 I'm the founder of DataVocity and it is a pleasure to be with you remotely this morning. For those of you who've been at the chapter meetings over the past few years, you'll know that every year Mike and the local chapter invite us in to tell you a little bit about the upcoming Enterprise Data World conference. So it's a pleasure to be here yet again through this what is now an annual tradition. So just for a little bit of context, Dama and the organization that preceded DataVocity got together almost 20 years ago now to conduct the first of these combined events and at the time it had the very long title of the Dama International Symposium and WorldShare Metadata Conference. So thankfully in recent years we've rationalized that to Enterprise Data World and I'm proud to say that it's been a wonderful partnership over those many years. The conference is officially, it's the official annual educational conference for Dama International. It is however open to anybody who wishes to attend, not just Dama members and hopefully through that combination we're able to help Dama each year both with its annual budget and with the recruitment of new members. So it's been a very fruitful partnership over the years. And we're going to talk a little bit more about some of the specific Dama advantages in just a couple of minutes. So this year we're going to be back in San Diego, April 17 through 22 of the dates and we're at the Sheraton Hotel and Marina. This particular view that you can see is I believe from the west facing windows of the hotel rooms. So yeah, it's a lovely location. Okay, so on the presentation this morning we're going to talk a little bit about what is Enterprise Data World, what's in it for you as Dama members. We'll talk some about the educational agenda this year. We're going to spend a particular time on the professional development opportunities at the conference and then wrap up with a little bit of final incentives around San Diego as a venue and how to register, get the best price on your attendance and some key deadlines to look for. So what is Enterprise Data World? Really it's virtually everything that you can imagine about Enterprise Data with the possible exception of some physical layer topics like storage. We really don't get into hardware very much at all. But pretty much every other aspect of data management, methods around data management, some new data management technologies and how your organization can best leverage data for the objectives that it has. Obviously in recent years we've been spending considerable time around topics like big data and data governance. So there's quite a strong emphasis on those. But there are also advancements in some of the more traditional topics around architecture, data modeling, metadata management and you'll see those new developments reflected in the EDW program this year. The structure of the program is that we start with some in-depth tutorials. We then graduate into the conference itself where we have shorter conference presentations and in particular we have a lot of case studies at EDW. So there's always a big emphasis on the peer-to-peer sharing of experience and in the past couple of years we've introduced advanced seminars at the end of the conference so that you can dive into certain topics in greater depth. So let me just talk a little bit about what's in this for DAMA and for DAMA members. So you'll recognize the DMBoc wheel on the left-hand side there. We use this as a model for the track breakdown at the conference. And we try to get topics in basically all of these subject areas so that the educational agenda is both consistent with DAMA's objectives as an organization and also so that the material that you'll learn at the conference can support your certification under the CDMP certification. And as I say, we'll get to a bit more of that in just a moment. But the relationship between DAMA and diversity in the production of the conference is a business relationship. DAMA benefits from the profits of the conference. So if you like, there's a portion of all the profits of the conference that goes to DAMA International each year. It is by far the largest international meeting of DAMA members in the world and it's a great opportunity to meet with colleagues from around the world, around the country. There's a dedicated DAMA track by which we mean there are topics specific to the DMBoc and the CDMP and there are also meetings between local chapter presidents so that DAMA can get its business done during the week of EDW. There is on-site CDMP certification, which means that there are dedicated times for you to take the CDMP exams. Also on Sunday, there's a free workshop that is designed to help you prepare for CDMP certification. And all of the hours that you spend at EDW qualify for the recertification requirements of existing CDMP hold it. So it serves many purposes on that level. This particular year, DAMA International is pleased to offer all EDW registrants a free membership to DAMA International Central, which is a new, I guess, category of membership which will ultimately, we hope, or DAMA hopes, will simplify the ability of people from all over the world to join DAMA regardless of whether they have an active local chapter or not. So just to describe in greater detail what some of the advantages of that will be, basically everybody will have the opportunity to join DAMA International as an EDW conference attendee with the benefits that you see here. I won't go through each of those individually, but obviously there are a lot of discounts. There is access to the DMBOC standards, rather the data management standards version two, and all of these other things here. For those members who are, for those folks who are currently members of