I was in Silicon Valley this week speaking at Software 2006. This was pitched as having 2,500 attendees, and the organizers claimed 1,700 on the day itself, yet at any plenary session I could only count about 400 or so. Indeed on the first morning the main hall was so awkwardly empty that the number of chairs was dramatically reduced for future sessions, presumably to make it seem fuller. This is getting silly, rather like the perennial numbers game between police (”10,000 protestors”) and demonstrators (”100,000 protestors”) played out in countries the world over. As noted previously the trade show seems to be in secular decline, even here in the heart of hi-tech country. The show itself had good speakers and excellent conference admin, yet the partly deserted exhibit hall spoke volumes. Even the bikini-clad girl handing out free gifts (note to the marketing manager at Aztec who hired the model: you may want to consider trying a gimmick that does not look quite so tacky; even in the 1980s this seemed a bit dubious) was unable to lift the atmosphere. The exhibit sponsors did not seem best pleased (sample comment: “four of out of five people who came to the booth were trying to sell us something rather than the other way around”) and the supposed legion of CIOs attending were either cunningly disguised or further optimism on the organiser’s behalf.

Ironically the conference hotel perhaps held the clue as to why attendance at trade shows seems to be so hard to drum up these days. If you go to the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara concierge desk you are greeted not by a person but by a video screen. The concierge herself (the helpful Anna) sits 80 miles away and chats to you, even able to print out directions on the printer at the concierge desk. If even the hotel concierge can’t be bothered to travel to work any more and can do her job quite adequately by video link, is it any wonder that busy executives spend less time at trade shows and more time on webinars?

I enjoyed a thoughtful article by Colin White, long-time database expert and general guru, about data integration and MDM. In it he defines an architecture for data integration that splits out the technologies from the different techniques and supporting applications. He also points out a couple of important things: one is that CDI is not a very useful term, since it implies that it is only about integrating customer data. This is very true, and applies to MDM in general. It is not the case that CDI just means taking half a dozen separate customer data sources and somehow banging them together. In reality it will not be practical to end up with one master source for customer (or pretty much any master) data, so what is important is to be able to to catalog what is out there, map the differences in definitions so that sense can be made of these differences, and a process defined so that changes can be propagated in a controlled way to the various sources. This is much more than just synchronizing updates between SAP and Siebel. Beyond simple things like names and addresses, you also need to consider how customer data is to be classified e.g. into different a market segments or demographic groups. Changing this classification is a non-trivial business process that will require input from various people within (and possibly beyond) marketing, and will likely involve multiple versions that need to be discussed, tested and modified before being published, and then propagated into the various operational systems. As Colin says, “management” is a much more appropriate term here than “integration”: this may seem an esoteric point, but names matter (if you doubt this, ask Vauxhall, whose “Nova” car means “no go” in Spanish)

Another point well made by Colin is how the term “real time” is regularly abused. Since most business intelligence requires some form of analysis, it is rare indeed that it needs to be truly “real time” e.g. looking at the buying patterns in a retail store by branch may usefully show all sorts of things (which items are moving, which promotions are working etc) yet this information has no more meaning of you get it at 14:15 than if you get it at 14:05, or indeed at 11:32. Having it a few minutes more “real time” adds no meaning, yet will cost dramatically more in terms of IT complexity and cost. I would argue that there are very few things indeed in business intelligence that truly require real-time data feeds. Certain operational queries may need this e.g. checking a customer’s credit rating, or looking at overall trading exposure before placing a trade, but these are a small subset of what is usually termed business intelligence.