Data & Analytics Virtual Summit 2021

2021 Speakers

2020 Previous Speakers

Virtual Welcome / Opening Remarks

Opening Keynote Presentation

Becoming Truly Data-Driven: Altering the Organizational Mindset

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

Networking Break / Exhibit Hall Showcase

Panel Discussion

Developing Technology Literacy as a Core Skill to Improve Decision-Making and Investments

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 technologies become more and more of an integral part of the business and a true organizational asset, the technology investment decisions must be made with more than just a rudimentary ability to convey and comprehend the technologies. As such, the importance of tech 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 tech 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 tech savvy literacy programs, 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 technology 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 technology-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 literacy

Lunch & Learn

Select a topic and join us for an informal and interactive group session where we’ll discuss challenges and strategy implementations that are top of mind for today’s data and analytics practitioners

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

Keynote Presentation

The 3 Pillars for Effective Business Intelligence Governance

Business intelligence (BI) governance can be intimidating for many large enterprises. Users have access to multiple tools and content, and establishing a uniform layer of governance on top of a heterogeneous environment is a daunting task. However, governance is critical, and the lack of proper governance leads to poor user engagement and low ROI from BI investments.

Join us in this engaging session as we discuss the benefits of implementing an effective Business Intelligence Portal, such as:

• Managing information access and discoverability
• Optimizing BI content, license utilization, and staff resources
• Creating trust with your BI team and the content they produce

Keynote Presentation

The CDO in 2021: Evolving the Role to Spearhead Data-Driven Transformation

With the role of the CDO becoming critical to the transformation demanded by enterprise organizations, it’s being further elevated as an integral business position. In 2021 and beyond, the office of the CDO will be seen as a mission-critical function – comparable to IT, Operations, business operations, HR and Finance. With data playing a key role in this time of disruption, the CDO is best positioned to create the business roadmap to harness data in order to drive new value streams.

In this informative session we will review best practices for the CDO to drive innovation and transformation, such as:

• Collaborating with senior leadership to drive a data-first culture across the organization, ensuring that data is a linchpin to decision-making
• Promoting learning and inspiring leaders to gain new skills and knowledge that are needed to improve data literacy and drive business
• Establishing organizational capabilities through standardization of resources, work and business processes
• Ensuring the reliable, safe and ethical use of data through policies, best practices and training
• Delivering data and insights quickly and effectively into the hands of business leaders who can in turn run the business in real-time through data insights that are translated to actions
• Identifying and demonstrating tangible ROI to ensure that resources are guided and prioritized to the biggest business impact areas

Keynote Presentation

Modernizing your Data Warehouse with Cloud Migration to Improve Performance and Scalability

Traditional data warehousing can’t keep up with the demands of rapidly growing data volumes and processing workloads, so many organizations are looking to shift on-premises workloads to the cloud. However, when it comes to data management, business intelligence or reporting, moving to the cloud has several perceived problems such as performance, security, and lack of control. A data warehouse migration is a challenge for any company, and in order to execute it well, it’s critical to thoroughly research the challenges, mitigate risk, and carefully plan the migration to ensure readiness.

Join this engaging session as we discuss key considerations for data warehouse migration, such as:

• The skill set and training required to enable successful migration
• Thoroughly understanding your existing data warehouse system, its architecture, schema, data volumes, data flows, security, and operational dependencies
• The migration tasks, approaches, order, and deadlines
• Data model design changes that are required during and after migration
• Ways to implement testing and quality assurance to assess progress and enable decisions to be made
• Contingency plan and points of rollback that are necessary in case things go wrong

Panel Discussion

Creating a Data-Driven Culture – Making Data the Basis of Organizational Decision-Making

Regardless of industry, the biggest obstacles to creating a data-based business aren’t technical; they’re cultural. While it’s simple enough to describe how to inject data into a decision-making process, it’s far more difficult to make this normal, even automatic, for employees – a shift in mindset that often presents a daunting challenge. Leading a data transformation requires new mindsets and methods at every level.

Join us in this engaging session as we as we will discuss what’s needed to help create and sustain a culture with data at its core, such as:

• Ensuring that executive leadership sets an expectation that decisions must be anchored in data – that this is the cultural norm, not a novel or exceptional initiative
• Developing a clear and concise data strategy for every department
• Implementing organization-wide data governance systems
• Discovering patterns in data and experimenting with analytics solutions to see what really works in operational processes
• Building deep data and analytics partnerships to ensure that your data is aligned with organizational business objectives

Closing Remarks and End of Data & Analytics Virtual Summit