Keynote Speaker
Wayne Eckerson

Principal of BI Leader Consulting and Director of Research,
BI Leadership Research

TOPIC: The Big Data Revolution: Integrating Big Data in BI Ecosystems

The Big Data revolution represents the next big leap in business intelligence. It supplements existing data management infrastructures with new types of data, such as Web traffic, social media, sensor, and text, that don’t play nicely in traditional data warehouses. It brings a rich new assortment of products, such as Hadoop, NoSQL, and SQL/MapReduce databases, that can speed the delivery of analytical insights and applications. This presentation will describe the unique characteristics of Big Data, evaluate its role in BI architectures, and examine techniques for integrating it with existing BI products and tools. In this session, attendees will learn:

• What is Big Data and how it will evolve
• Big Data’s impact on existing BI architectures and products
• How Big Data creates a BI ecosystem that finally meets the needs of business analysts
• Four methods of integrating with Big Data products

About Wayne:
Wayne Eckerson has been a thought leader in the business intelligence field since the early 1990s. He has conducted numerous research studies and is a noted speaker, blogger, and consultant. He is the author of two widely read books “Performance Dashboards: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Your Business” (2005, 2010) and “The Secrets of Analytical Leaders: Insights from Information Insiders.”(2012). His consulting company, BI Leader Consulting, provides strategic planning, architectural reviews, internal workshops, and long-term mentoring to both user and vendor organizations.

Wayne is currently director and founder of BI Leadership Research (www.bileadership.com), an education and research service run by TechTarget that provides objective, vendor neutral content to business intelligence (BI) professionals worldwide. For many years, Wayne served as director of education and research at The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) where he oversaw the company’s content and training programs and chaired its BI Executive Summit.

Keynote Speaker
Donald Farmer

Vice President of Product Management,
QlikTech

TOPIC: BI for the Right Side of the Brain

Business Intelligence is an analytic process, isn't it? It is surely rational, logical and reduces complex business scenarios to models and measures and numbers - to "facts" and "single versions of the truth." Donald Farmer says that is nonsense! Business Intelligence is also about discovering patterns and exploring hunches. BI supports decisions, but decisions are emotional and intuitive just as much as they are fact-based or balanced.  If we are to succeed in breaking Business Intelligence out from a small circle of practitioners to be a wide-ranging practice, we need to build BI that speaks to all our needs.  In this provocative session, Donald Farmer will explore how we can develop BI practices that meet basic human needs for information, exploration and decision making.

About Donald:
Donald Farmer is the Vice President of Product Management for QlikTech, the leading vendor in the emerging field of "Business Discovery," a user-driven approach to business intelligence. Donald is an internationally respected speaker and writer, with over 25 years experience in data management and analysis. He has applied his knowledge in fields as diverse as archeology and fish-farming.

Before joining QlikTech, Donald was a leader of the Microsoft Business Intelligence team, working on new products for ETL, predictive analytics and OLAP. An author of several books and many articles, Donald is also a Guest Professor at Southwestern University in Chongqing. He is married to Alison, an artist, and lives in an experimental woodland house near Seattle.

Clark Abrahams

Global Marketing Director,
SAS

TOPIC: High-Performance Enabled Decision-Making, Problem-Solving & Innovation

Advances in computing technology offer opportunities to re-think how people, processes, data, and systems can combine to create better outcomes for an organization. Those high performance analytics driven outcomes are a product of clearer vision, better and more timely decisions, and improved execution. This work provides a  glimpse into the future where exascale computing (billion-way concurrency) will enable corporate executives to more fully understand and optimize all aspects of their operations and form decisions based upon a unified interactive and near real-time system that captures the essence of the business reality.

Decision-makers, liberated from their “waiting for answers” mode will experience far greater operational agility as they exercise their ability to re-frame problems on-the-fly, and gauge the joint sensitivity of results to a multitude of assumptions and big data. It’s envisioned that this type of HPC-enabled analytic system might function for a business leader much like a walking stick that, after a period of time, the brain fully accepts as part of the anatomy! This has the potential to greatly accelerate the learning cycle, speed decisions and execution, and facilitate the sort of imagination and innovation that results in greater vision. This, in turn, opens up a larger set of options and opportunities for the organization as it strives to achieve its goals. Perspectives and examples drawing from SAS solution successes and the speaker’s industry experience will be shared.

