This week’s X Change conference in San Francisco was very successful, at least by my measure, and I wanted to briefly summarize some of what I saw and heard for those of you who couldn’t join us.

• Before the event, Bill Gassman from Gartner commented to me “the more things change,  the more things stay the same.”  While the technology has become more sophisticated and the practitioner base (at least the sample represented at X Change which clearly skewed towards expert status) become more experienced, internal process and organizational challenges continue to dominate the conversation and negatively influence our ability to get the job done.
• For sophisticated companies, there are still many questions but far fewer answers.  Campaign attribution, data privacy, reconciling panel-based and census-based methodologies, data sharing and integration, and I’m sure hundreds more topics are on our minds but in many cases some critical connection cannot/has not been made
• Points #1 and #2 aside, some of us are doing amazing things with web data!  I was amazed at some of what I heard regarding how companies are evolving their use of web analytic data.  Despite the difficulty associated with many aspects of doing our jobs, some members of the larger web analytics community are definitely Competing on Web Analytics and will undoubtedly raise the bar higher and higher.
• All in all, the expert analytics community appears to be a pretty happy bunch.  Nobody was complaining about layoffs or lack-of-budget, at least not that I heard.  The complaints I did hear were typical: “our vendor promised this but has not delivered”, “we simply cannot find qualified people”, and “this stuff is a lot harder than some people make it out to be.”

We will be publishing a document in the next few months providing a much more detailed look at what was discussed at the X Change (watch my blog for details) but if any of you participated in the event and have other insights please feel free to leave them below in comments.

I am tremendously honored to be a partner in the X Change conference and look forward to helping produce the conference for years to come.  If you missed the event this year, don’t make the same mistake twice.  Keep watching my and Gary Angel’s blog for details about X Change 2009!

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