Data & Analytics Fall/Winter Virtual Summit Series: September – December 2020

Speakers for September 30, 2020

All Times in EST

Democratizing Data – Rethinking How Your Organization Manages, Distributes and Consumes Data

Virtual Welcome

Chairperson’s Opening Remarks:

Democratizing Data – Rethinking How Your Organization Manages, Distributes and Consumes Data

Opening Keynote Presentation

Democratizing Data to Create New Opportunities, Revenue Streams, and Drive Business Growth

Making data accessible enterprise-wide through data democratization is a topic that’s been bandied about the boardroom for some time. Data, and universal access to it, is recognized as the key to transforming companies, creating new opportunities, and unlocking the value embedded within organizations — all of which can positively impact a company’s top and bottom line. However, a large majority of companies haven’t progressed as planned, and are nowhere where they need to be on the road to data democratization.

Join this enlightening session as we discuss best practices in democratizing data to drive growth, such as:

• Driving a dramatic cultural change in order to realize a financial gain
• Freeing information from the silos created by internal departmental data, customer data, and external data
• Mitigate and embrace the risks involved with increasing accessibility to the data
• Creating a shared framework of metadata across the organization to ensure a seamless exchange of information across all phases of the process
• Utilizing visual analytics such as infographics, interactive reports, and virtual reality so that employees are better able to understand and utilize the data

Keynote Presentation

Defining an Effective Framework to Turn Data and Analytics into Quantifiable Results

The discipline of data-driven decision-making may be an entirely new approach for many organizations that are thinking about how to improve business performance. An assessment of analytics maturity is crucial to company performance, so it’s important to define a framework for a repeatable analytic process.

Join this informative session as we will talk about the steps that are necessary to create an effective framework, such as:

• Clarifying how your organization can set and execute goals, and measure performance
• Predicting the behaviors and tendencies of your customers, and forecasting how they will behave in the future
• Balancing business objectives with the goals of the customers
• Launching the optimized mix of strategies in the field and capturing the responses
• Analyzing the results in order to evaluate the impact on business performance

Interactive Roundtable Discussions

Keynote Presentation

Implementing an Effective Data Governance Plan to Ensures that Your Data is Managed Efficiently and Strategically

Fostering an organizational culture that facilitates data democratization while enabling self-service can help teams make decisions faster. However, even though it’s critical for everyone to be able to access the data they need, it’s important to prevent them from performing analysis that leads to flawed business decisions. To achieve an effective balance between real-time access to date while keeping it secure, it’s imperative for the company to implement a data governance plan that weeds out inefficiencies and boosts accountability within and between business teams.

Join this interactive discussion as we talk about the best ways to implement an effective data governance strategy, such as:

• Ensuring that your governance initiative leaders are “data native” experts that are empowered to enforce the strategies that they’re creating and implementing
• Investing in user training so that everyone in the organization understands the scope, significance, and processes surrounding the data
• Creating a series of resources that clearly outline and document the systems, policies, and procedures around using your organization’s tools
• Implementing user permissions to ensure that end-users can only access data that suits their understanding, skills, and need

Keynote Presentation

Leveraging AI to Help to Ensure that Data is a Source of Value for the Organization

When it comes to artificial intelligence (AI), there is no such thing as data overload. In fact, it’s quite the opposite – the more data, the better. Because AI systems have the ability to process enormous amounts of data, and their accuracy increases along with data volume, the demand for data continues to grow.As the lifeblood of AI, data is critical to helping you get the business insights you need to move your business forward.

In this session we will discuss ways to lay out the groundwork for successful integration of AI, such as:

• Determining the most important areas in which AI can benefit the business
• Ensuring that your IT infrastructure can handle the change
• Investing in your employees’ knowledge of AI and its impact on data
• Defining KPI’s and implementing a reporting mechanism that will help determine whether the platform can do what it promises to do

Interactive Roundtable Discussions

Keynote Presentation

Aligning the User Experience with the Needs of the Business to Ensure Maximum Adoption of Data Democratization

Data democracy provides organizations with the tools they need to independently understand data and make insights-driven decisions. It’s critical for companies to learn how to successfully implement data democratization by aligning analytics with clear business outcomes, ensuring sound foundational data, and focusing on the user experience. In addition, it’s important to enable free data exploration and approachable analysis, so that employees will be empowered to move the needle on business growth without struggling against technical learning curves and insights bottlenecks.However, in many organizations the data doesn’t flow downstream to the business people who’d derive value from the information it holds, so businesses can’t fully capitalize on their infrastructure investment.