About Clark:
Clark Abrahams is a Global Marketing Director at SAS, where his responsibilities and interests span research, product development and marketing across all industries with recent focus on applications of high-performance computing and cross-discipline application and integration of analytic methods. A former banking executive, author, and inventor, he has seven years of corporate board experience. He is a 2012 NACD Governance Fellow, and co-authored an NACD handbook on decision-making for directors due out in March 2013. Previously, he co-authored two books and a chapter in a third, on breakthrough technologies for framing and solving risk and compliance problems. 

Mr. Abrahams is a strong proponent of high-performance analytics (HPA), which he envisions will enable quantum leaps in business strategy, problem-solving and decision-making. His current research interest is the computerized fusion of imagination and knowledge, which promises to greatly compress executive learning cycles. His next book deals with excascale financial optimization and languages for simply communicating very complex ideas and business problems. A San Francisco native, he graduated from UC Berkeley with degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science, and he holds a Master of Science Degree in Engineering from Stanford University. Mr. Abrahams has been awarded three patents and has four patents pending on computerized methods in risk evaluation, decision-making, policy formulation, model validation and asset securitization.

Tim Barr

Director of Cloud Sales,
iDashboards

TOPIC: Planning Your Dashboard Project

In today’s business environment reports loaded with overlooked data have become extinct, while dashboards have become the preferred user-interface for presenting information.  Dashboards can positively change the way we view, disperse and work with information, and allow for a better understanding of data, while greatly reducing the amount of resources spent gathering and analyzing information. Join Tim Barr as he outlines the dashboard project lifecycle and discusses best practices for ensuring the successful launch of a dashboard project.

About Tim:
Tim is currently Director of Cloud Sales for iDashboards, one of the world’s leading dashboard software companies. Tim has worked in sales and management for some of the world’s best companies, including Lanier, McDonnell Douglas and GRiD Systems, and through ‘Tim Barr Training’ has provided keynote addresses and taught leadership and sales classes to thousands of people in hundreds of companies.  Tim is an expert at teaching how to take Excel information and turn it in to interactive, intelligent dashboards that provide insight and understanding from the rows and columns.

Loren Bast

Director of Business Intelligence,
Cheezburger

TOPIC: Data in a World of Memes: Lessons Learned While Serving Up Billions of Laughs

With over 40 thousand websites, millions of monthly visitors, and hundreds of millions of monthly pageviews, Cheezburger has no shortage of data. Loren will walk through the reporting and analysis challenges faced by the company, lessons learned from some of the mistakes made, and important takeaways that may be useful for any company.

About Loren:
Loren has worked at Cheezburger in numerous roles for over 3.5 years.  In his current role as Director of Business Intelligence, Loren runs what is affectionately known as the Notorious Business Intelligence Team (aka, Notorious B.I.T.).  Prior to Cheezburger, Loren held various product and business intelligence roles at All Recipes, Market Leader, and Yapta.

Loren lives in Seattle, WA, and occasionally speaks and writes about web analytics, data science, and other business intelligence topics.

Thomas Campbell

Director - Global Business Intelligence,
Kelly Services

Presenting with

Filious Louis

BI Architect,
Kelly Services

TOPIC: Mobilization of Business Intelligence: Rethinking the User Experience

This session will cover the impact of mobile technology on the delivery of Business Intelligence applications. The discussion will take an in-depth look at Kelly’s first iOS application and the architecture and design considerations that guided the development process.

About Thomas:
Tom has 35 years of information technology experience and has been working in the Data Warehouse space since 1988. He has designed and implemented both decision support and real time operational systems utilizing Teradata in the retail, hospitality and staffing industries. His responsibilities currently include leading Kelly Services’s data warehouse and business intelligence initiatives. He received his Teradata Masters certification in 2004 and has been a member of Teradata’s Product Advisory Council since 2007.