DAMA, there are also substantial discounts on actually attending Enterprise Data World. I'll mention those at the end of the presentation. Okay, so let me tell you a little bit about the conference this year. I'm thrilled that Jim Tio from BB&T is able to kick us off this year. Jim's done just an amazing job. BB&T is a large regional bank in the southeast of the US, but he's a wonderful speaker, has a great sense of humor, and so he's taking a little bit of a lesson from Dave Letterman this year and having a top ten list of the surprises that he's learned in developing a successful Enterprise Data Office. The distinguishing thing about Jim's success at BB&T that inspired us to invite him is that really he has accomplished an Enterprise program of governance and quality and is moving into analytics now in a way that most organizations struggle to achieve at the Enterprise scale, so I'm thrilled to have Jim with us. Now, always in the middle of the conference we have what we affectionately call the fund keynote. Last year it was Graham Simpson. Prior to that we had a cellist and a speaker from Marvel Comics. This year, a gentleman who won't be well known to most of you, but he's developed quite a reputation in the city of New York. Ben Wellington works for a hedge fund, but in his spare time he's a stand-up comedian and a data scientist, so kind of an interesting portfolio of interest that he has, but Ben has been telling stories in the city of New York through his blog called IQuant about the city, telling stories about the city based on the data that the city makes available. Everything from the highest yielding parking fine locations to the price of subway tickets, and he's discovered things in the data that he then writes about and literally brings about changes in the city. One great example was that he figured out that based on the price of a New York subway ticket, one of the ones that you might buy that say you buy it for $10, and every time you take a trip you scan it and it gets reduced, he figured out that in fact you could never entirely use the funds that you had paid for, so he kind of embarrassed the city into changing the pricing structure of a New York subway ticket so that you would always be able to use every penny of your ticket. So that's maybe a trivial example. There are a lot more around everything from restaurant safety to the action of police officers and traffic cops and all sorts of things. Anyway, Ben's a very entertaining speaker and you'll enjoy his talk. We're going to wrap up the conference this year with basically a town hall with Tom Redman. Many of you will know Tom from his book. He was the original guy to use its own data driven, but it only seemed appropriate in this year of a presidential election that we have a town hall format to wrap up the conference and talk about some really hard issues in accomplishing the goals of good data management. This was prompted by a conversation I was having with Tom at one point about the notion that so many organizations asked this question, what's holding us back from accomplishing things? It all seems so straightforward. In theory, doing data analytics and making improvements to operations or making better decisions is simple. It's sort of obvious and yet most organizations struggle to get there. Tom's going to include that topic amongst his town hall questions and get everybody involved at the end of the conference and kind of work through some solutions. One of the things that we're doing at EDW this year is we're co-locating three additional events. In many ways these are like additional track sessions at the conference. Last year we did this with the CDO vision program. This is sort of the executive track if you like of EDW. Everybody who signs up for EDW as a conference attendee is entitled to go to this and any of the other additional programs. There's no restriction on what you can attend. These are sort of bonus sessions if you like. We found in particular that having the executive track co-located was wonderful not just for senior executives but also those who are either aspiring to senior management or just trying to get a better sense for how senior executives think about data strategy and innovation and analytics, et cetera. This is a program where we basically put a microphone in the hands of everybody who's in the audience. We encourage a great deal of conversation. The presentations themselves are only about half the time allocated to the agenda. The other half of the time is allocated to conversation interactions. That's the philosophy that we bring to this particular part of the program. Certainly if you have a chief data officer or a senior data management executive who's interested in attending and if they want to just sign up for CEO vision, that's fine too, they can do that. That cross-fertilization of people at all levels was just very effective last year. We're going to encourage that again. Another of the programs we're co-locating this year is the NoSQL Now program. This is a conference we've been running in San Jose, Silicon Valley for the past five years. We're conducting basically the enterprise edition of NoSQL Now. The technologies around these new databases has progressed to the point where it's in much wider use amongst large enterprise customers now, not just a kind of an internet phenomenon. You'll see two dedicated tracks at EDW focused on NoSQL technologies. Most of those will be oriented towards evaluating different databases which are appropriate to use under which circumstances. These sessions will in many cases be a little bit more technical, but some of them are business oriented as well. But if you know your organization is moving in this direction, I think this is a wonderful opportunity to learn some