The University of Cincinnati (U.C.) and Lucrum, Inc. sponsored their fifth Business Intelligence Symposium on September 14, 2011 at the U.C. Carl H. Linder College of Business. The theme was “The New World of Technology: Cockpits and Dashboards”. The excellent group of keynote speakers included:
Filippo Passerini
Group President GBS & CIO, Proctor & Gamble (P&G)
Will Groneman
EVP System Development, TriHealth
John Ward
Director, Health Systems Integration, TriHealth
Jim Scott
CIO, KnowledgeWorks
After a networking lunch, there were three simultaneous breakouts from Mufaddal Frosh and Ted Wimmel of TriHealth, Jim Scott of KnowledgeWorks, and Mike Zeller of University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Art, Architecture and Planning (DAAP).
While all of the speakers were excellent, what I most remember is Filippo Passerini discussing business intelligence at Proctor & Gamble. He shared that P&G simultaneously centralizes IT, yet embeds analytic experts directly into business units. The “what” of business intelligence is old news – it’s available to everyone- and automated. What P&G is now working on is making the “why” just as accessible.
I’m sure that somebody actually working on BI at P&G would tell me the scenario isn’t as rosy as portrayed at the symposium. But in many organizations, the CEO and CIO aren’t even near the corporate BI system, despite its supposed importance to the organization. It was very refreshing to see a CIO intimately acquainted and involved with corporate BI strategy and tying it to corporate business strategy.
The next Business Intelligence Symposium, tentatively titled Innovative Analytics, is scheduled for Tuesday, December 13, 2011. It’s worth checking out if you practice business intelligence within a 2-3 hour drive of Cincinnati.