About Filious:
Filious is a seasoned professional in architecting BI solutions. He has designed and built scalable, user friendly BI solutions for various service industries. Currently he is a BI Architect for Kelly Services. His responsibilities include maintaining a BI infrastructure for 5,000 users, establishing best practices benchmarks and bringing innovation to Kelly's BI Solutions. His specific areas of interests are Enterprise Mobility, Data Visualization and User Experience Design for BI.

Mohammad Dadashzadeh, Ph.D.

Chair, Decision and Information Sciences Department,
Oakland University

TOPIC: BI/Business Analytics Degree Programs: Challenges and Opportunities for Universities, Students, and Employers

According to a report published by McKinsey & Co., by 2018 the U.S. could face a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with “deep analytical talent” and of 1.5 million people capable of analyzing data in ways that enable business decisions. Universities have taken big notice of this big IT job opportunities and a variety of programs in BI/Business Analytics have appeared in recent years. But, what are the critical success factors of a BI/Business Analytics degree program? In this talk, we examine the question from the perspectives of universities, students, and employers while addressing the challenges and opportunities in delivering “big data talent.”

About Mohammad:
Mohammad Dadashzadeh has been affiliated with University of Detroit (1984-1989), Wichita State University (1989-2003) where he served as the W. Frank Barton Endowed Chair in MIS, and the Applied Technology in Business (ATIB) Program (2003-2009) at Oakland University where he directed more than two million dollars of funded projects at sponsoring organizations in Southeastern Michigan. He has authored 4 books and more than 50 articles on information systems and has served as the editor-in-chief of Journal of Database Management. Dr. Dadashzadeh has extensive consulting experience and more than 6,000 people have attended his professional training seminars worldwide. He has been a recipient of teaching awards at MIT, the Industrial Management Institute, and Wichita State University. Dr. Dadashzadeh currently serves as Professor of MIS and Chair of Department of Decision and Information Sciences and the coordinator of the 1-year, half on-line program leading to a Master of Science in IT Management focusing in Business Analytics from Oakland University.

Stuart M. Davis

Director of Business Intelligence,
Quicken Loans

Presenting with

Matt Lauer

Data Engineer,
Quicken Loans

TOPIC: Big Data in the Real World

At times an organization is not sure how to leverage “Big Data” or cannot get past the “Big Data” proof of concept. This stalls the adoption of new technologies and prevents the integration of potentially valuable data and information into their existing business intelligence environment. We will ground the discussion a bit and cut through the hype surrounding words like “Big Data”, “Data Science” and “Hadoop” to provide a down-to-earth explanation of how these relate to an organization which currently employs business intelligence and analytics. We will also provide a few business examples to jumpstart your own adoption of this emerging field.

About Stuart:
Stuart is a Director of Business Intelligence at Quicken Loans leading teams focused on advanced analytics and big data initiatives. Prior to his current position within the company, Stuart has had the pleasure of serving as the VP of Business Intelligence, overseeing the creation of the Business Intelligence team integrating technology and analytics. He also served as the organization’s Chief Marketing Officer on an interim basis.  Throughout his 13 years of experience in the analytics space, he has built teams and led technology initiatives that focus on leveraging data and the sciences of data to create efficient and accurate insights and data-driven decisions. Prior to Quicken Loans, Stuart built an analytics center of excellence at MediaCom Interaction (f.k.a. Beyond Interactive), an integrated online marketing agency within the WPP family of agencies. Stuart has an MBA from Eastern Michigan University and a Bachelor of Music from Old Dominion University.

About Matt:
Matt is a Data Engineer with the Data Science team at Quicken Loans and is responsible for overseeing the build out of a Hadoop environment to support data science initiatives. His current research interests include Hadoop and its eco-system (Hive, HBase, Pig, Mahout), languages such as Java and Python, and machine learning algorithms as they apply to a distributed computing environment. He also spent over five years on the Business Intelligence and Data Warehouse teams, leveraging .NET and the Microsoft SQL Server BI Platform to deliver near real-time data and information to the business. Prior to working at Quicken Loans, he spent six years with the United States Air Force, serving first as a military officer and later as a government contractor with the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). Matt has an MBA from the University of Dayton and a BSE in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan.

