BISM and application development convergence - the holy grail of data?

A thought struck me whilst at a session on DAX at TechEd2012 on DAX and its evolution from a functional thing within Excel, to a full-blooded query language.

This in itself is cool and interesting, but with all of the sessions that I've been attending on the Business Intelligence Semantic Model area (BISM) and the way that data experts can build rich Tabular semantic models using PowerPivot the following thought occured:

When will the development and analysis usages of data found themselves on a common model? At what point will a developer make use of the same BISM as someone building a report on that data? Surely this is the holy grail of data interaction and usage, an assurance that the developer benefits from the understanding of data that a business analyst has and that the business analyst can benefit from applications that have been implemented on that common understanding of the purpose of data.

SharePoint: buy the platform, sell the app

In discussions with a few folk regarding SharePoint over the last couple of months I have come to the conclusion that most businesses (and Higher Education is no exception to this) purchase SharePoint on the promises of a slick, shiny demonstration to senior managers (probably at one of those Caribbean 'conferences' I'm always hearing so much about) and the annoying fact that you can, more or less, do anything with SharePoint.

#TEE12 Day 1 roundup: SharePoint BI&dev and awesome Agile estimation

Today I attended the following:

• Keynote
• Creating Self-Service BI Solutions with SharePoint 2010 (ooh on blog and everything!)
• Developing and Managing SharePoint solutions with Microsoft Visual Studio
• Making Agile Estimation Work

Below are the major bits remembered off the top of my head (the transformer is recharging!) To take them one at a time:

Conclusions from #XCRI #CourseData Development Day

A good day was spent examining the major elements of technical implementation at the XCRI-CAP development day in London yesterday. Here are my collected thoughts on the major themes.

#JISC #XCRI #CourseData - Development Day

Today is development day for stage 2 of the JISC course data project: http://bit.ly/coursedata-tech-event

I'm particularly interested in how people are approaching implementation of course data feed information within the context of the set of policy issues that the course data project raises.

The day promises to provide a bit of networking with other folks working on development of feeds and interaction with aggregators, demonstration of various validation and aggregation tools as well as some code sharing activity.

Hopefully this will serve to kick start some of the work left to do for our particular project instantiation!

- rob