I arrived at the Walt Disney World Dolphin Resort for Oracle Technology Day 2005. As an aside, I’m so thrilled to live in Orlando, Florida. I grew up in the Flint, Michigan area where the only tourist attraction is the half of the city that closed in the early 1980’s when GM closed up almost overnight (see Michael Moore’s Roger & Me). So, I’m regularly surprised that I live so close to gorgeous and luxurious resort locations.

What’s up with a conference starting at 8:00AM with an one hour breakfast? Do these people not have homes with kitchens? Here’s the thing: I’m busy enough that I don’t actually read the schedule when I attend these things, so when I arrive at 7:50AM I expect things to start in 10 minutes. Instead, I got the chance to sit around and observe people, find out who’s who, and generally exercise my social muscle for a full 80 minutes.

People are fascinating and the technical crowd is no different. You have several types of people that will attend a technical conference, but I'd like to pick on only those with which I came into contact. The first person I sat down next to was a "Self-Trained," which is a person that learns everything on his or her own. I’m a self-trained, so this type is one I’m pretty familiar with: learned the technology during some historical task when a one-off solution was chosen by the employer and then became the resident "expert". My experience is that the older the Self-Trained, the more arcane the technology. The reason for this is simple: self-training takes lots of time, so keeping up with the "newest" thing becomes hard to do without outside motivation.

The next person I met was at the breakfast table. I noticed him immediately because he was actually wearing the Oracle baseball cap that every attendee received at the registration desk. He was also wearing – are you sitting down? – a Microsoft monogrammed oxford shirt. Who does this? The "Conference Junkie", that’s who! This type walks through local malls wearing a Cisco hat, carries an IBM duffle bag, and writes with an oversized Seibel ink pen.

The final type I will mention is the "Casual Technologist", which was represented at this conference by the two DBAs sitting at my table. Coming from a very large local government contractor, these guys mostly talked about how they intended to spend the day at one of the Disney World theme parks instead of learning about the newest Oracle technologies. To prove the point, they packed up their belongings and left the conference before the 9AM start time.

The title of this conference was "Compliance to the Core", which immediately piqued my interest. Being a LIMS consultant offers regular opportunities to deal with compliance issues. However, this type of compliance is different from CFR part 11 compliance. To get a handle on this type of compliance, think of the following hypothetical event: An executive from a major energy or financial company sends out false or inaccurate data in order to make the financial position of the company look more solid to shareholders and the financial community. From a culpability point of view, the company itself must be able to show that the timeliness and quality of the internal data available to that executive is not blamed for the release of inaccurate data. Enter "business intelligence."

Although the push is somewhat new to Oracle, the idea of business intelligence is very old: "Summarize for me all the data I have permission to see in a way I can understand and make certain it’s up to date!" Sound easy? Wrong! Typically, I see people reviewing only the data they can get, regardless of whether they should get it, or whether it is the right data, or whether they have the mathematical skill to summarize the data in ways that are accurate or meaningful. So, functional business intelligence is very good news, since it is an attempt by Oracle to place data storage, warehousing, mining, transformation, reporting, security, and dashboard-like summarization all under a unified application interface. This is excellent news for the LIMS industry, since it means that big, corporate businesses are increasingly interested in things that the average pharmaceutical company is interested in, which is, secured data delivered reliably.

I'm looking forward to seeing what affect this new push on business intelligence has on the LIMS industry long term. Is it possible, for example, that this more interactive front end could replace the somewhat inflexible reporting interfaces currently offered in several LIMS programs?