Just a quick wrap up from day 1 at the Seattle OAUG Connection Point EPM/BI conference:
Today started with an overview of BI/EPM from Tobin Gilman, VP EPM & BI Marketing @ Oracle. He highlighted some of the progress Oracle has made progressing their vision to consolidate and integrate the Hyperion and BI applications as well as showing how to take BI to the next level by enabling actions based on exceptions. He also gave a shout out for my visualization presentation after lunch, so I guess I owe him a share of the gate 😉
Again as for most Oracle events there was a great choice of topics, which meant some hard decisions had to be made over which sessions to attend. I ended up attending two planning presentations, to catch up on the latest tips and tricks.
After lunch I gave my presentation on data visualization, which covered the full process from understanding the customers requirements, to designing and crafting reporting, while visiting some of the science and psychology behind how we perceive and interpret graphs and charts.
I also showed some examples of chart/dashboard designs and how to be smarter in building them, using the science and psychology above – to make them easier to interpret and see the trends and key messages. I’ll post a summary of the main points later this week.
The afternoon was closed off by Tom Spitz, who leads the Oracle Unified Method (pdf) – which is a standard based methodology for implementing IT projects, with several views, templates and guidelines which can be used depending on the project.
It was great to catch up with a few people I haven’t seen in a while and meet some new faces. Overall a busy day, with lots to take in – looking forward to tomorrow sessions.
thin sliced 