In this engaging session we’ll discuss ways to successfully facilitate data democratization, such as:

• Advancing self-service analytics tools like machine learning, semantic analysis, and visualization to improve decision-making
• Determining the business outcomes that the company is looking for, in order to set up strategies for monitoring revenue performance, conducting root cause analysis, and identifying key opportunities for improving revenue generation
• Determining consistent data definitions that will be agreed upon and used throughout the organization
• Enabling users to easily explore data for analysis by utilizing interactive visualizations to assist them in examining the data
• Delivering approachable analysis to ensure that the analytics solutions are clear and consumable throughout the entire organization

Panel Discussion

Developing a Data-Driven Foundation that Becomes a Key Component of Organizational Culture

Massive quantities of data have the potential to fuel a new era of fact-based innovation in corporations, backing up plenty of new ideas with solid evidence. Supported by hopes of better satisfying customers, streamlining operations, and clarifying strategy, many companies have for the last several years amassed a ton of data, invested in new technologies, and brought in expensive analytical talent. Ensuring that data and analytics are seen as key areas of focus in an organization requires an overarching data culture that requires a number of components to be successful. However, for many companies, developing a strong, data-driven culture remains elusive, and data isn’t usually the universal basis for decision making.

In this interactive panel discussion, we’ll cover several things that your organization can do in order to help create and sustain a culture with data at its core, such as:

• Ensuring that the culture initiatives start at the very top, and are clearly supported by the C-suite.
• Shifting the focus from supplying data to the business – to driving business value from the data and analytics programs
• Fixing basic data-access issues quickly to ensure that the business doesn’t struggle to obtain even the most basic data
• Utilizing analytics to empower employees and help them learn new skills and better handle the data
• Leveraging big data and analytics in order to drive organizational innovation

End of August 12 Session of Data & Analytics Virtual Summit Series

All Times in EST

Shifting the Organizational Mindset to Create a Truly Data-Driven Culture

Virtual Welcome

Chairperson’s Opening Remarks:

Shifting the Organizational Mindset to Create a Truly Data-Driven Culture

Opening Keynote Presentation

Changing the Organizational Mentality to Become Truly Data-Driven

Becoming truly data-driven requires changing mindsets, attitudes, and habits—embedding data into the identity of the organization. In a data-driven culture, people ask the hard questions and challenge ideas to come together with a shared mission and improve the organization with data. To achieve this, it’s important for leadership to inspire the workforce through action, basing decisions on data, not intuition.

Join this informative session as we review some core elements that are needed to create a truly data-driven culture, such as:

• Creating a foundation of trust in the people and the data to develop high-trust, collaborative relationships
• Making the commitment to treat data as a strategic asset and ensure that analytics projects tie back to critical business efforts
• Prioritizing data skills in recruiting, developing, and retaining talent
• Active sharing of best practices across the entire organization to develop a sense of community and support business objectives

Keynote Presentation

Utilizing Data-Driven Decision-Making to Improve Organizational Alignment and Grow the Business

Companies have access to more data than ever before, and ones that can leverage the data to drive decision-making gain a competitive advantage, reduce business costs and increase profit. By leveraging the wealth of data and digital insights available and embracing the power of business intelligence, it’s possible to make more informed decisions that will lead to commercial growth, evolution, and an increased bottom line. However, for many companies the data sits in dashboards and degrades, and they continue to make decisions that disregard tangible insight.

Join this engaging session as we review how organizations can effectively utilize data to drive decision-making and create smarter business decisions, such as:

• Examining corporate objectives and prioritizing data with business goals at the core
• Finding and presenting relevant data to predict future trends and optimize current operational efforts
• Democratizing data to empower the entire organization to access it and help make informed decisions
• Extracting meaningful insights and analytical reports that will lead the company to make data driven business decisions
• Continuing to examine, analyze, and question the data driven decisions to refresh and evolve the business goals

Interactive Roundtable Discussions

Keynote Presentation

Advocating and Developing Data Literacy to Support a Data Driven Workforce

Organizations have to understand that data must be spoken as a common language with its customers when looking at the pervasiveness of data and analytics capabilities. As data and analytics becomes an integral part of the business and an organizational asset, the entire workforce must have at least a rudimentary ability to convey and comprehend conversations about data. As such, the importance of data literacy will become a critical element of most daily tasks. Data and analytics leadership will need to play a key role in creating the narrative for company-wide data literacy, and must also be able to highlight the value that will be gained by the entire organization.

