- In Person
Thorogood BI & Analytics Update: Lessons for the Digital Transformation Era
Type:
- Seminar
Topic(s):
- Digital Transformation
- Artificial Intelligence
- Cyber Risk
Our first BI & Analytics Update seminar of 2019 looks at the opportunities of Digital Transformation, explores the use of Artificial Intelligence capabilities for enterprise decision-making, and examines Cyber risks and ways to manage them.
Our exciting agenda elaborates on these themes, sharing our consultants’ experiences of helping leading organizations to address challenges and exploit opportunities, along with practical options that you can adopt immediately.
Morning Presentations:
- Keynote: Lessons for the Digital Transformation Era
- Building Cyber Expertise at Hiscox
- Intelligent Analytics for Assisted Decision Making
- Architecting for Agility with Microsoft Azure
- Dev Ops: When Speed to Delivery Matters
- Governing and Executing your Self-Service Strategy
Optional Afternoon Breakout Sessions:
- Microsoft Power BI Hands-on Training
- Tableau Test Drive Experience
- Microsoft Analytics Hands-on Experience
- Moving to an Azure Cloud Environment
Game-changing technologies, including Cloud, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Chat Bots, are being deployed. Greater business agility and responsiveness are being sought through the application of DevOps and Agile development methodologies for better development project outcomes.
In his 2018 book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, historian Yuval Noah Harari paints a vivid picture of the opportunities and threats facing humanity from advances in information technology and biotechnology.
Since the industrial revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries, machines have replaced many jobs that relied upon physical human labour. In the 21st century, Harari argues, Artificial Intelligence will do the same for jobs relying on cognitive human abilities.
In activities as diverse as driving, money lending, and contractual negotiation, Artificial Intelligences based on data, algorithms, and machine learning will display an edge, through raw computational power and in applying pattern recognition to the understanding of human biochemistry enabling the prediction of human behavior more accurately than by fellow humans.
For many in established industries and organizations, this may sound like science fiction or far-off future gazing. But for some of our clients, there are real aspirations for advances and applications of AI in 2019. Organizations that invest in data and algorithms have the opportunity to reduce the reliance on human intuition and the inevitable errors and biases that affect decision-making.
Assisted Decision Making, with humans in-the-loop, informed and guided by advanced data analytics and insights generated by machine learning algorithms, is very achievable with tools available today, including cloud ecosystems from Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services, and end-user tools such as Microsoft Power BI, and Tableau.
The threat and impact of cyber attacks grow ever greater. Whilst technological developments keep antivirus and firewall experts on their toes, the weakest link in most organizations remains the humans they employee, serve, or collaborate with. Cyber security is a large and growing topic of interest to many of our clients, whilst one client, Hiscox, is growing their business offering cyber insurance solutions to the market.
There is no charge for this event, though spaces are limited and priority will be given to current and prospective clients. Sign up today and reserve your place.
What to expect
After a morning of insightful presentations and demonstrations, you’ll get the chance to dive into some of the topics and get hands-on with the technologies through afternoon workshops and training sessions. There are also fantastic networking opportunities over lunch and breaks.
Watch this 2-minute video to understand what it’s like to attend a Thorogood BI & Analytics Update:
Morning Sessions
Keynote: Lessons for the Digital Transformation Era
Trevor Jones, Founder and CEO at Thorogood
The phrase Digital Transformation represents huge changes in industry and for us all as individuals.
Game-changing technologies, including Cloud, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Chat Bots, are being deployed. Greater business agility and responsiveness is being sought through the application of DevOps and Agile development methodologies for better development project outcomes. It’s an exciting time for those of us with an interest in Business Intelligence and Analytics. With such significant technological and business change there is great opportunity, and inevitably, new challenges to be mastered. In the delivery of successful BI and Analytics solutions, there are also some fundamentals to keep in mind that can help you to navigate the changing landscape.
Building Cyber Expertise at Hiscox
Ramiz Mohamed, Head of Cyber Pricing at Hiscox
Hiscox, a global specialist insurer, has been providing effective cyber risk management solutions for over a decade. Its cyber products are focused on protecting businesses of all sizes – from small businesses to the largest multi-nationals – as well as individuals. In response to fast-growing market demand, they formed the Cyber Clear Center (C3), a virtual business unit to work across their existing business structures.
