Teradata Universe

A kind gesture to a poor academic (thanks Sean) means that yours truly is off to Sydney! I'll be attending Teradata Universe at the Sofitel Wentworth, in mid-March. That's right, I'll be discovering "how to throw the shackles off (my) organisational data and turn it into enterprise intelligence that creates new opportunities for business growth, increased efficiency and improved customer relationships." Phew, and all in just 2 days! I joke, but I am actually looking forward to it.

There are a number of sessions that interest me, such as "Data Governance: Applying Governance to a dysfunctional BI environment" but the one I'm really interested in is "The Value Proposition for a Data Warehouse Platform." This session is presented by Jim Blair, from Blue Cross/Blue Shield. Those of you up with the research on data warehousing governance (as I plan to be by March!) will recall a paper lead-authored by Hugh Watson, appearing in a 2004 volume of Decision Support Systems. The paper presented the DW governance program at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, or "BCBSNC" for short (doesn't that just roll off the tounge?). BCBSNC won the Data Warehousing Institute's (TDWI) Best Practice Award in the data warehousing governance category, and it will be interesting to hear what he has to say.

I'll post a summary of the event after the fact. Cheers.