The @BIAConference in February “It’s still THE BusinessObjects user conference” – #BIAChat Summary

Today I started with a cold snowy, hike, with windchills of 0 degrees:

So I looked up the forecast for Huntington Beach, California, the location of the BI+Analytics Conference in February, and found this on the Weather Channel:

Source: Weather Channel

The weather looks fantastic, especially compared to 0 degree windchill here in Northern Virginia.

Earlier this month the BI+Analytics Conference held a tweet chat with Timo Elliott using hashtag #BIAChat. What was discussed? Who were the top participants?

Top participants are shown above, and no surprise that Timo was the top participant.

The timezones were dominated by Timo’s (Paris) and East Coast, which is the location of Eventful Conferences in Syracuse, NY.

In this day and age of mobile, it is still surprising that most of the tweets come from the Twitter desktop client.

Some rough text analysis of the tweetchat, using SAP Analytics Cloud, is shown below:

This is the summary that appears when you highlight the counts

I got lazy and let SAP Analytics Cloud “build my story” for me:

Here’s a tag cloud:

A word cloud, according to Stephanie Evergreen, is not to generate insight but just show the most frequently used words (no surprises – Timo, conference twitter handle and hashtag).

As expected, Timo’s tweet was the top retweeted and most favorited:

I’m presenting a keynote at @BIAconference this year, and I’m doing a twitter chat later today, Wed Dec 6th, 1pm ET, 7pm CET. Ask all your big questions on SAP innovation, eg #analytics, #bigdata, #ML, #SAPLeonardo.. hashtag is “#BIAChat” — see U soon! #biaconf @EventfulConfs

Timo also said this during the tweetchat:

@tpowlas @BIAconference It’s still THE BusinessObjects user conference, even if it’s been through lots of incarnations — i.e. the one that fits closest with the needs / interests of long term users #BIAChat

My top tweet was this:

@BIAconference also looking forward to our @SAPMentors speakers presenting including @golasalle @ihilgefort @QuelzSeville @oswaldxxl and more… #BIAChat

More insight from Timo:

(1) Decisions are more important than ever before! Ability to see fast and decide fast means you speed up the innovation cycle, which in turn is often the difference between survival and not #BIAchat

(2) We’ve moved from a process era to a data era. We’re used to processes generating data for analytics — now data is being used to create new “digital processes” #BIAChat

(3) Data isn’t just something that we used to “improve” products — it’s now actually part of them. i.e. data is actually part of the typical customer experience, what differentiates you from the competition. #BIAChat

(4) We can now monetize data in new ways, moving more directly from information to income — e.g. new SAP Data Network platform aggregates, anonymizes, and lets you sell data to new people in new ways… #BIAChat

Kyle Tate, Eventful Conferences producer, also said this:

This is a great community with so much excitement coming in Feb. we moved the conference into Q1 to ensure you spent the entire year using what youve learnt #BIAchat

I asked what makes this conference unique and this was the response: