Analytics is the foundation of decision-making and data has tremendous value to companies looking to build great, personalized products for people. At Yahoo!, product, business, and scientific staff analyze petabytes of raw data on a continuous basis to generate information, knowledge, and insights that are applied to consumer and advertiser experiences. The challenge is reducing the cycle time for generating insights. Scott Burke details how Yahoo!  is increasing its ability to observe, decide and act on data to create value for the entire marketplace.

The goal of operational BI is to get useful information stored in backend and transactional systems to decision makers, customer service reps and even to customers on the front line. It’s easier said than done, but when done right, the payoff is significant. CTO Bryan Sivak describes  the District of Columbia’s pioneering online application, TrackDC, which lets any citizen with an Internet connection track budgets, spending and project performance of individual agencies plus download data for their own analysis or to develop applications of their own.

Hear directly from your IT practitioner peers during these sponsored case study presentations that highlight project management and technical lessons learned, plus tips, tools and tactics for applying business intelligence strategies and analytical tools to create quantifiable business value.

Agile BI, according to Forrester Research, is like any Agile development methodology that calls for incrementally delivering products versus a big-bang approach; for rapid prototypes versus specifications; for reacting versus planning; and for personal interactions with business users versus documentation. But Agile BI does require new and different technologies and architectures for support. Metadata-generated BI applications are one such example. In this panel, CTOs from leading BI software vendors lay out their agile BI technology roadmaps. Forrester analyst Jim Kobielus moderates.

CIO Ed Freeman details how a large urban school district created an enterprise-wide architecture designed to support deep analytics, program evaluation and agile business intelligence. He also delivers a report card on the program’s goals, including  improving the speed and quality of decision-making; capitalizing on existing data and systems infrastructure and creating an intentional data-driven culture. Ed will also share various development strategies and lessons learned, with respect to platform implementation and the deployment of various BI delivery systems.

Research proves that organizations running on analytics enjoy a significant competitive advantage. The challenge for many organizations is making the leap to integrating analytics into everyday business processes. Hear how this professional adapted their existing work processes, information and staff to a new, more productive and profitable way of doing business.

IDC Research shows that analytical orientation is a statistically significant predictor of competitiveness. IDC analyst Henry Morris highlights the individual components that make up analytical orientation and describes the five factors your organization can and should focus on to improve its analytical orientation and boost its position in the marketplace.

Business Intelligence & Analytics Perspectives Conference’s annual awards program, Best Practices in Business Intelligence, identifies and acknowledges excellence among companies in the following areas:

• Running the Business on BI
  
• Driving Process Management with BI
• Integrating BI Across the Organization
  
• Improving Results through Cloud-Based BI
  

Today's savviest organizations are using data to create and extend products and services, make pricing and inventory decisions and indeed evolve business strategy. Complex analytics that provide product-specific forecasts plus call upon sources of external data to invoke demographic and macro economic trends are the wave of the future. By consolidating 13 billing systems into a single enterprise system, Verizon Wireless has created a  powerful and highly reliable single version of the truth that has transformed the way it does business.

Business intelligence and analytics can provide a great opportunity to drive action and positive business results in an organization. However, the “holy grail” to business transformation is behavior change. Often times, great ideas and innovations do not result in realized benefits because necessary and expected behavior changes do not occur.  In this discussion, explore lessons learned by Red Robin in its journey to become a more agile and responsive organization with technologies like data visualization, and how IT is being positioned as a transformative change leader in the company.