2019 Great Lakes BI Summit Speakers

Featured Keynote Speakers

Chris Surdak, Surdak & co

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.

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.

Alberto Cairo, University of Miami

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.

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).

2019 Session Speakers

Featured

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.

Learn more about Joe’s session

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. In this presentation, we will see how to leverage the BI Connector and ODBC driver to extract data to Excel, as well as tools that aid in the asking of more complicated questions of your data (specifically Compass, MongoDB Charts, and the Aggregation Pipeline).

Learn more about Austin’s session