Previewing Three Sessions at the Brighton Rittman Mead BI Forum 2015

As well as a one-day masterclass by myself and Jordan Meyer, a data visualisation challenge, keynotes and product update sessions from Oracle and our guest speaker from the Oracle Data Warehouse Global Leaders Program, the Brighton Rittman Mead BI Forum 2015 has of course a fantastic set of speakers and sessions on a wide range of topics around Oracle BI, data warehousing and big data. In this blog post I’m going to highlight three sessions at the Brighton BI Forum, and later in the week I’ll be doing the same with three sessions from the Atlanta event - so let’s start with a speaker who’s new to the BI Forum but very well-known to the UK OBIEE community - Steve Devine.

Steve is one of the most experienced OBIEE practitioners in the Europe, recently with Edenbrook / Hitachi Consulting, Claremont and now working with Altius in the UK. In his session at the Brighton BI Forum 2015 Steve’s going to talk to us about what’s probably the hottest topic around OBIEE at the moment in his session "The Art and Science of Creating Effective Data Visualisations". Over to Steve:

"These days, news publications and the internet are packed with eye-catching data visualisations and infographics - the New York Times, the Guardian or Information Is Beautiful to name but a few. Yet the scientists and statisticians tell us that everything could be a bar chart, and that nothing should ever be a pie chart! How do we make sense of these seemingly disparate, contrasting views? My presentation provides an introduction on how graphic design principles complement the more science orientated aspects of data viz design. It will focus on a simple-to-apply design framework that brings all of these principles together, enabling you to create visualisations that have the right balance of aesthetics and function. By example, I’ll apply this framework to traditional BI scenarios such as operational and exploratory dashboards, as well as new areas that BI tools are just beginning to support such as commentary and storytelling. I’ll also look at how well Oracle’s BI tools address today’s data visualisation needs, and how they compare to the competition."

On the topic of data visualisation, I’m also very pleased to have Daniel Adams from Rittman Mead’s US office coming over to the Brighton BI Forum to talk about effective dashboard design. Daniel’s been working with Rittman Mead clients in the US and Europe for the past year helping them apply data visualisation and dashboard design best practices to their dashboards and reports, and he’ll be sharing some of his methods and approaches in his session "User Experience First: Guided information and attractive dashboard design":

"Most front end OBI developers can give users exactly what they ask for, but will that lead to insightful dashboards that improve data culture and escalate the user xperience? One the biggest  mistakes I see as a designer, are dashboards that are a cluttered collection of tables and graphs. Poorly designed dashboards can prevent users from adopting a BI implementation, diminishing the ROI.  In this session, attendees will learn to design dashboards that inform, instruct, and lead to smart discussion and decisions.  This includes learning to visualize data to convey meaning, implementing attractive visual design, and creating a layout that leads users through a target rich environment. We will walk through a series of “before” and “after” dashboards that demonstrate the difference between meeting a requirement, and using proven UX and UI design concepts to make OBIEE dashboards insightful and enjoyable to use."

Finally, someone I’m very pleased to have over to the Brighton BI Forum for the first time is Gerd Aiglstorfer. I first met Gerd at an Oracle event in Germany several years ago, and since then I’ve noticed several of his blogs and the launch of his Oracle University Expert Sessions on OBIEE development, administration and RPD modelling. Gerd is one of Europe’s premier experts in OBIEE and Oracle BI, and for his inaugural BI Forum presentation he’ll be deep-diving into one of the most complex topics around repository modeling in his session "Driving OBIEE Join Semantics on Multi Star Queries as User":

"Multi star queries are a very useful and powerful functionality of OBIEE. But when I examine reports developed by business users or report developers I often find some misunderstandings on how it is working and queries are build by OBIEE. As additionally the execution strategy in OBIEE 11.1.1.7 has changed to generate SQL of multi star queries I had the idea to introduce the topic at the BI Forum. Thus, it's a quite interesting topic to go into technical details of OBIEE SQL generator engine. I'll introduce how users can drive join semantics on common fields in multi star queries. You will get a full picture of the functionality for a better understanding of how report creation affects SQL generation. I recognized some inconsistencies during my tests of the new OBIEE 11.1.1.7 logic in January 2014. I will demonstrate the issues and would like to discuss if you would say: "It's a defect within the SQL generator engine" - as I do."

Full agenda details on the Brighton Rittman Mead BI Forum 2015 can be found on the event homepage, along with details of the optional one-day masterclass on Delivering the Oracle Information Management and Big Data Reference Architecture, and our first-ever Data Visualisation Bake-Off, using the DonorsChoose.org dataset.