Nathaniel Lin, PhD, Founder, Analytics Executive Network, and Adjunct Professor, Georgia Tech College of Management

It looks like 2011 will be a year of analytics. More than just returning to their pre-recessionary level, many businesses are increasing their investments as they view analytics as the key and possibly the only edge for them to win in this highly competitive and fast-changing business environment. Having worked with many companies big and small that have aspired to be analytically competitive, Lin has seen many costly attempts but relatively few successes. This talk will be a brief survey of the many lessons and best practices that Lin has personally witnessed, experienced and benchmarked to date. His goal is to arm the analytically aspired companies with the right enablers and increase their chance of winning. The major take-aways for those who attend this talk will be:

• Given the many confusing definitions for analytics, what is and is not the analytics for winning?
• What are the many pitfalls that would prevent businesses from extracting full values from their analytics investments?
• Analytics best practices that are becoming "must-have's" as they have enabled many companies (Harrah's, Amazon, Google, CapitalOne, P&G, eBay, etc.) who have adopted them to win and become industry leaders.
• Lin’s recommended roadmap to winning with analytics.

Radhika Kulkarni, PhD, Vice President, Advanced Analytics R&D, SAS Institute Inc.

Advances in computing power and the speed of communications within organizations across time zones and geographical boundaries are occurring in leaps and bounds. Data volumes are increasing faster than storage capacity and include increasing percentages of unstructured data, requiring new analytical techniques to derive meaningful insight from them. There is greater demand for embedding solutions within business systems in transparent ways. This presentation will explore the role of advanced analytical tools, techniques, and practices in this exploding arena and will include examples illustrating:

• The growing recognition of traditional O.R. as a key component, and often, a driver of business analytics solutions;
• The value of an integrated view of the various techniques in business analytical decision making;
• Future directions for exploration to keep pace with the growing demands of the business analytics market.

Scott Friesen, MBA, Sr. Director of Analytics for the Consumer Insights Unit, Best Buy

The most advanced applied mathematics, statistics, and operations research do not implement themselves. In the exploration and development of analytic capabilities, there are typically two moments where the potential impact can falter. The first is in the translation between the analytic capability and the business (private or public sector) and the second is the quality of the capability foundation, or lack thereof. In this discussion, Friesen will give an overview of the analytic principles on which his team operates at Best Buy, as well as discuss the capability improvements underway to further enhance and enable future analytics. Best Buy has an extremely rich data set. However, it operates in a dynamic, multi-channel atmosphere that presents fascinating challenges ranging from IT to analytic application, while simultaneously offering tremendous opportunity for value creation using its data assets.