November 15, 2002: Business Intelligence

Date:      November 15, 2002

Location: U.Va.  The Darden School, Charlottesville, Va.

Synopsis:

Organizations are investing in business intelligence software to provide analysts and knowledge workers with timely information and analytical capabilities for strategic decision making. This CMIT program will present current practices and challenges in business intelligence, and it will discuss where the industry is heading in the near future. A leading BI vendor, BI analyst, and several private and public organizations with BI implementations will offer different perspectives on these issues. The objective is to help companies evaluate the effectiveness of their existing BI infrastructure and plan for future opportunities.

Agenda

Michael Saylor 

Michael Saylor co-founded MicroStrategy in 1989 at the age of 24, and has since pioneered new products that help organizations better understand their data and make more effective decisions. He spends much of his time meeting with customers to understand their needs, and meeting with employees to create and deliver solutions. Saylor is consistently recognized as one of the technology industry's leading visionaries, and his vision is instrumental in shaping MicroStrategy's marketing and technology decisions. Prior to co-founding MicroStrategy, Saylor worked as a venture manager at the DuPont Chemical Corp., where he helped apply simulation, database, graphical user interface, and networking technologies to strategic planning. Saylor graduated with highest honors from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with dual Bachelor's degrees in Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Science, Technology and Society.

Wayne Eckerson 

WAYNE W. ECKERSON is the Director of Education and Research for The Data Warehousing Institute, the leading provider of high-quality, in-depth education and research services to data warehousing and business intelligence professionals worldwide. Eckerson oversees TDWI's educational curriculum, member publications, and various research and consulting services. Eckerson has written and spoken extensively on data warehousing and business intelligence subjects since 1994. He has published in-depth reports about data marts, databases, on-line analytical processing (OLAP), meta data management, Web-based query tools, enterprise information portals, and customer relationship management applications and architectures.

Eckerson has also written about business intelligence issues for Data Management Review, Computerworld, the Journal of Data Warehousing, DB2 Magazine, Enterprise Systems Journal, Application Development Trends, and Oracle Magazine, and has been quoted extensively in a variety of business and industry magazines.

In addition, Eckerson has delivered presentations at industry conferences, users group meetings, and vendor seminars. He has also consulted with many large vendor and user firms, including IBM, J.P. Morgan, NCR, Unum Corp., Oracle, Washington Mutual, Sybase, Information Builders, and Tandem.

Prior to joining TDWI, Eckerson was a senior consultant at the Patricia Seybold Group, and Director of the Patricia Seybold Group's Business Intelligence & Data Warehouse Service, which he launched in 1996. He also coordinated Patricia Seybold Group's B2B coverage.

Barbara Wixom

Dr. Barbara Wixom is an Assistant Professor of Commerce at the University of Virginia's McIntire School of Commerce. She is a data warehousing and business intelligence specialist, teaching courses in data warehousing, data management, and IT strategy. Dr. Wixom is an associate editor of the Journal of Data Warehousing, a research fellow of The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI), and a best practice judge in the annual TDWI and DM Review data warehousing competitions. In 1999, Dr. Wixom won first place in the Society for Information Management paper competition for her case study on data warehousing at First American Corporation, and she received honorable mention in the 2000 competition with a paper that described the way in which Owens & Minor used business intelligence to add value to its supply chain. Dr. Wixom's research investigates how organizations can create effective data warehousing and business intelligence strategies.