Speaker: Prashanth Southekal, Ph.D., MBA Managing Principal, DBP Institute

Organizations, profit and non-profit, all over the world are looking at leveraging data and analytics (D&A) for improved business performance. A report from MIT says that digitally mature firms are 26% more profitable than their peers. McKinsey Global Institute indicates that data-driven organizations are 23 times more likely to acquire customers, six times as likely to retain customers, and 19 times more profitable. Against this backdrop, what are the key data and analytics trends that companies can adopt today and be better prepared for the future? In this presentation, Mr. Southekal will talk about three key data and analytics trends for improved business results. Specifically, he will give an overview of each trend, discuss the rationale as to why each trend matters in today’s business environment, and offer prescriptive recommendations on the required capabilities so that organizations can prepare themselves to harness each of the data and analytics trends.

Speaker: Wendy D. Lynch, Ph.D. Founder, Analytic-translator.com

As more companies adopt big data analytic strategies to advance their business efforts, there is a desperate need for people who can understand and apply those analytic discoveries. Today a majority of analytic projects never produce business value – not because they lack data, technology, and analytic talent, but because analysts and business teams don’t speak the same language. As a result, projects are often poorly defined, inadequately explained, or discarded as incomplete or confusing. This session will explore the reasons why analytic efforts fail and will introduce analytic translation, a new role to bridge the gap between the promise of big data and the reality of defining and meeting essential business needs.

Speaker: William McKnight President, McKnight Consulting Group

Data Quality is an elusive subject that can defy measurement and yet be critical enough to derail any project, strategic initiative, or even a company. The data layer of an organization is a critical component because it is so easy to ignore the quality of that data or to make overly optimistic assumptions about its efficacy. Having Data Quality as a focus is a business philosophy that aligns strategy, business culture, company information, and technology in order to manage data to the benefit of the enterprise. It is a competitive strategy. However, you can’t improve what you can’t measure. We need a means for measuring the quality of our data. Abstracting quality into a set of agreed-upon data rules and measuring the occurrences of quality violations provides the measurement in the methodology.

Break 11:00AM - 11:30AM

Speaker: Rogayeh Tabrizi CEO, Theory+Practice

Best practices in data and AI move fast and constantly change. What doesn’t change and is more critical now than ever is the importance of asking the right questions. Questions vary by stakeholders, their framework and point of views. In order to promote explainability and adoption of predictive models and advanced analytics, it is essential to understand how stakeholders make decisions, take action and what drives their behavior. Thus the tools needed to accomplish this also need to simplify the data access and data self service in an organization. Data fabric and similar architectures are some of the tangible ways of delivering on a question first approach.

Speaker: Laura Madsen CEO, Moxy Analytics

Very few things can help accelerate your journey towards a data-driven culture faster than actionable data. The only way to reach that much sought-after panacea is to build it, and providing data that helps all business stakeholders take action is critical. But, providing actionable data isn’t as easy as asking what someone wants – there are perils lying in the promise. In this session, we will cover what “actionable” really means and discuss tangible steps you can take to get you one step closer to a data-driven culture.

Speaker: Serena Roberts
Co-founder & COO, Moxy Analytics

This session will cover general dashboard design principles and data visualization best practices with a focus on decreasing development time and increasing consistency across the organization.