- In Person
Organizing for Great BI & Analytics
Type:
- BI & Analytics Update Seminar
Topic(s):
- Strategy
- Organization
Delivering Business Intelligence & Analytics solutions assuredly and repeatedly requires an organizational approach that is right for your enterprise, processes and methodologies that support a winning culture, and access to the data and technologies that can bring business visions to life.
Join us in London on October 18th for our second BI & Analytics Update seminar of 2018. We have a great agenda built upon our very latest experiences with enterprise clients across the financial services and manufacturing sectors, underpinned by over 30 years of successful delivery (with just a few lessons learned along the way).
We’ll be sharing our perspective on the hottest data analytics topics of the day, including Agile, DevOps, Intelligent Analytics, Data Lakes, and the continuing growth of Microsoft’s Azure data cloud platform and Power BI data insight tool. We’ll also look at how popular planning cloud platforms can be leveraged to provide a more effective link between plan and action with an integrated Analytic Planning approach that drives effective business change.
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 our afternoon workshops and training sessions, including Azure ML Studio, Power BI, Tableau, and Anaplan.
Spaces are limited, but attendance is free for current and prospective clients so sign up today and reserve your place.
Morning Presentations
Digital Transformation: Taking the Opportunity
Trevor Jones, Founder and CEO at Thorogood
Digital transformation is a broad term representing huge change in industry and the wider world. Newer technologies, including Cloud, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Chat Bots, are being deployed through novel approaches and methodologies, such as Agile and DevOps. 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 inevitably both great opportunity and considerable risk. 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.
Dev Ops: When Speed to Delivery Matters
Jeff Burke, US Managing Director 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 which concepts apply to BI and analytics, and which don’t.
Developing a Centre of Excellence for Power BI
Evelyn Heyes – Executive Team and Consultant at Thorogood
Microsoft is currently providing a compelling option for the surfacing of data and insights through their Power BI product, and it is one that is constantly evolving. 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.
Integrated Analytic Performance Management
Julia Honigsberger – Director and Consultant at Thorogood
Linking performance management, analysis, and scenario modeling into the planning process
Many organizations are successfully using KPIs to drive direction and profitability, and adding in root cause analysis can really help businesses understand why targets are being missed. But there’s often a disconnect with the planning process, resulting in plans that don’t take recent learnings into account. And even if they do, how can planners understand what the impact of these events may have on potential plan options?
Planning should be rooted in the context of strategy and recent performance, linking specific decisions and actions through analysis and scenario modeling. By linking performance management’s root cause analysis to planning scenarios, and leveraging the power of optimization techniques, planners can better understand what options they have and what the impact of alternatives might be, improving the likelihood that the best plans are implemented and driving performance in the right direction. At this session, we’ll take a look at some ways this is being achieved.
Architecting for 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.
Intelligent Analytics
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.
Afternoon Breakout Sessions
Managing Group and Management Reporting with Anaplan
In today’s world of tight governance and demands for transparency, companies operate in a challenging environment. Many choose to tackle the area of group and management reporting in Excel. However, managing a key submission process in this way introduces weaknesses and risks which are difficult to overcome and add real cost to the job.
At this session well look at how Anaplan is being used to provide a flexible yet controlled solution to enable companies to complete their submissions.
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!
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.
Tableau Prep & More
Dive into recent updates across the Tableau platform and explore how these updates will impact your organization.
We’ll highlight major updates to the Tableau platform in Tableau 2018.2, and introduce Tableau Prep, Tableau’s new data preparation and integration tool with live demos.