2009 SAS® Global Forum Executive Conference
Leading with Confidence in an Era of Uncertainty
Reserve your spot today.
IT Management Session
Join us for a special IT management session on Tuesday, March 24, at the SAS® Global Forum and learn how you can prove to your business executives that having powerful information and analysis capabilities can help navigate an uncertain business environment with confidence.
You’ll get the latest ideas for using business analytics to meet corporate goals, hear firsthand best practices stories and network with peers who are using SAS to succeed in today’s uncertain business climate.
We’ll explain key technology intersections and how to combine traditional business intelligence capabilities with real-time, event-based applications and business process information to perform business activity monitoring.
Presentations
9:00 a.m. – Transitioning to a Business Analytics Environment
In order to effectively compete in an ever-changing business environment, Bell Canada, Canada's largest communications provider, needed to ensure that its analysts spent less time pulling data and more time providing insights to management. In order to achieve this goal, the IMS group (Integrated Marketing Scientifics) took ownership to implement data analysis and visualization capabilities for Bell's business users. But the democratization of the data is easier said than done.
Yves Lapierre of Bell Canada will explain why a successful transition must address:
- Data and technology infrastructures.
- Roles and responsibilities.
- Strategy and cultural challenges.
10:00 a.m. –
Panel Discussion: How to Roll Out a Powerful, Effective Business Analytics Framework
Keith Collins, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at SAS, will moderate a panel focusing on how to deploy and support an operational framework for business analytics. The focus will be on using business analytics effectively in the operational and cultural sense.
Topics will include:
- What it means to deploy an operational framework.
- How to sell the value of business analytics and make that value real.
- The finer points of both large and mid-sized deployment.
Panelists include:
- Anne G. Robinson
- Eric Williams
- Gail Richmond
11:00 a.m. – The Five Faces of Business Intelligence
There is a shift in business intelligence (BI) away from looking exclusively at the data and toward understanding the role of BI in the process. While a number of styles exist – allowing for event-driven or periodic access to the BI infrastructure – the core will remain the rich functionality that allows the investigation of data and the creation of powerful models that enable better decisions and improved business processes.
Join SAS Fellow Allan Russell and find out how new BI infrastructures will evolve to ease the delivery of information and insights gleaned from existing, "classic" BI processes. Emerging interoperability standards for areas such as services, messages and events will be exploited so that BI infrastructures can monitor the operational applications representing business processes. The ability to ask the BI infrastructure to provide recommendations will provide even more value.
Speakers
Keith Collins
Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer
SAS
Keith Collins drives corporate technology strategies for SAS solutions. He is responsible for managing Research & Development, Information Services and Technical Support.
Collins led the effort to develop SAS®9, the breakthrough platform that is redefining business intelligence. He also ensures that SAS technologies are aligned with market demands through close contact with marketing, sales and the SAS CIO Customer Advisory Board.
A graduate of North Carolina State University, Collins is a founding member of the advisory board for the university’s computer science department and holds a seat on the Institute for Advanced Analytics Executive Advisory Board.
Yves Lapierre
Associate Director - Integrated Marketing Scientifics
Bell Canada
Gail Richmond
Manager
Branch Ordering Development
Waitrose, Limited
Gail Richmond is responsible for the delivery of change development projects on the business side for all aspects of forecasting, replenishment and stock maintenance within the supply chain.
Richmond has been with Waitrose for many years, beginning on the shop floor as a trainee manager before moving into the head office. Prior to managing her current team, she worked on future development projects for many areas of the business.
Anne G. Robinson
Senior Manager, Information and Data Strategy
Customer Value Chain Management (CVCM)
Cisco
In her current role, Anne Robinson is responsible for establishing and deploying strategic business intelligence and data management capabilities across the CVCM organization. Previously, she led a team of forecast practitioners tasked with developing and delivering sophisticated mathematical models to predict future product demand.
Robinson serves on the SAS Analytical Customer Advisory Board as well as the SAS-Teradata Product Advisory Board. She is an active member of INFORMS, where she is the current Vice President of Marketing and Outreach. Robinson has a master’s degree in applied operations research from the University of Waterloo and a doctoral degree in industrial engineering from Stanford University.
Allan Russell
Senior Vice President of Strategy
SAS
In 2006, SAS CEO Jim Goodnight selected Allan Russell to be a SAS Fellow, which means the 28-year SAS veteran researches and reports on emerging trends in the software industry.
Recently, Russell co-authored the book Information Revolution: Using the Information Evolution Model to Grow Your Business with SAS Senior Vice President Jim Davis and Vice President Gloria Miller. The book provides a framework to manage and use data as a corporate asset and compete in today's global arena. Russell's research focuses on "the uses of BI in a process-centric world" and examines areas such as business process management, business activity monitoring, SAS workflow tools and integration between SAS and process platforms.
Eric Williams
Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer
Catalina Marketing Corporation
Eric Williams is responsible for directing the strategic technology, research and development, and new application development for Catalina Marketing Corporation.
During his tenure with CMC, Williams has led the development of Catalina’s multi-terabyte data warehouse (now one of the largest transaction-level databases in the world) and was instrumental in the development of the first “Internet-delivered” loyalty marketing solution for basket-level data management. Some of the largest supermarket retailers in the United States and internationally use this solution for Frequent Shopper data management.
Previously, Williams served as the Vice President of research and development for Catalina Marketing and vice president of retail for Catalina’s SuperMarkets Online division. Williams brings more than 25 years of experience and a broad industry perspective to CMC. His background includes management, sales, marketing, systems design and development, and operations positions with retailers, software development and information technology companies.