more about NoSQL technologies. And included in that are not just the database products per se, but topics like Hadoop and Spark and those sort of things. The third additional program won't be as familiar to many of you, but there's an organization in New York City called the Enterprise Data Management Council. It's a consortium of financial institutions which is among many of its ongoing projects is something called FIBO or the Financial Industry Business Ontology. And this is an initiative born out of the financial crisis of a few years ago and a group of enterprising technical folks within the semantic web community realized that some of the technologies that they were working on could have contributed to the prevention of some of the issues that were prevalent during that particular financial crisis. In particular, better understanding the risk profile of financial institutions by connecting the various derivative products and obligations that those financial organizations had to the final holder of those liabilities. So this will be a single dedicated conference for two days. We're going to be focused on both the management and the technical aspects of implementing FIBO. And we did a one-day version of this program in Washington, D.C. at the last Enterprise Data World that was very well received. So things have moved along considerably in the meantime. Certainly if your organization is in the financial services industry, then FIBO is something that you're going to need to know about, if not now, then in the very near future. So this would be a great way to get some education there. And the reason it's combined with Enterprise Data World is, frankly, there's a lot of the same people are working on problems related to Enterprise Data Management as who are joining into the FIBO community. So it's a great opportunity to get some extra synergy out of the EW meeting. So some of the hot topics this year, things that we have and haven't addressed in the past. I mentioned NoSQL databases. Shannon can attest whenever we do a webinar or an article on data diversity around data modeling for NoSQL. Our page views and webinar attendance is off the charts. This is the hot topic in data modeling right now. And for those who are involved with NoSQL, then they're finding that modeling is one of the sort of barriers to deployment in large enterprises because the whole notion of schemaless data management is a little bit far into a lot of them. So anyway, we'll have numerous topics, numerous presentations around data modeling for NoSQL. Machine learning is the other super hot topic throughout publishing activities. So we're going to be talking about machine learning and giving you a chance to understand what that is and how it might be relevant to you. There are a lot of presentation proposals this year focused on privacy and ethics. I think a lot of this is probably driven by the European laws related to privacy, also a lot of the conversations or concerns that are being raised here in the U.S., particularly around sort of the governance of big data, concerns about discrimination emerging when you rely simply on the data to guide decision making without taking into account larger questions of equity and fairness, et cetera. So we have numerous discussions and panels around both those topics. Believe it or not, metadata is as hot a topic as ever before. The big data world is helping to drive a lot of that. Of course, we're going to be spending many sessions talking about data science and predictive modeling and just to run through the rest of the list there. Visualization and storytelling, again, a lot of proposals this year on that. We're even finishing up one of the advanced seminars on data storytelling this year. Data catalogs are a hot topic. Everything is agile. Everything is in the cloud. Everything is a service. I don't need to tell you folks these things because you're living it every day, but coming to the conference gives you a chance to talk to other people about how they're managing these things, get different perspectives on how to bring these ideas into your organization, bring these new technologies in and do it without the expensive lessons that would be involved in tackling this for the first time. Learn something from other folks who are doing it and you'll save yourself a lot of grief. All right. I personally believe there have to be both personal and business reasons to commit to attending a week at a conference. So I think if it was all one or the other then it just wouldn't be the same experience. So I think it's very important that the week that you spend at EDW be personally valuable to you in terms of the skills that you gain, the contacts that you generate, the preparation that you give yourself for both advancement in your current job and perhaps where your career may take you in future. So that's where most of those topics on the left are entered. The ones on the right, obviously, you need to give your employer good justification for the time and investment that you're going to be making by attending. These are some of the things that we hear people say the most. The accomplished six months of research in just a few days, particularly with respect to a lot of the vendor organizations who will be exhibiting at the program. If you need to collect information on some of your project or do research on the best ways of approaching particular problems then you can get an awful lot done in just a couple of days at EDW. We find too that a lot of people say, well, I came here to validate our strategy. They have something in place and they're not necessarily sure if it's the right thing, but by talking to other people it gives them certainty about the direction that they're heading in future. And then I think the