INFORMS Business Analytics 2014 Conference in Boston, MA
800+ business professionals and academics gathered in Boston (Massachusetts) for the yearly INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics & Operations Research, THE Premier Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research. The venue was the Boston Westin Waterfront hotel. The general themes of this year’s event include: prescriptive analytics (i.e., more emphasis on the later stages of Analytics), and Big Data. But first and foremost, it is an excellent networking event. I particularly liked the fact that slides of most presentations were available prior to presentations. This facilitated choosing sessions to attend. This year’s prize winners included the Mayo Clinic, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
On Sunday, March 30, pre-conference vendor workshops took place followed by the Informs career event. The latter included companies such as Verizon, Amazon, Union Pacific Railroad, and many more (see pictures below). In total, 100+ job opportunities illustrated the hunger for analytical talent in all sectors.
Tuesday 1 April 2014
Next, I was invited to attend the Executive Forum. It was a great platform to network with many executives from US companies. Gary Bennett (@gbennett01, Director of Marketing and Member Services at Informs, see picture below) personally welcomed all participants.
The number of speeches was kept to a minimum: Freeman Marvin talked about CAP, Dr. Radhika Kulkarni (SAS, see picture below), and finally Dr. Anne Robinson (@agrobins, Verizon Wireless, and past-president of Informs, see picture below) discussed Informs’ role: to stimulate innovation, facilitate networking, organize forums, provide opportunities and resources, mentoring, and finally to help you achieve success!
An important remark: This is a subjective personal report about the INFORMS event. I made some particular choices which of the parallel sessions to attend, so another attendee may have had a completely different experience. Copyright for all pictures is held by yours truly (@dirkvandenpoel).
Congratulations to the INFORMS organizers for another flawless execution!
I am already looking forward to the next INFORMS event... the first edition of the INFORMS Big Data Conference June 22-24, in San Jose, CA.
On Monday, March 31st the conference kicked-off with a keynote presentation by Prof. Dr. Tom Davenport (@tdav, Babson College, see picture below). He already gave a keynote in 2006 at this event. This year, he focused on Analytics 3.0. Most companies by now implemented descriptive and predictive analytics, so now it’s time for prescriptive analytics.
He gave nice examples of General Electric and Ford. Both companies are 100+ years old, and are reinventing themselves using analytics.
Next, Dr. Kerem Tomak (@Macys, Vice President Marketing Analytics and CRM at Macy’s.com) took the stage to talk about “Combined Decision Support for Marketing and Merchandising in an Omni-channel World”. Nowadays, most successful retailers have an omni-channel strategy. He discussed the right
tools, processes and people skills.
Next, I attended the talk by Jeff Greenfield (@C3Metrics, Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer at C3Metrics). He emphasized the importance of full-funnel attribution, not just the last one (mostly a click).
Then, it was time for a networking lunch. It was a nice way to get to know other participants. In the afternoon, I first attended the session by Steven Tramposch (Vice President Consumer and Market Intelligence at Heineken USA) and Mark Garratt (Partner & Co-Founder at In4mation Insights) with a talk titled “Giving Marketing Mix a Voice: Integrating Data to Tell Stories about Brand”. They discussed (what they called) the Swiss Cheese problem: The challenges of combining data from different data sources.
Dessert was served during afternoon coffee/tea. Many interesting posters were displayed at the same time.
Stefan Conrady (@BayesianNetwork, Bayesialab, see picture below) showed a lot of nice demos illustrating the power of Bayesian networks. These are nicely written up in white papers.
Every year, the INFORMS organizers are able to fill a nice exhibitor floor with relevant companies showing their analytics products.
As a last presentation of the day, I attended Prof. Dr. Dominique Hanssens’ (see picture below) talk on Marketing Mix generalizations. This was an excellent overview of the academic work in this area to date. He discussed the shape of the sales response function, how to handle endogeneity, and long-term effects.
Then, it was time for the pre-award reception.
Immediately after this event, it was time for the Franz Edelman Award gala - the big dinner event. Congratulations to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (@CDCgov, see picture below), which uses analytics and operations research to combat the remaining pockets of polio around the world, who won the 2014 Franz Edelman Award for Achievement in Operations Research and the Management Sciences. Click here for the video of the event.
The 2014 Wagner prize was awarded to the team working with Yedioth Group in Israel to optimize supply and demand (see picture below).
Finally, the Gary Lilien ISMS-MSI Practice Prize was presented to Prof. Dr. Martin Natter and Ju-Young Kim (Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany) and Ana-Marija Ozimec (ENTEGA GmbH & Co. KG, Germany) for their work "ECO: Entega's Profitable New Customer Acquisition on Online Price Comparison Sites."
On Tuesday, April 1st, 2014, I first attended the reprise presentation of the 2014 Franz Edelman Award Winner, i.e., by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention team (see picture below).
Next, I attended a talk by Kathleen M. Egan (@Revionics, Vice President of Science and Strategy Services, Revionics Inc., see picture below) titled “Evolution of Price Optimization Models and Pricing Principles”. This was a great talk with lots of depth and many examples.
Next, I attended Webster Mudge’s (@wmudge, Senior Director of Technology Solutions at Cloudera) session titled “A Single Data Asset: Real-World Use Cases”. He discussed the enterprise data hub.
Next, I attended Kathy Kilmer’s (@disney, Director, Sales Planning and Analytics at Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, see picture below) keynote presentation “Method to the Magic: The Disney Approach to Analytics”. She discussed the challenges communicating the data to a worldwide workplace of 130,000 cast, crew and imagineers busy delivering first-class vacation experiences to millions of guests each year. She gave the advice to start small to gain trust, and then slowly expand into analytics projects. One of the big operational challenges is keeping customers busy while they are waiting in the queue at popular attractions.
Next, Dan Rosanova (@DanRosanova, Senior Architect at West Monroe Partners, see picture below) gave a talk titled “Time + Space + Transaction: Creating Situational Awareness with Today’s Big
Data Technologies”. He explains combining data sources (e.g. CRM (transactional), web
logs (temporal), and IP Geo-location (spatial)) for situational awareness.
After lunch, I attended a “soft skills” session by Kimberly A. VanderSchaaf (Vice President
Commercial, Business and Small Business Banking Analytics at BMO Harris Bank, see picture below) titled “Partnerships, Not Projects: Successful Analytics at BMO Harris”. She talked about the challenges establishing a culture within an organization where analytics is moved from a back office function to the front of the house.
Again, sweets were served during the coffee/tea break in the poster/exhibit area.
Yours truly was happy to be included in the live wordcloud for the #Analytics2014 event, shown at the Perceptive Analytics booth.
After the break, I attended an excellent talk by Tom H. C. Anderson (@TomHCAnderson, CEO at Anderson Analytics - Odin Text, see picture below) titled “A Snapshot of Practical Text Analytics”. He shared many nice examples detailing the added value of text mining, more specifically based on social media data.
Finally, as a last session, I checked out something completely different... I went to the talk “Luck of the Draw: Finding Fraud in Online Poker” by Ryan Cooper (Co-Founder and Vice President, ORM Technologies, see picture below).