In this informative session we will discuss the steps necessary to develop a successful data literacy program, such as:

• Recognizing the current talent in the organization that has an advanced understanding of data, and can serve as arbiters for all of the business groups in the company
• Ascertaining the most readily apparent problem areas where a lack of data understanding is a critical barrier to data being utilized to its full organization and business potential
• Cultivating upper-level leadership and front-line managers that will be utilized in developing and administering data-driven solutions and services
• Developing workshops and training breakouts to review all of the information that has been gathered, and sharing the takeaways with other divisions and departments to bring attention to glaring gaps in data literacy

Keynote Presentation

Creating an Analytically Driven Organization: Implementing an Advanced Analytics Program

Many organizations have been charging ahead with bold investments in analytics resources and artificial intelligence by implementing analytics programs and hiring analytics talent, but many of them fail to convert their analytics pilots into scalable solutions. Unfortunately, top management often fails to really grasp the concept of advanced analytics by struggling to define valuable problems for the analytics team to solve, and they lack the full investment in building the right skills.

In this session we will review some important considerations to ensure your organization has the right talent that is necessary to making intelligent, data-driven business decisions, such as:

• Deciding on the key metrics that are truly meaningful for your business, in order to make the right recruiting decisions
• Modeling the data correctly to properly plan the goals of your analytics team
• Creating data and analytics content that’s mobile, easily searchable and quickly digestible, in order to improve the learning experience
• Creating new, collaborative advanced analytics opportunities that inspire personal investment in the process

Interactive Roundtable Discussions

Keynote Presentation

Making Data & Analytics Strategies a Routine Boardroom Discussion Topic

Leading organizations in every industry are wielding data and analytics as competitive weapons, operational accelerants and innovation catalysts. Information as an asset is still in the “early adoption” phase, which makes it a competitive differentiator for leading organizations as they focus on digital transformation. In turn, data and analytics become strategic priorities. However, many companies continue to struggle under the weight of traditional business models and analog business process that discount the potential of data and analytics.

Join us in this engaging session as we discuss how to make data and analytics become the centerpiece of enterprise strategy and focus, by:

• Collecting examples of the internal and external economic benefits from data and analytics that your organization has generated
• Committing to the information management and advanced analytics skills and technology investments that are necessary to realize that potential of data and analytics
• Measuring and communicating the value of the organization’s information assets to help shift the culture into believing and behaving as if information is an actual asset
• Building advanced analytics competencies beyond traditional business intelligence and embedding them throughout the business

Panel Discussion

Women in Data & Analytics – Improving Talent and Leadership in Your Data Organization

It’s critical for an organization to align its culture with business goals, and perceptive data and analytics executives are actively implementing strategies to cultivate a distinct and inclusive culture that’s fully aligned with brand identity. They’re fully aware that women are making a huge impact in data and analytics, and have clearly become leaders in advancing data strategies and analytical research. However, many organizations realize that it’s a significant challenge for them to improve on their ability to pinpoint, engage and retain female data and analytics practitioners.

Join this highly engaging panel discussion as we discuss best practices for attracting and retaining female data and analytics talent, such as:

• Providing awareness, education and advancement to women in data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence
• Highlighting female leadership in your data and analytics organization as part of the brand strategy
• Creating culture-changing employee experiences with data and analytics initiatives geared towards women in the organization
• Implementing diversity and inclusion training geared at the data organization to ensure that female candidates have equal opportunities for advancement and leadership opportunities

End of August 12 Session of Data & Analytics Virtual Summit Series

All Times in EST

Unleashing the Power of Data with a Modern Data & Analytics Strategy

Virtual Welcome

Chairperson’s Opening Remarks:

Unleashing the Power of Data with a Modern Data & Analytics Strategy

Opening Keynote Presentation

Managing Organizational Data During Times of Uncertainty

Despite the pandemic crisis that the world will be dealing for an extended period of time, most organizations still need to gather massive amounts of data, analyze trends related to this influx of information, gain insights, and make corresponding decisions. In fact, in a time of increasing uncertainty, they need to make better decisions with greater urgency and wider import at higher levels of risk. This demands an effective framework of the highest quality, well-understood data, delivered at speed and in considerable volumes.

