Rittman Mead BI Forum 2012, Brighton & Atlanta May 2012 : Call for Papers Now Open!

Mark Rittman -

I'm pleased to announce the call for papers for the fourth annual Rittman Mead BI Forum, which like last year is running in Brighton, UK and Atlanta, GA in May 2012.

Last year's event was the best attended ever, with a mix of technical and project/methodology talks based around OBIEE (Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition), and technologies that support it such as ODI, Essbase, Oracle OLAP and Exadata. This year, we'll of course be covering the new Exalytics product, and we have last year's US Best Presenter winner, Kevin McGinley from Accenture, providing the optional Masterclass on the Wednesday before each event.

This year, we're opening up the presentation formats a bit, so that as well as the regular one-hour presentations, we'll also be inviting presentations in these additional formats:

  • One hour debates, along the lines led by Stewart and myself last year, along topical and controversial topics where the audience will vote at the end - for example, "You probably don't need Exalytics", "
  • Ten-minute "TED"-style talks, where no slides are allowed and you can speak on your favourite topic in a short, lightning session, and
  • Ten-minute "Ignite"-style talks, where you have 20 slides, each of which automatically advances every thirty seconds

Feedback from previous years indicated that sessions that got the audience involved went down the best, and there were also suggestions for shorter, differently-presented sessions. We will be giving free passes to speakers accepted for the one-hour sessions, and 25% discounts for speakers providing the ten minute sessions.

If you're wondering what sorts of topics might be of interest to attendees, here's some requests and thoughts from delegates from last year's events:

Suggestions for Technology-Focused Sessions

  • Integration between ODI and OBIEE (both ways)
  • OBIEE Performance Tuning - including case studies
  • Search, and Unstructured Data
  • Golden rules for deployments and multi-developer projects
  • ODI, Essbase and OBIEE working together
  • Introduction to Endeca
  • BI Applications topics
  • OBIEE and ADF: what are the limits ? When is it a must to use ?
  • OBIEE 11g security - what works, what doesn't, how does it all fit together?
  • Mobile BI - including designing dashboards for delivery via Mobile
  • Multi-tier performance tuning including web tiers, clustering etc
  • Mapping "nuts and bolts"
  • Knowing/administering/troubleshooting the 11g Weblogic/EM layer and the complexities surrounding that
  • Options for using OBIEE for real time or near real time operational reporting
  • Exalytics - Understanding installation/configuration; how managing the caching if you have over 1 terabyte of data; go over new features, etc.

Planning & Methodology

  • Strategy Maps and Scorecards - How and Where to Use Them?
  • How to present information overload for end-users - how do you convince someone they don't need 45 reports?
  • How effectively and quickly are people able to implement various Oracle BI Applications in real world scenarios? And how are they structuring the project to do so?
  • Exalytics - making the business case. What makes a customer choose Exayltics? As of which customer size/complexity/maturity does it make sense?
  • Cloud Delivery Models
  • Data Governance Frameworks
  • Design principles, with regards regards to design, usability, etc.

So what are you waiting for? The abstract submission form is now online, and will close on January 31st 2012, with speakers notified in early February 2012. Get submitting those session abstracts now, and hopefully we'll see you in Brighton or Atlanta in 2012!