Keynote: Digital Transformation: What It Is, What It Isn’t and Why It’s Imperative
From Big Data and Hadoop, to Blockchains and Chatbots, many organization struggle to adapt to an endless flow of business fads. At first glance, Digital Transformation appears to be yet another fad, blending apps, social media and Internets of Things in a mystical brew of profits derived from vast quantities of data. However, author, engineer and futurist Christopher Surdak argues that Digital Transformation is neither a fad of a buzzword, rather, it is a social, technical and economic phenomenon of historic significance. In this presentation, Surdak will discuss how the Digital Transformation of our world is both understandable and inevitable. Drawing from historical examples he will show how the changes in our world parallel those of the Industrial Revolution and how our society is undergoing a similar, fundamental change; only hundreds of times faster. Finally, he will discuss specific actions that you can take, today, to begin adapting to competition in the digital era.
Presented by: Chris Surdak, Surdak & Co.
Chris Surdak, JD is and award-winning author, innovator, disrupter, engineer and strategist. He is the President of Surdak & Co. - a technology, business and regulatory consultancy. Chris is an industry-recognized expert in big data and analytics, cognitive computing, robotic process automation, artificial intelligence, organizational dynamics, and digital transformation with over 20 years of experience.
Chris began his career with Lockheed Martin, where he was a spacecraft systems engineer and rocket scientist. Since then, he has held leadership roles with leading companies such as Accenture, Siemens, Dell, Citibank, HP, and Ernst & Young. Chris is also the author of the books: Jerk: Twelve Steps to Rule the World (2016), Data Crush: How the Information Tidal Wave Is Creating New Business Opportunities (2014), and The Care and Feeding of BOTS, which is set to be released in early 2019.
Keynote: How Charts Lie —Getting Smarter about Visual Information
In the past few decades, data visualization has become a mainstream language for exploration and communication. Researchers and professionals in multiple disciplines, from the sciences to journalism, have adopted it because of its power to make patterns and trends visible. However, do we really read charts well? Maybe not. This talk reveals the most common types of mistakes people make when seeing graphs, maps, and diagrams, and explains how to become a better chart reader.
Presented by: Alberto Cairo, University of Miami
Alberto Cairo, Knight Chair in Visual Journalism at the University of Miami. Cairo is the director of the visualization program at UM’s Center for Computational Science, worked previously as director of infographics and multimedia at news publications in Spain and Brazil, and as a professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. As a noted author, freelancer and consultant for companies such as Google, Cairo will share his insight as outlined in his upcoming book How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter About Visual Information, which is set to be released Fall of 2019.
Cairo’s other published works include, The Functional Art: An Introduction to Information Graphics and Visualization (2012) and The Truthful Art: Data, Charts, and Maps for Communication (2016).
Warehouse Analytics for the Supply Chain
In this session, Joe will discuss the different tools and technologies to deliver rich content at the right time to the right people who will help drive decisions in your Supply Chain. With the ever-increasing data collection technologies, there is a critical need to create easy to use visualizations to pinpoint inefficiencies. This presentation will also cover the different platforms to deliver content to users.
Presented by: Joe Beydoun, Lipari Foods
Joe Beydoun is the Vice President of Technology for Lipari Foods, a wholesale food distributor in the Midwest with over 1,000 employees. He has expertise in warehousing, transportation and analytics systems. He is a member of the leadership team at Lipari Foods and participates in the operational management and strategic planning of the company.
Collin Boyce, City of Lansing
Collin Boyce is the Chief Information Officer and Chief Information Security Officer for the City of Lansing. He is passionate about providing organizational leadership in utilizing technology to improve the user's experience and enhancing customer service. His key areas of focus are workflow optimization, agile project management, vendor and contract negotiation, vendor management, and using data to drive business decisions.
Learn more about Collin’s session
Enterprise Information Management – From Data Readiness to Insight & Activation
The session will provide a holistic overview of the journey and current state of Domino’s Enterprise Information Management practices which has experienced exponential growth over the last couple of years along with the company. Focus of the session will be around how the organization managed that growth with a staircase approach to adding incremental capabilities and maturity into the enterprise from data readiness to insight to activation and how it supports overall competitive advantage.
Presented by Fred De Letter, Dominos
Fred De Letter is currently leading the Business Intelligence & Enterprise Information Management practice within Domino’s across all enterprise domains including Sales & Marketing, Finance, Supply Chain and HR. His focus is on enabling core analytical insight as well as putting a strategic road map in place to better leverage information as an asset and creating competitive advantage. Focus on business strategy and how analytics can impact. Strategy to include digital transformation, product / data monetization, BI-as-a-Service & automated augmented analytics.
Ravi Ginjupalli, Kelly Services
Ravi is a Sr. Director of BI & Analytics at Kelly Services. He is a Tech-Savvy Leader with over 20 years of experience across different domains of Information Technology including Analytics, Application Development, Security, Infrastructure and Enterprise Architecture. His passion is in inspiring change, cultivating innovation, and enabling digital transformation while balancing business objectives. He is a practitioner of Servant Leadership with situational adaptability; skilled in driving employee engagement and building high performance teams that lead to recruiting top talent.
Learn more about Ravi’s session.
Chris James, Duo Security
Chris has over spent 10 years focused on data quality and delivery with experience in Financial, Automotive, Sales, Manufacturing and Digital Marketing data. His passion is to democratize data so we can all make more informed decisions and give data to those who can do the most with it.
