Howard Dresner is a celebrity in the business intelligence industry, but most people at last year’s Tableau conference didn’t even recognize him when he showed up there.

Who needs BI? Tableau Software liked to think it had left BI behind. BI people, after all, were the control freaks who denied access to data. They sneered at Tableau’s “pretty pictures.” They cared more about data hygiene than data analysis.

But there he was. Stephen Few spotted him in the audience a few minutes into his keynote and paused to wonder if it was really him. Tableau vice president of marketing Elissa Fink welcomed him. I and some others said hello. Mostly he wandered alone.

But he’s coming back this year — to speak. He’ll be among 10 on the “experts track” at the Tableau Customer Conference in Las Vegas. Others include BI veteran Claudia Imhoff, Cindi Howson of “BI Scorecard,” and Performance Dashboards author Wayne Eckerson.

They’re all worth listening to. But the one most Tableau people would feel at home with is Paul Kedrosky. Unlike the others, he’s not from the BI world at all. He’s an “investor, speaker, writer, media guy, and entrepreneur,” according to his blog’s “about” page. But I know him as the man who counts ladders.

At last fall’s Defrag conference in Boulder, he told about using the California Highway Patrol’s count of fallen ladders on freeways as a leading economic indicator. Who says data must come from conventional sources? He’s serious and creative, a mix Tableau people appreciate.

He’s written that we live in a “golden age of data visualization,” but I’ve found no elaboration. I’ll be listening for that.

As for the other nine “experts,” the first thing I’ll look for is the size of their audiences.

SaaS vendors who also sell on-premises versions have a tricky little problem, Claudia Imhoff says. How do they sell both at the same time?

A few people from SaaS vendors who attended Claudia’s Tuesday session mentioned two strategies: One is to separate the sales forces, with one selling the on-premises version, and another selling the online version.

These vendors could also sell the shareware way: let the online version be the lighter, simplified one. Let the on-premises version include all the extras.

They better figure it out. Right now, she says, there are just too many SaaS vendors in the market.

You say dayta and I say dahta. You say business intelligence—and now Colin White and Claudia Imhoff say “decision intelligence.” They may want you to say it, too, depending on what you mean.

Now or later—yesterday afternoon it didn’t sound clear just when—they’d like you to say “decision framework.” Perhaps that’s in addition to “decision intelligence” or instead of it. I’m not sure.

They’re both veterans of technology wars, fads, shifts, realignments and convergences. Both are among the most eminent of BI thought leaders. They’ve given their suggestion a lot of thought.

You may ask why? For one thing, they explain, business intelligence has become too closely associated with analytics and data warehousing. They decided it would be easier to offer a new term than try to straighten out the old one. What will keep the same thing from happening to the new term? A fair question.

A second reason for the new term: they’d like to get your attention.

They hope to have the attention of several hundred attendees tomorrow morning at 8 a.m. at TDWI World Conference in Las Vegas. They’ll explain in detail during their keynote. The hot breakfast, restored by popular demand since last August, won’t hurt.