In this session we’ll be discussing best practices for ensuring your data is managed and secured effectively, such as:

• Establishing a business continuity plan that covers the restoration of technology and business operations in the event of an unplanned event
• Developing a clear understanding of how, when and where your workforce should be working with sensitive data – and ensuring that it’s done in an approved way
• Creating a robust monitoring and reporting system in order to help detect any data intrusions quickly and effectively
• Moving your files onto secure servers offsite – such as through Cloud storage solutions – to ensure that the organization has a reliable copy of the data to restore from (or compare against) if a security issue does arise
• Establishing a clear understanding of how to effectively roll out service enhancements

Keynote Presentation

Implementing an Agile Approach to Data Unification

Data unification is an incredibly complex process and one of the biggest challenges that many organizations face today. Trying to combine all of the data across your organization into one master source is incredibly difficult to achieve at scale, particularly when hundreds of thousands of datasets are involved. Because of this data mastering crisis, there is an immediate need for organizations to provide agile and curated datasets.

In this interactive session we will discuss some of the principles for scalable data unification, such as:

• Ingesting data and performing data cleaning
• Performing schema integration and entity consolidation
• Performing classification and other complex analytics
• Exporting unified data to one or more downstream systems

Interactive Roundtable Discussions

Keynote Presentation

Personalizing the Customer Experience to Yield a Higher ROI

While the value of personalization is clear, the task can seem rather lofty. Despite the many challenges in creating dozens or even hundreds of different experiences for your customers, it’s imperative to make sure that your message speaks to each of them on an individual level. The organization must deliver real-time contextually relevant experiences that are informed by customer data.

Join us in this highly interactive session as we talk about the ways your organization can connect and aggregate data about your customers and their preferences, such as:

• Implementing messaging that encourages active participation and celebrates customer achievements
• Utilizing information about past interactions and purchases, and retargeting your audience on different platforms
• Creating compelling and compatible content and experiences that stay with your customer throughout their whole journey
• Utilizing innovative technologies based on market trends, customer behavior, and buying signals to ensure that content and messages reach the customers in a timely fashion and correct format

Keynote Presentation

Identifying and Seizing the Opportunities to Drive Business Value Through Advanced Analytics Innovation

In today’s increasingly data-driven landscape, the companies who succeed are equipped to put their data to work most effectively. Data analytics dramatically impacts both internal critical operations as well as external product or service delivery and customer experience. This is made possible by creating faster, more in-depth insights that enable better decision making and provide a huge opportunity to drive digital transformation across the business.

Join this session as we discuss the key points to successfully develop a solid analytics strategy, such as:

• Engaging with internal clients to improve delivery of analytic projects needs
• Supporting business transformation by providing thought leadership in analytic techniques and new solutions
• Identifying data points opportunities across the digital and physical customer journey
• Monitoring external trends to inform strategic decisions

Interactive Roundtable Discussions

Keynote Presentation

Utilizing Analytics to Improve Customer Engagement and Gain a Competitive Advantage

Effective data and analytics implementation allows organizations to use intelligence from feedback to tailor offerings that improve customer satisfaction. There are several factors to consider, including the use of a wide range of data sources, well-developed core analytics capabilities, and integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and the internet of things (IoT) into processes.Because of the more pervasive use of analytics,organizations must continue to improve their use of data and analytics to stay ahead.

Join this engaging session as we discuss ways to use data to increase customer engagement, such as:

• Developing multi-channel customer support strategies that allows companies to communicate with customers via their preferred channels
• Aggregating customer interactions, transactions, feedback, and agent data to provide an end-to-end picture of the customer journey
• Creating compelling and relevant content and experiences that stay with the customer throughout their entire journey
• Utilizing deep learning technology on industry trends, consumer behavior, and intent signals to ensure that content and messages reach the right customer at the right time in the right format

Panel Discussion

The War on Talent in a Digital Age: Strategies for Attracting, Developing and Retaining Data and Analytics Talent

Few areas of the job market have seen the growth and disparity in supply and demand that the data and analytics field has experienced. As big data continues to get bigger and the analytics field continues to mature, it’s becoming a core part of business and the decision-making process. Competition for top analytic talent is going to be fierce as more companies enter the hiring fray. It’s clearly a talent-driven market, as companies have to deal with bringing in new talent while dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic – and they’re not just competing with organizations in the same industry any longer.

In this panel we will discuss strategies for improving talent acquisition and development, such as:

• Knowing the specific data and analytical skills you are hiring for
• Creating career paths that lead to high-profile positions within the organization
• Illustrating the business impact that data and analytics can create
• Showing data and analytics talent that the organization, particularly senior management, is excited about the impact data and analytics has on the business
• Fostering a culture of self-development within the data and analytics teams

End of August 12 Session of Data & Analytics Virtual Summit Series