notion of an ROI on your investment is important too. So I mentioned you can learn a lot of lessons without having to pay the same price as those who've gone before. But also the idea of getting everybody on the team onto the same page, having shared perspective and shared language around how to move forward is important. And what we've noticed also, we have a couple of companies this year who are bringing a team of people and they've asked us to arrange a meeting room for them during and or after the conference so that they can sort of digest and use the proximity to that knowledge and proximity to the learning that they've just gained to start making plans immediately. So a couple of international organizations that are planning to do that this year. All right. I mentioned, I talked some more about the CDMP. For those of you who have the CDMP already, you've probably received notice from Damon International that some things are changing. I won't try to describe those to myself. I don't speak directly on behalf of Damon International. However, there is some information on the Enterprise Data World site about the CDMP program and there are links to dama.org for full explanation. And certainly I would recommend that if you have a CDMP currently that you go to Damon's website and read up on the evolution of the CDMP. This structure of associate to practitioner, master and fellow, this is the new structure in place. And so anyway, that's well laid out on the dama website. The new CDMP exams will be available at EDW for the first time for those who wish to get the CDMP for the first time. Those will be available at the times listed on the lower left there starting on Sunday, Tuesday and then Wednesday. The CDMP prep session is on Sunday from 10.30 to 2.00 p.m. So that's free for anybody who's registered for the conference. And I highly recommend that if your goal is to get certified during the conference or even if you want to do it afterwards. My understanding is that CDMP is moving from a face-to-face proctoring model to an online one. So you can attend that class and then do the exams later if you wish. But it's certainly convenient to have them on site. You do need to bring a laptop however with Wi-Fi capabilities so that you can access the exams. Okay. So whenever I tell people we're going to be in San Diego for anything, they always sort of sigh and say, oh, I hope I can go. It's a great town. These are some of the classic tourist attractions in San Diego. The zoo obviously is well-famous. I frankly enjoy a lot of the restaurants down there. I just find the atmosphere in the city wonderful, but gas lamp area, et cetera. The hotel is not right in the gas lamp area, but we have buses that will take people in there each night. It's literally a five-minute cab ride if you want to go on your own too. It's a great town and we always love going back there. This will be our third time in San Diego with EDW and everybody loves it. Okay. So to give you the best opportunity to attend and save money, we always have what we call a dama dollars discount. It is the largest of all of the discounts associated with association membership or affiliation. It's a $250 discount on any of the conference options and the code that you need there is dama417. So that's what you need to use during the registration process to save that $250. You can combine that discount with the early registration incentives that we offer. So the first of those expires on January 29. Actually, just yesterday, specifically for dama members, we've extended that to February the 1st. And if you remember of the dama LinkedIn group, you'll get a reminder about this next Thursday. So the best discount is available by February the 1st. Then after that, there's a discount also available by March 11. After March 11, we revert to full prices. So the discount by February the 1st would be $550 in total. By March 11 would be $450. There's also additional discounts if you have a group of people. Once you register four people, the fifth is free. If your organization needs us to spread that discount and give everybody 20% off, then we can do that. You just need to contact our registrar and let them know. So we can deal with whatever your payment structure requires. The discount at the Sheraton is $209 per night, and that rate ends on February 27. Something I really should tell you, and this is not a, come on, it's true. We sold out of both, not just hotel rooms, but we actually sold out for the EDW conference last year. We had to stop taking registrations about two weeks in advance. Something we've never done before, and I don't think we'll have to do it this year, but when we say that things sell out, we don't say it just to get you to act right away. It does sometimes happen. So in particular with hotel rooms, that inventory can be limited. If not, the hotel selling out, the group rate could sell out. So instead of selling rooms for $209, the hotel once they sell out might decide to sell them for $300. So just look into that before you make your reservation and try to get in early so that you can take advantage of those good rates. All right, these things obviously won't write all these down, but I do recommend trying to follow us on Twitter for any announcements about the program. These are the ways you can reach us. The hashtag for Enterprise Data World is EDW16, and that's been pretty active lately, so participate in that. For me, it's right on the hour, so it's a good time to finish up, but if you have any time for questions, I'd be happy to answer them. Otherwise, you are welcome to send an email to this address at the bottom, info at DataVersity.net or my personal address is Tony at DataVersity.net. So either way, we'd be delighted to hear from you. Mike, back to you.