One of the key tasks of the C3 team is to collate data from disparate underwriting, claims, and pricing systems as well as third-party cyber benchmarks for analysis and distribution through Tableau. With 150 users in a variety of teams across North America and Europe, the insights produced by the C3 team helps to grow Hiscox’ cyber expertise, develop cyber service propositions, and improve offerings to customers.
Ramiz will take us through Hiscox’ journey.
Intelligent Analytics for Assisted Decision Making
Liz McCreesh, Analytics Practice Lead and Consultant at Thorogood
Many BI projects focus on “Guided Analytics” – a decision maker using the dashboard is guided to think in terms of relevant business questions and to form data-driven answers, insights, hypotheses and further questions. The dashboards, the business questions and the integrated data structure that supports them guide human analysis and can also provide a platform for Automated Analytics.
We will show how artificial intelligence can provide answers and insights, and to direct human inquiry to interesting, out-of-the-ordinary events and patterns.
We look at how automated analytics can help to explore to a depth that a human analyst could not routinely accomplish, surfacing insights for further investigation. Once automated, the frequency with which a machine can take a look at things opens up new possibilities – to handle more data and at a greater frequency.
Architecting for Agility with Microsoft Azure
Al McEwan, Executive Team and Consultant at Thorogood
Organizations are turning to cloud architectures for flexibility, speed of delivery and scalability at an affordable cost. Microsoft Azure is often chosen for BI & Analytics due to the depth and breadth of its offerings in that area, but sometimes the large number of capabilities can make it difficult to know where to begin.
We’ll look at Design Patterns in Microsoft Azure, showing how a standard starting-point set of components can simplify the process of identifying which capabilities you need. Then, using a real customer example, we’ll consider how you can combine the different Azure capabilities available to create business applications that do exactly what you want, while reducing the dependence on IT and Infrastructure teams.
Dev Ops: When Speed to Delivery Matters
Eddie Druce, UK Chair and Consultant at Thorogood
Business Intelligence systems need to be flexible and responsive to the business groups that they serve. In the eyes of the consumer, IT has always been slow to react and will always be unless there is a push for more efficient, less error-prone processes. DevOps introduces the philosophies and technology to streamline the delivery lifecycle. The concept was originally created for custom software development, however, business intelligence systems are different and present a unique set of opportunities and challenges. This session will highlight the business reasons to explore a DevOps approach and consider which concepts apply to BI and analytics, and which don’t.
Governing and Executing your Self-Service Strategy
Evelyn Heyes – Executive Team and Consultant at Thorogood
Organizations are investing heavily in modern self-service tools such as Tableau and Microsoft Power BI, and often more than one will be available to end-users. A clear strategy to empower business users to access and analyze data, to gain insight and ultimately drive business value has great economic potential. In this session, we will explore the benefits of a co-ordinated, centrally-driven approach to promote the use of best practice across the organization, increase awareness of opportunities to drive business value from data and reduce the dependence on IT.
Afternoon Sessions
Breakout: Microsoft Power BI Hands-on Training
Missed one of our Dashboard-in-a-Day sessions?
Following the great success of our dashboard-in-a-day training for Microsoft’s fast-growing Power BI data visualization tool, we have a 2-hour intensive hands-on breakout session to help you crack the basics. Bring your own laptop and join in the fun!
Breakout: Tableau Test Drive Experience
We’ll provide an overview and demonstrate the Tableau product suite, including Tableau Desktop for self-service analysis, Tableau Prep for data manipulation, and Tableau Server for enterprise collaboration. You’ll then have an opportunity to get hands-on with the products through a guided example.
Breakout: Microsoft Analytics Hands-on Experience
Using hands-on examples, we’ll explore the statistical modeling tools in Azure ML Studio. We’ll also discuss some key considerations in choosing statistical and machine learning models, and training them on your data.
Deep-dive: Moving to an Azure Cloud Environment
Following the morning presentation on Architecting for Agility, we’ll take a deeper look at the most common Azure components in a BI landscape, using real-world examples to understand how each fits into the overall system.