Jeffrey DeNamur

Senior IT Manager - Business Intelligence, Collaboration, ERP Systems,
Haworth

TOPIC: Closing the Information Loop

Hear how Haworth, a global furniture manufacturer, uses BI tools to harmonize data from multiple sources – using BI as the ultimate traffic cop for improving product delivery.

About Jeffrey:
Jeff has 24 years of IT experience mostly focused on ERP implementations. He has worked for numerous ERP and consulting companies in this time. As Senior IT Manager, Jeff is responsible for managing the SAP implementation project and Business Intelligence team at Haworth.

Jack Hertel

Solution Architect,
QlikTech

TOPIC: Business Discovery: Powerful, Next-Generation BI

True self-service BI has finally arrived and it's transforming businesses worldwide. QlikView’s Business Discovery approach delivers on the promise of BI by putting business users in control. Unlike traditional BI which provides pre-packaged, hardwired analytics for power users, Business Discovery enables everyone to generate unique insights. Learn how you can understand your business in brand new ways.

About Jack:
Jack is currently a Solution Architect with QlikTech and deals primarily with pre-sales consulting. Formerly a developer at Dow Chemical Company, Jack has over 20 years of experience in the business. His goal to make it easier for users to make critical business decisions through the value of unique BI solutions.

Sam Istephan

SQL Technology Architect,
Microsoft

TOPIC: Offering Insights for Everyone from Any Data, Any Size, Anywhere

Empower users of all levels with new insights through familiar tools while balancing the need for IT to monitor and manage user created content. Deliver access to all data types across structured and unstructured sources.  Our first priority is to make it simple to embrace the discovery of insights based on data. We believe the key is to provide friendly, familiar tools to help reduce the complexity some busin ess managers experience when mining data on their own, as well as to support a collaborative environment so you can make data available when and where decisions are made.   Microsoft provides these capabilities through integration with already familiar tools, such as Excel, PowerPivot and SharePoint. And now SQL Server 2012 introduces Power View, providing SharePoint users with highly interactive, browser-based data exploration, visualization, and presentation capabilities.

About Sam:
Sam Istephan is a SQL Server Technical Architect working for the Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) in Southfield, Michigan where he delivers a wide-range of related services including Strategy Briefings, Architectural Design Sessions, and Proof of Concepts to some of Microsoft’s largest customers.  Prior to Microsoft, Sam worked as a Sr. SQL Server database engineer and a C# engineer.

John Kastler

Vice President, Information System Services,
Gleaners Community Food Bank of Southeastern Michigan

TOPIC: Mapping the Need

Learn how Gleaners deploys GIS Technology to advance their mission of feeding hungry people. GIS assists team members in making better decisions in areas such as resource allocation and community investment opportunities and is done to enhance public education efforts.

About John:
John started his career at Gleaners in 1989 as a food solicitor, and has been fortunate to have worn many hats through the years. He is currently Vice President of Information Services, a position he has held for five years. Gleaners has come a long way - 23 years ago when he started, he was issued an electric typewriter, desk phone (no voice mail), and a box of 4X5 index cards for prospecting. Now they have a staff of approximately 100 people housed at six locations across five counties with a fully integrated phone and data network along with bar code technology for inventory management.

Rik Tamm-Daniels

Vice President, Technology, Channels and Alliances,
Attivio

TOPIC: The Unsung Hero of Big Data: Unstructured Content

When it comes to Big Data, a lot of time and attention is spent talking about the value of unstructured data: system logs, web click logs, sensor data, etc…, but one of the most omnipresent types of Big Data often gets ignored when it comes to the analytics and BI conversation.  That unsung hero is unstructured content: emails, documents, CRM cases, survey comments, social media – in short human-created information.

Every business has a huge amount of unstructured content that contains valuable insights about customers, products, sales strategies, quality levels and the list goes on.   Unstructured data can tell you that your customer clicked on some products and because of that might by something that someone else with similar behavior bought, which is valuable, but analyzing email can tell you that a specific customer might never buy from you again if you don’t fix a specific problem.  

