22-25 April 2026 
Insight Discovery
2022TL; DR
How to define business requirements for a successful cloud data & analytics project
Session Details
Many data projects fail to deliver the impact they should for a simple reason – they focus on the data. In this session, James explains a different way of thinking that will set up your data & analytics projects for success. Using an iterative, action-oriented, insight discovery process, he will demonstrate tools and techniques that will help you to identify, define and prioritize requirements in your own projects so that they deliver maximum value. He'll also explore the synergy with modern cloud analytics platforms like Azure Synapse, explaining how the process and the architecture actively support each other for fast, impactful delivery.
3 things you'll get out of this session
Speakers
James Broome's previous sessions
Do those numbers look right? How to ensure quality, and avoid inaccuracies in your data insights.
The need to validate business rules and security boundaries within a data solution is important, as well as the need for ensuring that quality doesn't regress over time as it evolves. Data insights are useless or even dangerous if they can't be trusted, and in this session, James will explain how and why they should treated just like any other software project with respect to testing - by building automated quality gates into the end to end development process.
During the session, he'll walk through some practical examples and proven techniques around testing data solutions - including Power BI reports, Synapse Pipelines and interactive Spark notebooks.
Predictive Maintenance with Azure Synapse
This session provides an end-to-end walk through of how to use Azure Synapse for cloud-hosted advanced analytics, based around a real-world predictive maintenance use case.