After introductions, we begin the day with an overview of the agenda highlighting the key topics to be covered and the logistics of the event.

0920-1040 Improving Insight and Decision Making Using Microsoft Business Intelligence and SQL Server 2008

This introductory session will showcase examples of using BI to improve the running of any organisation. We will stay at conceptual and business levels to ensure that you have a good understanding of the opportunities and the issues that need to be addressed. We will also introduce the terminology and the concepts of BI, such as predictive analysis, performance management, multidimensional data, warehouses, marts, KPIs and so. This session will also give you a good foundation on which to build your BI knowledge from an architectural perspective. We will close this presentation with a brief discussion of a few successful industry case studies.

1040-11:00 Break

1100-1215 Delivering BI Through Microsoft Office System 2007

· In this session you will see a live showcase of BI offerings from the perspective of an executive, a manager or a knowledge worker. You will see decision making support through SharePoint Server. We will visualise insight through dashboards and using SQL Server Reporting Services. Above all, we will demonstrate the tight integration of various Office components, notably of Excel with the BI platform. You will see how to perform market basket analysis and new ways to work with pivot tables and multidimensional data without ever leaving Excel’s friendly yet powerful environment.

1215-13:15 Lunch

1315-1430 Aggregating Knowledge in a Data Warehouse and Multidimensional Analysis

The first more technical session of the day will look at the back office of BI. We will look at the data movements in your organisation, managing it with SQL Server Integration Services to build a working Data Warehouse. We will optimally prepare this data for advanced multidimensional analysis by creating suitable aggregations, hierarchies of attributes and building efficient cubes. This session will stress the importance of data quality and we will show you ways to improve it at its basic and organisational level’s.

1430-15:00 Break

1500-1600 Finding Hidden Intelligence with Predictive Analysis of Data Mining

The final t

echnical session of the day will concentrate on the most future-oriented technology, data mining. We will show you how to find patterns and hidden intelligence in large amounts of data. You will learn how to look for it using a variety of sophisticated techniques. Naturally, we will show you how to forecast and predict the future events and measures in a trustworthy and reliable way. If you ever wanted to build a predictive KPI, this session will show you how to do it. At the end of this session, and of this day, you will know what can be done to gain insight into tomorrow’s unknown to make better decisions today.

1600-1630 Business Intelligence with Microsoft – Summary and Q&A

We will close the day by summarising the functionality of the entire Business Intelligence platform, once again looking at a BI project from an end-to-end perspective. We will also dedicate a good amount of time for answering any remaining questions from the audience.

Technorati Tags: Business intelligence,data mining,Office,SQL server 2008,performance management,Rafal Lukawiecki,Project Botticelli