Realizing the value of unstructured content requires a different set of technologies and techniques than structured data - most importantly text analytics.  This talk will provide in-depth insight in to the different types of text analytics available today,  best practices for deploying text analytics across business domains and strategies for unifying unstructured content insight with other relevant sources of information to enable organizations to truly connect the dots and make decisions faster and more accurately than ever before.

About Rik:
Rik Tamm-Daniels co-founded Attivio and currently serves as Vice President of Technology for Attivio's Channels and Alliances division developing and executing Attivio's technical strategy for OEM, SaaS, SI, VAR and Technology Alliance partner recruitment and enablement. Prior to becoming VP of Technology, Rik served as VP of Product and VP of Engineering for Attivio delivering many releases of the award-winning AIE platform using Agile development methodologies.

Rik has an extensive background developing B2C and B2B enterprise as well as SaaS software systems across a wide variety of verticals including enterprise information access, digital services transaction processing, health sciences publishing, commodity-grade metals markets and global travel services. He holds Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Computer Systems Engineering from Boston University.

Attivio
attivio.com

Attivio’s unified information access platform, the Active Intelligence Engine® (AIE®), redefines the business impact of our customers’ information assets, so they can quickly seize opportunities, solve critical challenges and fulfill their strategic vision. AIE combines the power of enterprise search, business intelligence and big data analytics for strategic applications and solutions that include information from multiple internal and external sources.

Attivio integrates and correlates disparate silos of structured data and unstructured content in ways never before possible. Offering both intuitive search capabilities and the power of SQL, AIE seamlessly connects with existing BI and big data tools to reveal insight that matters, through the access method that best suits each user’s technical skills and priorities.

BI Leadership Research
bileadership.com

BI Leadership Research is an education and research service run by TechTarget that provides objective, vendor-neutral content to business intelligence (BI) professionals worldwide. Its mission is to he lp organizations make smarter decisions through the judicious use of data-driven technologies, such as data warehousing, BI, analytics and big data. Its team of experienced industry analysts conduct in-depth research on industry trends, evaluate commercially available software and host conference events, webcasts and seminars.

Cheezburger
cheezburger.com

Cheezburger is one of the largest social humor platforms on the Internet, where millions of people come every day to get their 5 minutes of happiness. Cheezburger operates such popular websites such as I Can Has Cheezburger?, Failblog, Memebase, and Know Your Meme.

Gleaners Community Food Bank of Southeastern Michigan
gcfb.org

For more than 35 years, Gleaners Community Food Bank has been "nourishing communities by feeding hungry people.” In 2012, Gleaners distributed 46 million pounds of emergency food to more than 550 partner soup kitchens, shelters and pantries in Wayne, Oakland, Macomb, Livingston and Monroe counties. We alleviate hunger by providing the equivalent of more than 100,000 meals per day to people who otherwise cannot afford the food they need. 

Of every dollar donated, Gleaners uses 93 cents for food and food programs. One dollar provides three meals for a hungry neighbor.

Haworth
haworth.com

Haworth, Inc. is a global leader in the design and manufacture of office furniture and organic workspaces, including raised access floors, moveable walls, systems furniture, seating, storage and wood casegoods. Haworth serves markets in more than 120 countries through a global network of 600 dealers.

iDashboards
iDashboards.com

iDashboards is an enterprise-class dashboard application that helps organizations leverage information in real-time through visually rich, responsive and personalized dashboards. Dashboards can help consolidate key performance indicators to monitor financial and operational results, and drilldown to charts and dashboards for even more insight. Organizations typically have many different software systems and data sources, each providing its own reporting. iDashboards brings all of these disparate data sources into a single business intelligence platform that improves monitoring and insight into all facets of operations. With implementation of iDashboards, organizations can make better business decisions and improve operational efficiency.

