Mark Madsen is the global head of architecture at Teradata / Think Big Analytics, where he is responsible for understanding, forecasting, and defining the analytics landscape and architecture. He was formerly president of Third Nature, where he advised companies on data strategy and technology planning. Mark has designed analysis, data collection, and data management infrastructure for companies worldwide. He focuses on two types of work: the business uses of data, and guiding the construction of data infrastructure to support those uses.

His presentation will include the following information....

It seems as if every organization wants to enable analytical-decision making and embed AI into operational processes. What can you do with analytics? It looks like anything is possible. What can you really do? Probably a lot less than you expect. Vendors promise easy-to-use analytics tools and services but they rarely deliver. The products may be easy but the work is still hard. Why is this?

• Using analytics to solve problems depends on many factors beyond the math: people, processes, the skills of the analyst, the technology used, the data. Technology is the easy part. Deciding what to do and how to do it is more difficult. Despite this, fancy new tools get all the attention and budget.
• People and data are the truly hard parts. People, because many believe that data is absolute rather than relative, and that analytic models produce an answer rather than a range of answers with varying degrees of truth, accuracy and applicability. Data, because managing data for analytics is a nuanced, detail-oriented and seemingly dull task left to back-office IT.

If your goal is to build a repeatable analytics capability rather than a one-off analytics project then you will need to address the parts that are rarely mentioned. This talk will explain some of the unseen and little-discussed aspects involved when building and deploying analytics so that you can better understand the work and what you can do to support it.

DAMA members who have a paid membership from April 2017 through March 2018 may attend at no charge.  Guests are welcome to attend for a $25 fee and can submit payment here.

Please send your RSVP by March 30th to: rsvp@kcdama.org.

NOTE:  Please contact Membership@kcdama.org or Treasurer@kcdama.org if you are unclear of the status of your membership.

KC DAMA Day 2018

• Speaker: Joe Caserta
• Date: Tuesday, May 15th, 2018
• Time: 8:00am-5:00pm (Registration and Hot Breakfast starts at 7:30am)
• Where: KU Edwards Campus, BEST Building Conference Center, 12600 Quivira Road, Overland Park, KS 66213
• Cost:
  • Early Bird Prices through May 1st
    • $80.00 for KC DAMA Members
    • $155.00 for non-members*
  • After May 1st
    • $100.00 for KC DAMA Members
    • $175.00 for non-members*

*includes KC DAMA membership through March 31, 2019

Click here for full details

Click here if you have questions/concerns related to the event.

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Michael Scofield, M.B.A. is an Assistant Professor at Loma Linda University. His career includes application development, database design, data architecture, information quality, and decision support for a variety of industries including manufacturing, software, education, and financial services. He has lectured to professional audiences in over 26 states, Canada, the U.K., and Australia. Professional audiences include various accounting groups, over 10 sections of the American Society for Quality, Data Warehousing Institute chapters, and database user groups. He has also lectured at numerous universities.

His presentation will include the following information....
Producing decision-able information from lots of raw data often requires complex processes which must be carefully designed and architected.

• This presentation looks at the gap between raw data and decision-able information. Most of the chatter about data quality focuses upon raw, granular data describing discrete events and entities inside the enterprise and around it. But for data warehouses and decision-support, data must be converted into useful information meaningful to the decision-maker.
• We will look at numerous examples between raw data and derived data (“information”) which show us trends, patterns, etc. Examples come from astronomy, military intelligence, and criminology. For example, in image analysis (in the intelligence community) we see a succession of “derived” data as we move from pixels to clues about the enemy’s strategic intent. But in that progression, there is potential for error or bias. That must be understood.
• As an enterprise is inundated with more data (raw, intermediate, and advanced information) the designing and population of good metadata becomes even more important. We will look at nine distinct kinds of metadata. Not all kinds are of equal importance, but we will show the value of each. The larger the organization, and the more diverse the “institutional memory”, the more important it is to properly document the data asset for broader exploitation of its value.
• We will also look at how incorrect conclusions may be drawn because of mis-handling of the process to derive “higher level” information from the raw data.

DAMA members who have a paid membership from April 2018 through March 2019 may attend at no charge.  Guests are welcome to attend for a $35 fee and can submit payment here.

Please send your RSVP by September 7th to: rsvp@kcdama.org.

NOTE:  Please contact Membership@kcdama.org or Treasurer@kcdama.org if you are unclear of the status of your membership.

Karen Lopez is Sr. Project Manager and Architect at InfoAdvisors. She has 20+ years of experience in project and data management on large, multi-project programs. Karen specializes in the practical application of data management principles. She is a frequent speaker, blogger and panelist on data quality, data governance, logical and physical modeling, data compliance, development methodologies and social issues in computing. Karen is an active user on social media and has been named one of the top 3 technology influencers by IBM Canada and one of the top 17 women in information management by Information Management Magazine. She is a Microsoft SQL Server MVP, specializing in data modeling and database design. She’s an advisor to the DAMA, International Board and a member of the Advisory Board of Zachman, International.

She’s known for her slightly irreverent yet constructive opinions and rants on information technology topics. She wants you to love your data.

Karen is also moderator of the InfoAdvisors Discussion Groups at www.infoadvisors.com and dm-discuss
Follow Karen on Twitter (@datachick).

DAMA members who have a paid membership from April 2018 through March 2019 may attend at no charge.  Guests are welcome to attend for a $35 fee and can submit payment here.

Please send your RSVP by November 2nd to: rsvp@kcdama.org.

NOTE:  Please contact Membership@kcdama.org or Treasurer@kcdama.org if you are unclear of the status of your membership.