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Wrap of ITWeb BI Summit

By Allyson Towle
Johannesburg, 27 Mar 2017
Delegates networking with our sponsor South Africa Qlik Master Resellers.
Delegates networking with our sponsor South Africa Qlik Master Resellers.

The 12th ITWeb Business Intelligence Summit 2017 took place on 14 and 15 March 2017 at The Forum, Bryanston and was a huge success. ITWeb would like to express its heartfelt gratitude to the speakers and sponsors who made this a possibility.

Now that we have had the time to review the event, we can provide you with the key takeways:

We hosted over 300 delegates, speakers, guests and sponsors for two jam-packed conference days and over 70 people attended the two-half day workshops hosted by our keynote speakers Dr Barry Devlin, 9sight Consulting and Mark Madsen, ThirdNature (US). There were two international speakers; six industry perspectives; numerous thought leadership and industry speakers; local and international keynote presentations as well as the latest insight into social media and mobile analytics trends, making this Africa's largest gathering of business intelligence, analytics and data science professionals.

A fractured picture

Mark Madsen of Third Nature explained that with beer and diapers, fragmentation and ambiguity is a problem. "There are mixed answers, and some correlations, but are you asking the right questions, and under what set of circumstances is it true?" Enterprise reality is that causality is greater than correlation, he adds. "You wouldn't do anything without some idea of cause or context. Correlation isn't enough. So what is the explanation? What is the defining function linking the two together?" This is the same thing that is happening here with the beer and diaper story, he says. "With this, the model is seeing pieces of a whole, because each of these models is independent with its own observations and data, like a snapshot that covers only the focal point of your eye. There are multiple pieces not independent, but dependent on a larger frame of reference." When they are lined up together, the larger scene emerges in the same way that your brain puts together a scene by focusing on individual pieces and assembling the picture from them as your focus moves from place to place, concludes Madsen.

Social data

Meet Mark Madsen during the 1:1 interview.
Meet Mark Madsen during the 1:1 interview.

According to BrandsEye CEO JP Kloppers, there are three main points to consider when analysing social data. Firstly the company needs to ask whether or not this is relevant to its business or research. Secondly, which is possibly the most complex, is sentiment measurement. Thirdly, is topic analysis: "This offers an additional layer of insight to your data and can provide granular insight into the reasons why people are expressing sentiment. This will offer a clear indication of what sub-topics constitute both the positive and negative conversation themes," he notes.

Executive fatigue

"I've spent a lot of time in my career trying to figure out why it is that despite all that money spent on BI projects and initiatives, less than 30% of these projects are successful," said Bill Hoggarth, director of Dataways. He pointed out: 'BI is not new. It's been around for many decades and there's a significant level of executive fatigue when the topic of investing in BI projects comes up."

Data governance is a business process

Dr Rado Kotoro, InfoBuild (US) said there are three principles of data governance which have to be applied: "Firstly, organisations have to think of data as a business asset and also manage it as an asset. Secondly, they must use data to be more innovative in a business; this will help the organisation provide clients with a variety of choices. Thirdly, data must be used as a as a monetisation tool, when you start collecting data think about how the business can use it to be monetised".

Data disrupted

Engage with your speakers during the Q&A time after each session.
Engage with your speakers during the Q&A time after each session.

Maritza Curry, Business Intelligence manager at Woolworths, explained: 'Our world is changing at a fast speed and in ways that we couldn't have foreseen five years ago. These new start-ups, like Uber and Airbnb, have managed to use big data in ways that make them understand their competitors and their business environment much better than most companies do... start-ups are using data not only to disrupt established industries but also to transform them and in some cases, to completely reinvent these industries."

The data explosion

According to our 2017 lead sponsor, South Africa Qlik Master Resellers, "2017 is the year of data literacy - competence in finding, manipulating, managing, and interpreting data, including text and images. Clients are now experimenting with data devices and data platforms. There's no doubt the data is exploding. We also have to consider that there is internal and external data within the organisation. We have social media data which raises questions like what do we do with that social media data and is it pertinent to our organisation?" Adam Barrie-Smith, expert services manager at South Africa Qlik Master Reseller left us with this message: "Every organisation needs to manipulate and understand data to eke out its value, and to be cognisant of the fact that IT doesn't have time to re-invent and re-work the ecosystem in line with every discovery."

Watch this space for more information on ITWeb Business Intelligence Summit 2018!

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