It’s been a pretty interesting month on the board.

First, we did have a little problem. I’m sure one or two of you may have noticed that the SQL Saturday web site was down for a moment. Well, three days. Joking aside, this was a serious problem, but my involvement was largely peripheral since I’m in charge of Chapters. I tried to help out a little, offering what support I could and, if nothing else, supplying an ear, willing to listen. Quite a few people took advantage of that. I communicated all their information up the chain to HQ and the other board members. Nothing has been held back.

Next, we’ve started the budgeting process. That’s fascinating. As well as a giant pain in the… well, anyway. Thankfully the people at HQ are helping shepherd me through the process.

We’ve had a number of leadership changes at different PASS Chapters. A couple of new groups have been created. We’re making some progress there.

Also this month I went to the PASS Business Analytics Conference.

Let’s talk about this.

The event was really well put together. The keynotes were amazing. You can read about them here and here.  The venue was great. The speakers I saw seemed good (for the most part). We hosted a number of focus group discussions with attendees and speakers to get feedback on the event. Overall, they were extremely happy with it. They also provided a lot of great suggestions to help improve the event if we do it again.

And there is the question. Do we do this again?

I’m not sure.

If you saw my tweets during the event, I was very supportive. I was also actively promoting the event in the weeks leading up to it. All this is part of my responsibilities as a board member. We were committed to an event and I’m going to help the organization ensure that event is successful. Period.

However, if you had asked me whether I would support doing this again next year, prior to going to the event, I would have said no. Now, I’m not sure. The fact is, there’s a split between the perfect BAC audience member and the perfect Summit audience member. That’s not saying that there’s not crossover. There very much is. But, my concern is, can we, the PASS organization, properly support a community that is business focused using the tools we have for supporting a technology focused community? Should we?

From all the feedback, we supplied an event that people liked and cared about and, most importantly, would suggest to others. So we probably can support a business focused community. Should we?

For myself, and all this is just me, reporting to you, I think that the big question is, does this help our existing membership. Prior to this event, I would have said absolutely not. I would have argued that there was not a path from DBA to analyst. After talking to lots and lots of people at the event, I found that a healthy number of our peers have moved from being a DBA or BI person to being a data analyst. It goes something like “Hey! You know that data stuff, right? Well we need someone to do this data analysis thingymabob and you just volunteered.”

In short, many data analysts are accidental data analysts and they come from our peers, our community, in fact, our #sqlfamily. Now, should we do this thing? I’m on the fence still, but I don’t mind admitting, I’m wavering towards “Hell, Yes.”

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