One of the most common learning strategies/survival mechanisms for law school, medical school, data science and other students working on advanced degrees in complex subjects is the study group. Rather than trying to comprehend all the nuances  of abstract concepts and memorize volumes of facts on their own, students band together to break the material into more digestible bites and then share their acquired knowledge with one another.

It’s a technique that has allowed many who might otherwise have failed to place designations such as Dr. or MS or MBA before or after their names. Yet somehow, once we leave the halls of academia for the working world, we often seem to forget the value of the group mind in the belief that it’s up to each of us to solve the issues facing our organizations alone. That’s just not smart.

“Solving real world problems with business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing (DW) can be a complex task,” says Shyam Varan Nath, a Business Intelligence Architect/Senior Managing Consultant at a large technology company and Director of Product Integration at the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG). “However, a group consisting of roles like database administrator, data architect, data integration or ETL (extract, transform and load ) expert and data visualization person, often break down the complex business problem into manageable chunks and solve the problem elegantly.”

Using the “study group” approach, professionals with complementary skills started to solve the problems that their business peers threw at them such as identifying the most profitable customers or which campaigns are most effective and ROI on discounts. However, the rapidly evolving technology landscape, threw yet another curve ball to these professionals in form of the Big Data.  You can see that by the huge number of articles that are written about the mysteries of Big Data. A few years ago we were still measuring our data stores in megabytes; now we’re reaching for our old mathematics textbooks to look up the next order of magnitude. We have to keep expanding our vocabulary to tera peta, exa and so on.  Yet while we have more data than ever, we seem to have fewer business insights and less actionable information; BI professionals are being tasked with determining how to organize and parse all that data to spot trends and tell the business leaders what their next move should be.

“We think of modern-day information systems like a well-engineered aircraft carrier,” says James Lui, Sr. Applications DBA, Aramark, and member of the IOUG Board of Directors. “But more often they’re closer in resemblance to a Jenga tower, with many precisely engineered pieces that are very stable, until you remove a key piece that collapses the tower.”

It’s a difficult and challenging process when all you know is how your own organization is used to handling data.

The same goes for the Cloud Computing. You can read a hundred articles and attend a dozen webcasts that tell you all the advantages of moving to the Cloud – how you can reduce costs, enable more effective data sharing across geographies, keep your internal staff focused on high-value opportunities rather than software or hardware maintenance, etc. You might even read a well-written Cloud Computing story in a newspaper such as Wall Street Journal these days. But that will not prepare you to harness the SaaS (Software as a Service) model for delivery of your internal database marketing tool for your field sales force.

That information is out there. You have to know you’re not the only one trying to solve these and many other BI/ DW. Wouldn’t it be nice to have that old college study group available to tap into and turn massive challenges into manageable problems to solve?

Actually, it does exist, and on a much larger scale than the handful of people you may have worked with in college or grad school. Only now we call them user groups, and rather than meeting at the library, or in an empty room at the student union, or on the commons (on nice days) they gather at conferences such as COLLABORATE 13 – IOUG Forum. And the good news is you don’t have to be one of the cool kids or part of the popular crowd to get in the “right” study group. The sub-groups tend to form around common interests/concerns – company size, industry, and topics such as Big Data and Cloud Computing.

Sure, social media makes it easy to connect with people from all over the world at a surface level. But according to 83 percent of the business people surveyed by Bizzabo, a developer of mobile apps for business events, nothing beats meeting person-to-person in a focused venue like a conference to build deeper, more powerful relationships.  This person-to-person networking is a proven concept in professions like medicine, law and real-estate, where instead of surfing the web professionals lean on peer groups.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of IOUG becoming that peer-to-peer connection point between BI, DW and analytics professionals who focus on generating business insights from data. These professionals have started embracing Big Data Analytics to broaden their horizons and tell stories using data. And while the topics may have changed from those early, simpler days, the value of the “study group” approach has only increased.

“While the formal education is great, the real value is in the relationships you build,” says Kim Floss, a past President of IOUG as well as a Senior Manager, Enterprise Database Services at a large consumer products goods manufacturer. “I’ve always had a big-company orientation, so I want to find out how others in big companies are using Oracle technology, what’s working and what didn’t. Being able to talk to other users at conferences such as COLLABORATE 13 – IOUG Forum, whether in formal sessions, at networking events or even just in the hallways gives me ideas about new strategies as well as the confidence to pursue them, because I already know they work. Listening to what people are doing, seeing how they’ve actually done it, and studying the audience’s reaction to the presenter based on their own experiences gives you a perspective you won’t get in a typical online or even live training class.”

For Rich Niemiec, Advisor to the Rolta International Board, former CEO of TUSC, past President of IOUG and the author of several books on Oracle, including the top-selling book on performance tuning databases, it’s about expanding beyond his known universe.

“When I first joined IOUG in 1993 I really didn’t know anyone in the Oracle world outside of Chicago,” Niemiec says. “That changed at the user conferences. I met Oracle people, some developers and project managers. What I liked was they were down-to-earth, smart people who were willing to give up their time to help anyone who wanted it. The IOUG people I met were great mentors to me. They still are. And I’ve met so many people since then continue to help me address the current issues, such as Big Data and how to gain better business intelligence out of it and determining where the cloud makes sense for data warehousing. At conferences such as COLLABORATE 13-IOUG Forum you can make contacts that move with you throughout your career.” Oracle CMO Judy Sim once said that customers who participate in user groups make fewer service requests.

With technology there are two constants. One, of course, is change. As new technologies are developed and business needs change, the industry has to change with it. Five years ago Big Data, Cloud Computing, mobility, etc. were not the industry buzz words. The other is that it makes little sense to go alone when it comes to managing this constant change. The “time to market” the solution is key rather than efforts on re-inventing the solution.

It’s time to take a lesson from your school days to build out and strengthen your peer network/study group with others who are in similar circumstances and have already solved (or are in the process of solving) the problems you’re facing. And COLLABORATE 13-IOUG Forum is one of the best places to accomplish that. It was a good idea then – and it’s an even better idea now.

John Matelski is President of the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG), which represents the voice of Oracle technology and database professionals. IOUG empowers users to be more productive in their business and careers by delivering education, sharing best practices and providing technology direction and networking opportunities. John can be reached at john_matelski@ioug.org.