Day 1 is in the books!

Just finishing up day 1 of DIG. We had a great first day with the clinics and a cocktail reception to welcome the conference attendees. I have a couple of observations from the day I wanted to quickly share:

1. Glyn Heatley delivered his CPM overview clinic in the morning. He had a pretty diverse group of IT and business functions in the room, which was great. There were a couple of observations from the group that I found interesting. One was the lack of statistical capabilities in a majority of the BI vendor platforms. I found this interesting and is something that I would like to research a bit to see where the gaps are. I am not in anyway knowledgeable in the area of statistical packages like SAS, so it would be interesting to see how big of a functional gap exists.

2. I sat in the Enterprise 2.0 clinic with Jevon and Thomas in the afternoon. This was a great session with a ton of learning. It was a bit like drinking from the fire hose. There were a couple of things that came up that we discussed in the session. The first was the concerns around privacy and sharing of certain types of data. I was surprised to hear that there are some E2.0 software vendors that are focused on becoming SOX compliant. The second interesting discussion was the differences between business taxonomy and folksonomy. Business taxonomy is the practice of establishing structure around things like enterprise data, while folksonomy is the practice of allowing the collective group to describe "objects" as they see them. An example would be tagging of content, like this blog post. The two worlds are very different but when done correctly, specifically creating the appropriate linkages between taxonomy and folksonomy, will enhance an organizations collective ability to describe information.

3. The reception was a great informal setting to meet and great with attendees. I had an opportunity to spend some time with our platinum sponsors Oracle, Microsoft and SAP. They will be participating in our "megavendor" panel tomorrow. Looking forward to the discusson.

That's it for me. It's been a long first day. The good news is that I am even at the tables thus far. The same can't be said for a couple of other folks who will go unmentioned.