Kelly Services
kellyservices.com

Kelly Services, Inc. is a leader in providing workforce solutions. Kelly® offers a comprehensive array of outsourcing and consulting services as well as world-class staffing on a temporary, temporary-to-hire and direct-hire basis.  Serving clients around the globe, Kelly provides employment to more than 550,000 employees annually. Revenue in 2011 was $5.6 billion.

Microsoft
microsoft.com

Microsoft's low-license-cost bundling strategy for BI platforms makes it a compelling license-cost value proposition for organizations that want to deploy BI to a wider range of users, or that want to lower overall BI portfolio license costs by using lower-cost BI tools for basic BI functions. Its license cost profile is comparable to open-source BI vendors, and is considerably less than its commercial competitors. Moreover, Microsoft has added a new BI package (server/client access license [CAL] model) for SQL Server 2012, which makes it easier for customers to license the SQL Server BI portion of the stack. As Microsoft continues to enhance its BI capabilities in products that most companies already own (Office, SQL Server and SharePoint), the functionality premium for alternatives may become increasingly difficult to justify for many organizations. In the Magic Quadrant customer survey, more Microsoft customers cited TCO and license cost as the No. 1 reason for selecting Microsoft as a BI vendor than for most other vendors in the survey.

Oakland University
oakland.edu

Oakland University is located 30 miles north of Detroit, among the rolling hills and woodlands of Meadow Brook, the former Dodge Wilson estate. Founded in 1957, Oakland University is a vital, growing, state-supported, comprehensive academic institution committed to excellence. With an enrollment of nearly 20,000 students, of whom 3,550 are graduate students, Oakland University delivers a broad range of arts and science, professional and graduate programs, including 139 undergraduate and 127 graduate programs at the master’s and doctoral levels on its more than 1,400-acre campus. The University is located in Oakland County, which has a population of over 1 million people with per capita incomes among the highest in the United States. Oakland County is home to nearly 50,000 companies, including nearly 300 Fortune 500 companies and the U.S. headquarters of Chrysler Corporation.

QlikTech
qlikview.com

QlikTech is a leader in Business Discovery--user-driven Business Intelligence (BI). Its QlikView Business Discovery solution bridges the gap between traditional BI solutions and inadequate spreadsheet applications. The in-memory associative search technology QlikTech pioneered created
the self-service BI category, allowing users to explore information freely rather than being confined to a predefined path of questions. Appropriate from SMB to the largest global enterprise, QlikView’s self-service analysis can be deployed with data governance in days or weeks. The QlikView Business Discovery platform’s app-driven model works with existing BI solutions, offering an immersive mobile
and social, collaborative experience. Headquartered in Radnor, Pennsylvania, QlikTech has offices around the world serving approximately 26,000 customers in over 100 countries.

Quicken Loans
quickenloans.com

Detroit-based Quicken Loans Inc. is the nation’s largest online home lender and the country’s third largest retail home mortgage lender. The company closed a record $70 billion of volume across all 50 states in 2012. Quicken Loans generates loan production from web centers located in Detroit, Cleveland and Scottsdale, Arizona. Quicken Loans ranked #1 in customer satisfaction among all home mortgage lenders in the United States by J.D. Power and Associates in 2010, 2011 and 2012.

Quicken Loans has ranked among the top-30 companies on FORTUNE Magazine’s annual “100 Best Companies to Work For” list for 10 consecutive years. It ranked in the top 15 of Computerworld magazine’s “100 Best Places to Work In Technology” for eight years in a row, ranking in the top 5 in 2012. The company has recently moved its headquarters and more than 7,000 of its 8,000-plus team members to downtown Detroit.

SAS
sas.com

SAS is the leader in business analytics software and services, and the largest independent vendor in the business intelligence market. Through innovative solutions, SAS helps organizations anticipate business opportunities, empower action and drive impact. We do this through advanced analytics that turn data about customers, performance, financials and more into meaningful information. The result? Fact-based decisions for undeniable bottom line impact – this is how we transform the way our customers do business. Because of the constant dedication to customers and research and development, SAS has thrived throughout the decades and has the ability to run across all platforms, using the multivendor architecture. Since 1976 SAS has been giving customers around the world THE POWER TO KNOW®.