Learn more about Chris’ session
Annette Jonker, OmniSci
Annette likes to work with big data in a hyper interactive way, unlocking secrets and insights. Annette works as Solutions Engineer at OmniSci, helping organizations quickly prove or disprove hypotheses and find actionable insights in billion+ record datasets. It really is more fun than “work”, but please don’t tell her supervisor.
She finds analytics intriguing, and the stories that people uncover in their data using the OmniSci platform fascinating. Annette started her BI career as a consultant with BusinessObjects 20 years ago, moved into data visualization with Qlik 7 years ago and has enthusiastically made the leap into GPU accelerated analytics with OmniSci.
Learn more about Annette’s session.
Monica Kedzierski, BorgWarner
Monica is the Director of Enterprise Data & Analytics at BorgWarner and built the Data & Analytics organization from the ground up. She champions the Vision and Strategy for Data & Analytics and fuels an analytics-driven culture across the enterprise. Monica leads large cross-BI analytical projects that are focused on solving main business objectives of the company. She promotes data literacy and analytics governed self-service to empower business users with data discovery.
Learn more about Monica’s session
Machine Learning: Hype or Hero
This session will go through how our organization identified three opportunities to use machine learning to solve our business problems. The session will walk through each business problem and outline the key lessons learned for each project when executing a machine learning project. The session will specifically explore how we used tools such as Azure machine learning studio, Azure customer vision API, and R studio for our projects.
Presented by: Jeff Kwiatkowski, USF Holland
Jeff Kwiatkowski is the Director of Data Warehousing and Project Management for USF Holland. For the last 20 years, Jeff has been involved in multiple aspects of business intelligence and data warehousing. Prior to USF Holland, Jeff has worked for Haworth as a business liaison manager and Johnson Controls as a platform manager for the data warehouse and java development teams and program manager for an IoT product. Jeff has also been formally trained on lean manufacturing principals and is a certified six sigma blackbelt.
Tommy O’Connell, MicroStrategy
Tommy is a Sales Engineer with MicroStrategy, based out of Chicago, IL and supports the Midwest territory. He has a Bachelor’s of Science from Pepperdine University and is currently pursuing his Master’s Degree of Computer Science at DePaul University. In his free time, Tommy enjoys golf, exercising, and spending time with his Corgi, Carl.
Learn more about Tommy’s session
Albert Pardilla, Alteryx
Albert Pardilla is a Solutions Consultant with Alteryx, helping data analysts and data scientists alike go from the end of their ropes to the edge of their seats. He was an Alteryx customer for seven years prior to joining, and has 16 years of experience in database marketing.
Learn more about Albert’s session
Jim Smith, Qlik
Jim Smith has been in the software industry for 30 years, and has spent the last 20 years supporting Business Intelligence products. Jim’s has worked directly with Oracle, SAP, ExactTarget, Salesforce and BI solutions vendors such as Birst and Qlik. His experience is both as a technical sales engineer and also a product trainer. He is looking forward to working with the attendees at the Great Lakes BI Summit and showing how organizations can see the whole story that lives in their data.
Learn more about Jim’s session
Rik Tamm-Daniels, Informatica
Rik serves as Senior Director, Strategic Cloud and Big Data Ecosystems at Informatica responsible for strategic alignment with key ecosystem partners to drive awareness and adoption of Informatica’s industry-leading enterprise cloud data management platform. Rik previously was VP of Technology and Partnerships at Paxata, a self-service data preparation pioneer, as well as a co-founder and VP of Technology at Attivio, a data catalog, enterprise search and text analytics vendor.
Learn more about Rik’s session
Khuzema Tikiwala, Meritor
Khuzema is currently working as Solution Architect – Analytics and BI at Meritor Inc. During his 27 years of professional career he has worked in various capacities as Manager, Technical Leader, Solution Architect and Developer. His areas of expertise include Data & Analytics, Business Intelligence, Data Warehouse, Data Integration, Data Governance, and Application Development (Web & Mobile) across various verticals. He believes in “Let our data guide us in providing meaningful insights needed to fuel success”. His focus in Meritor is on building a solid Analytical Platform and help take the organization to next level of technology including but not limited to Predictive Analytics, IoT, AI, Machine Learning and Smart Factories.
Learn more about Khuzema’s session
Nathan Patrick Taylor, DataRobot
Nathan Patrick Taylor is currently serving as a Customer Facing Data Scientist at DataRobot. Prior to joining DataRobot, Nathan was the Director of Data Science and Analytics at Symphony Post-Acute Network. While at Symphony, Nathan was named a “Data Science Superhero” by DataRobot. Nathan completed his Bachelor of Science in Computer Science at Huntington University. He also holds a Master of Public Health and Master of Science in Management Information Systems, both from Benedictine University.
Learn more about Nathan’s session
Lindsey Turcotte, Qlik
Lindsey is a Solution Architect for Qlik based out of the Detroit area. With a background in data science, Lindsey has experience working with several BI tools and analytic strategies. As a former Qlik developer, she is passionate about helping a broad range of users find value in their data.
Learn more about Linsdey’s session
Austion Woolfolk, Informatica
Austion is a 15 year Informatica veteran with over 25 years of data integration, decision support and business intelligence experience, and has worked with customers across all Informatica products and solutions.
Learn more about Austion’s session.
AUSTIN ZELLNER, MONGO DB
Austin has worked for over 20 years in the development world helping teams and organizations make the most of their data. His focus has always been on how to transform data into meaningful information, as well as enjoying tackling interesting modeling problems.
Learn more about Austin’s session