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

Resilient.Reusable.Robust: The Three R’s of a Sound Enterprise Data Strategy

Many organizations fail to launch successful analytics initiatives because they often miss out on the fundamentals. It is of utmost importance to couple any analytics strategy with an effective data strategy. This strategy must ultimately free up data scientists and business decision makers from time-consuming data wrangling. As the result, timely and quality insights can be produced to augment critical business decision making. The veracity of the analytics insights will only be as good as the underlying data that is used to model predictions. Join this engaging session as we review best practices for developing an effective enterprise data strategy.

Interactive Breakout

Implementing Cloud Data Warehousing to Improve Agility, Cost Effectiveness, Scalability and Performance

Keynote Presentation

Implementing an Effective Data Governance Plan to Ensure 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

Interactive Breakout

Building Trust in Enterprise Data to Drive Business Decisions

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 Breakout

Ensuring that Data & Analytics are Prime Drivers of the Business Strategy

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 October 28 Session of Data & Analytics Virtual Summit Series

Speakers for December 16, 2020

All Times in EST

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

Virtual Welcome

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

Implementing Cloud Data Warehousing to Improve Agility, Cost Effectiveness, Scalability and Performance

Moving data infrastructure to the cloud can offer your IT organization improved performance, elasticity, scalability and lower operating costs. It is also an opportunity for you to re-evaluate the current processes, roles and tools used to deliver enterprise data warehouses and identify new ways to increase your agility.

Join us in this informative session as we discuss the implementation of cloud data warehousing and share the following:

• Learn how automation software can help data warehousing teams successfully make the journey from existing legacy data platforms to cloud-based data warehousing platforms in less time and with existing staffing
• Learn how teams are using automation not only to design, develop, deploy and operate data infrastructure projects faster, but to better position to address future business change
• See how automation can be used on various platforms such as Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, or Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse

Keynote Presentation

Resilient.Reusable.Robust: The Three R’s of a Sound Enterprise Data Strategy

Many organizations fail to launch successful analytics initiatives because they often miss out on the fundamentals. It is of utmost importance to couple any analytics strategy with an effective data strategy. This strategy must ultimately free up data scientists and business decision makers from time-consuming data wrangling. As the result, timely and quality insights can be produced to augment critical business decision making. The veracity of the analytics insights will only be as good as the underlying data that is used to model predictions. Join this engaging session as we review best practices for developing an effective enterprise data strategy.

Networking Break / Exhibitor Showcase

Keynote Presentation

Advancing Enterprise Analytics: Keys to Success

As organizations navigate through the transitions to become more data-driven there are many factors that can cause both success and failure. This session will highlight key areas to focus on as you endeavor to support this transition within your organization as an individual contributor or a leader who is charged with driving this function.

Join us in this session as we’ll share experiences working in the healthcare analytics field over the last 30 years and cover some keys that have proven valuable:

• The importance of partnership
• Navigating organizational complexities
• Establishing a culture of enablement
• Pitfalls to avoid on the journey as a professional with aspirations

Lunch & Learn

Building A Best-In-Class Data & Analytics Team: Strategies to Attract Top Talent

According to Mckinsey Global Institute, data-driven organizations are not only 23 times more likely to acquire customers, but they’re also six times as likely to retain customers and 19 times more likely to be profitable! Data and Analytics professionals are driving strategy, digital transformation, personalization, revenue growth and efficiencies across industries, and they are helping companies become more data-driven.

Join us in this informative session as we discuss strategies to attract and retain top Data & Analytics talent.

Keynote Presentation

Building “AI Proficiency” in the Business

As business models become more digital, organizations are in a race to acquire in-demand technical and analytical capabilities like data scientists, data engineers, cloud engineers, etc.  But, what about the non-technical professionals in groups like marketing, product, sales, and operations?  What do they need to understand about AI to unlock its transformative potential?   Also, what role should IT and Analytics leadership play in this process?

Join this enlightening session as we address the following topics:

• Role of analytics and IT leadership in partnering with HR and business leaders to upskill non-technical roles
• Four key knowledge areas required by non-technical business professionals to fully harness the innovative power of AI
• Considerations for selecting and leading effective AI use cases
• Solution frameworks and real-world use cases
• Ethical considerations for implementing AI that “serves all”

Networking Break / Exhibitor Showcase

Keynote Presentation

Data Architecture Isn’t Agile…Enough: How Data Science and Data Architecture Can Work Better Together

Data Science is by its nature Agile but Data Architecture hasn’t become Agile to match. By Agile we mean, responding to ever-shifting priorities by delivering value in small increments through continuous, rapid cycles of time-boxed work.

Data science is mostly applied research and development, and wailing in frustration and despair. While data architecture is high ceremony, exhaustive steps, endless frameworks, and trying to figure out why there are 10 sort of similar but vastly different definitions of a customer. The end goal for data practitioners on both sides of the fence is the same…good quality data. With the amount of time wasted by data scientists wrangling and taming datasets, data architecture is an enabler that can help. So why aren’t data architects being invited to the party?

Keynote Presentation

Intelligent Automation: Automating the Supply Chain of a Data-to-Insights Factory

COVID-19 has taught us the hard way that business as usual will never be the same, and it’s critical to self-evolve to keep up with disruption. Successful companies have turned to intelligent automation to reimagine their operating models and service delivery frameworks. The promise of robotic process automation combined with data-driven autonomous insights based on AI and ML can fundamentally alter core processes for getting goods and services to consumers.

Join us in this highly informative session as we discuss:

• Ways to collect, organize, and produce data products that enable companies to understand and drive consumer engagement
• How successful organizations embrace Intelligent Automation, and what you can learn from them
• How you can manage technical, functional, and organizational change
• Lessons learned and recommendations for your consideration

Panel Discussion

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

It’s critical for an organizationto align its culture with business goals, and perceptivedata 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 themto 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 December 16 Session of Data & Analytics Virtual Summit Series