Instructor:
Gert H. N. Laursen Head of Customer Intelligence and Information Management,
Maersk Line

Workshop

Sunday, June 24, 2012 in Chicago
Full-day: 9:00am - 4:30pm

Making Information Strategic with Business Analytics and Data Science

Intended Audience:

Analysts that have realized that their organization doesn't want 'servers and algorithms', but wants to improve the way it works.
Managers who need to understand how you work with information on a strategic level.
Persons responsible for implementing analytical projects.

Knowledge Level: No programming knowledge or in depth analytical knowledge required. Participants will however benefit from bringing their business strategy and their organization's broad objectives for employing business analytics before they participate in the course.

Attendees will receive an electronic copy of the course notes via USB drive.

Workshop Description

This course will give you a holistic perspective on how business analytics can leverage information to support or even revolutionize the way you do business. Overall, you will learn how to pick your analytical projects and how to implement them. Topics covered:

This process starts with presenting how you can support your business strategy before, during and after its creation. Hence we will look into what a business strategy is, how organizations compete and how information is leverages to make a difference.

After the implementation of a new business strategy within functions such as marketing, sales or other operational realms, new objectives are often spawned. We will cover methods by which you can use analytics to move these initiatives forward.

In order to identify the information needs of an organization, we will look into the tool box of the analyst, and cover her best practices. How do you interview stakeholders, which overall analytical tools exist and when should they be used?

We will also briefly touch upon what a data warehouse is and how analysts must best execute on data sourcing in general.

Since large analytical projects often are implemented within the analytics department, we will look into how to integrate external stakeholders, smoothly execute change management, and assess whether the organization is ready to begin a given analytical initiative in the first place.

Training results - after having covering these topics, you will:

See analytics and BI from a business perspective.
Improve your dialogue with your internal users of analytics (an interview framework will be handed out)
See the complete broad range of applications of analytics (and learn when to employ statistics, reporting, data mining, etc.).
Have an understanding of how to best source data from other systems.
Understand the steps to implement analytical solutions.

This workshop builds a framework that provides an overall approach for working with analytics. Each individual step in the process will be presented via examples. You are also encouraged to bring you own business plans for class discussions.

Schedule

Price and Registration Info:

Workshop starts at 9:00am
First AM break from 10:00 - 10:15am
Second AM break from 11:15 - 11:30am
Lunch from 12:30 - 1:15pm
First PM break: 2:00 - 2:15pm
Second PM break: 3:15 - 3:30pm
Workshops ends at 4:30pm

Attendees receive a free copy of Gert H. N. Laursen's book Analytics for Managers, and an electronic copy of the course notes via USB drive.

Instructor

Gert H. N. Laursen, Head of Customer Intelligence and Information Management, Maersk Line

Based in Denmark, Gert H. N. Laursen works for Maersk Line as head of global Customer Intelligence and Information management. He has work as a strategy consultant with a particular focus on information management implementation. He worked several years in the Telecom industry, primarily within strategy creation and decision support (i.e. Business Intelligence and Analytics). His experience in information management also includes being responsible for SPSS/IBM national training centers in Denmark. The first 5 years of his career he spent working as a scientist within human resources and cultural development.

Mr. Laursen holds a Master degree in international marketing (one semester from Sheffield- Hallam University), an Executive MBA from Henley management school and a PMI green belt in Lean/six sigma (process optimization).

Within the last 3 years Mr. Laursen has published 3 books on the strategic use of information and has spoken at various events in Europe, Asia and America. He is married and has two children, Victoria at 4 and Lucas at 7 years of age. In his spare time he enjoys sailing, traveling and playing American style pool.

The instructor has worked as an analyst, statistics trainer, BI consultant, and developer of information strategies - as such, he has hands-on experience across all of this workshop's topics.