Q&A: Data Strategies and Philosophical Dilemmas, TDWI World Conference Discount

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Last chance to save up to $300 The early registration discount ends January 27! Save up to $300 on registration fees when you register for all six days of the TDWI World Conference in Las Vegas. Use priority code LV62 when registering. Q&A: Data Strategies and Philosophical Dilemmas With Frank Buytendijk BeingFrank Keynotes and Research Frank Buytendijk will deliver the Monday keynote, What Is True? What Is Real? What Is Good? Questions Business Analysts Should Ask, at the TDWI World Conference in Las Vegas. He will also be teaching the courses The Ethics of Analytics and Values, Culture, and Behavior: The True Drivers of Business Performance. BI This Week: What does philosophy have to do with business and technology? Buytendijk: Everything! More than one-third of the top 100 largest economic entities in the world are not countries, but enterprises. Businesses simply cannot be amoral; they affect society deeply. Technology has permeated our lives so deeply that we cannot imagine living without it anymore. One way of defining the purpose of technology is that it should augment human capabilities, yet many of the business systems I know just make you dumb. Philosophy should be fun, particularly for IT professionals; they have a lot in common with philosophers. IT professionals like to think their way through problems, and they are often focused on an ideal world, how things should be. IT professionals also like to think conceptually. These are all things that many philosophers do as well. How are these views related to having a data strategy? The more you think about it, the more creating a data strategy has philosophical implications. For instance, I have been arguing that we live in the days of postmodern IT, where there is no place anymore for a single version of the truth. Postmodernists claim there is only perception, and truth is nothing more than a sufficiently shared perception. With big data being a reality and data sets becoming increasingly complex and distributed, even the computer’s response to a query becomes nothing more than an opinion. We can’t really track the background of the results anymore, and the same query to a different but similar data set will give a different opinion. Creating a data strategy nowadays starts with realizing the postmodern reality. We should move away from the idea that “the numbers speak for themselves” and create a data strategy based on collaboration, triangulation, and discussion—all the things that were part of the 2.0 hype but never had a real business case. Furthermore, I hope that data strategies will start to include the ethical ramifications of data analytics. Read more For help with course selection and other conference information, contact the TDWI Education department today at education or 425.277.9181. TDWI BI Executive Summit Executing a Data Strategy for Your Enterprise Las Vegas, NV // February 13–15, 2012 Don’t miss the upcoming TDWI BI Executive Summit, held jointly with the Las Vegas conference. This three-day event will show you how to establish and execute data strategies that advance both BI and the entire enterprise. Click here for more information	Only 8 days left to save!Early Registration EXTENSION Register by January 27 and Save Up To $300! Use Priority Code: LV62 Download the brochure Hotel Discount The hotel discount deadline is almost here! TDWI has reserved a block of rooms for conference attendees at the rate of $139 a night. Click here for more information. Connect with Us <a href=”mailto:education