The Data Warehousing Institute

For more than a decade, data quality has been the focus of much IT effort, and today it is among the hottest topics in the industry. Demand for data quality tools and training, new data quality initiatives, and newly formed data quality departments all indicate that we see data quality as a serious issue. Yet substantial data quality improvements are as elusive today as they were ten years ago. In fact, while some companies have made positive progress toward quality of some individual databases, overall corporate data quality continues to deteriorate. This keynote presentation will help you to understand the root causes of this disturbing phenomenon, and to determine steps that you can take to overcome the data quality dilemma.

Will business take back BI? Does the future of BI include you? What happens when the new hires run your DW? What will the next generation of developers do with BI? Existing BI technologies are becoming obsolete. The gap between leading and trailing edges of technology infrastructure continues to grow. The conceptual gap is indicated by the trend toward labeling everything "2.0"—as in "it's different." At what point does it become a generational shift that brings wholesale change? The gap is apparent when looking at how people bring technology from home to work, and then expect at work what they have at home.

Cutting-edge technology comes from the periphery—not from the center. Recall, for example, what happened in IT with the PC revolution of the 1980s. In a similar way, today's data-centric BI model is becoming a thing of the past, with a shift to user-centric BI appearing. Traditional IT organizations are not prepared for the BI of the future. We cheerfully assume that things will continue as they have been. Among the problems—the tools that we buy today aren't the future; they're yesterday's future. In this keynote address Mark Madsen helps you to see the clues to the future of BI, and to understand the future that they suggest.