by Angela Guess
Kelle O’Neal recently wrote in the First San Francisco Partners blog, “I’ve only been attending Enterprise Data World (EDW) for the last five years or so, but the conference celebrated its 20th anniversary this year. Kudos to the DATAVERSITY team for another terrific and insightful event! Even in the short time I’ve been attending, I’ve seen the conference demographics shift — and it’s been pretty dramatic. Attendees are not just the technical people who want to be in the business, but people who run data programs from within the business or are responsible for a line of business. This reflects the shift in the data landscape itself. It’s not just talk anymore. People are really seeing and responding to data programs being business initiatives. With this, EDW’s presentations and talk tracks are also evolving, and there is more and more focus on data consumption (analytics) and new data platforms to manage ‘Big Data’.”
O’Neal goes on, “John Ladley, our President and Chief Delivery Officer, also attended EDW. We both found the attendees to be quite engaged and received great feedback (and some nice tweets) about our presentations. I heard back from several people who attended my EDW tutorial on Creating a Data Governance Operating Model: Roles and Responsibilities for Effective Governance and Stewardship. People were very interested in making sure their organization had the right strategy and the executive support and skillsets needed to be successful. They also wanted to understand what those specific skills should be. Also, there was also a lot of interest in exactly what roles are needed in IT to support governance and how to make this partnership most successful. Even just a few years ago, many people thought governance was run from within IT, so this is an interesting and meaningful shift in questions that shows most people agree that governance should be run from within the business.”
Photo credit: EDW