Data Analytics: PASS BA 2015

The Final Day of PASS BA 2015

When looking at conferences to attend, I always have to think about the travel time, the cost of the conference/hotel/flight, and the lost time away from work. So, I do try to be as "choosy" as possible in selecting the ones I want to attend.

They have to provide good knowledge transfer, opportunity for follow-up, and the ability to apply the information gained to practical applications - such as improving the way I work and teach.

I'm pleased to announce that the PASS Business Analystics Conference 2015 met all my criteria and more.

In the few days of the conference (it's a shorter event), I tried to attend sessions across the five tracks available - knowing that I could back-fill some of my missed sessions with the recordings on the post-conference USB (I wish EVERY conference did that). I attended sessions on Big Data with Hadoop by HortonWorks (impressed), sessions on Decision Modeling (very impressed), sessions on Data Access (impressed), sessions on surfacing data, cognitive computing (really, really liked that)... and more.

What especially impressed me about the conference was that I was able to get a combination of architectural information as well as some hands-on information. Not to mention a little show-and-tell on the PowerBI Designer. The mix was useful and worth my time.

My only area of concern was the seemingly heavy focus on Excel as an analytical tool (which it is), but at the expense of governance and life-cycle management.

I'm well aware the world is changing and Excel offers some fast and easy access to larger and larger data sets - but ... you know... I still think we need to be careful about spreadmarts, data islands, and the like. While features of PowerBI address this - it deserves specific mention. We have to always remind ourselves to be careful with giving access to data before we understand how clean and conformed it is.

The end analysis for me is that the conference was worth attending and that I gained value from the experience. I'm looking forward to revisiting the conference via the recorded sessions as well.