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Data to Decisions

Thursday, September 17 & Friday, September 18, 2020

Virtual Event

There is no doubt that the Business Analytics (BA) revolution (or hype?) continues at a blistering pace, with machine learning algorithms now taking their place as the "magical" technology of the day. While the initial fears about knowledge worker replacement have abated, many are wondering just how well their decisions can be "augmented" by their pal, the algorithm. And companies are amassing huge lakes of unanalyzed data just in case there are some gems amidst the dross.

Back in the trenches, business must do what they have always done: identify the right problem, gather the right data, perform the right analysis, and make the right decision.

The focus of this year’s Business Analytics Innovation Summit will be on decision–making. How has the use of Business Analytics (BA) changed the way your firm goes about deciding what to do? Specifically:

• How do you decide what data, and how much data to collect? How long do you keep it, and in what format? What surprising things have you learned about data management in the past few years?
• How do you prioritize what problems to try to solve using BA? Have you created new governance mechanisms? What makes the BA era different? Is BA just another element in your IT portfolio, or is it managed separately?
• How do you choose which analyses to do? And how do you ensure that the decisions these analyses recommend are actually carried out in practice? How do you evaluate the risks that come with offloading a certain portion of the decision to a machine?

Program

Thursday, September 17, 2020

Friday, September 18, 2020

Download the event program

Presentations

Joe Butkovic, Associate Manager, Business Intelligence Team, OEConnection

Building a Case for AI Automation at Your Company

This is the journey of starting a grassroots initiative that addresses the needs of intelligent automation, advanced business insight and scalability. There are key factors in gaining trust and buy in from leadership as well as executing on realistic plans. By utilizing advanced cloud services as well as custom machine-learning development, we can generate automation engines and provide advanced insight to drive and improve business process'.

Joe Butkovic is the Associate Manager of the Business Intelligence team at OEConnection. Joe grew up in Northeast Ohio and currently lives there with his wife, Jacqui, and son, Dexter. He spends his time with his family, doing home improvement projects and watching sports. Joe continually learns and studies in the Data Science and AI space as he believes it's impact on our future will be profound. It's not the skill, it's the will

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Katherine Lowry, Co–Chair, Emerging Tech Practice Team and Director of Practice Services and IncuBaker, BakerHostetler

Legal Analytics – Combining Intuition with Data–Driven Insights

The legal industry has unique analytical and business intelligence needs. Implementing solutions to deliver valuable insights require integrating external and internal data sources, normalization, and applying a variety of techniques to process data such as using NLP and ML to harvest key information. If done successfully, data can be transformed and combined with intuition to help identify risk, predict potential outcomes and drive informed decisions in practice and operationally. Learn how one AMLAW 100 law firm is tackling this problem head on by developing a data governance and business intelligence strategy to deliver actionable insights.

As Director of Practice Services, Katherine Lowry leads BakerHostetler's innovative legal R&D team, IncuBaker, and serves as the Co-Chair for the Emerging Technology practice team where she helps lawyers and clients navigate the intersection of digital business, emerging technology and law. Her focus is equally divided on providing BakerHostetler attorneys with tools that will allow them to deliver more effective service to clients as well as helping clients make the best decision on which technologies they should invest in to achieve their digital strategy. She manages transformational technology initiatives such as augmentation of legal services using AI and intelligent automation, increasing enterprise data maturity and data literacy, developing smart legal contracts, and the delivery of information and research services. Education: J.D., University of Dayton School of Law, 2001; B.A., Political Science, Stetson University, 1998.

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Adam Duale, Senior Manager, Tax Digital Consulting (TDC), Grant Thornton LLP

The Journey from Excel to Robotics and Where Data Analytic Tools Fit In

We collect massive amounts of unstructured data from an array of ancillary systems and sources. As such, there is a continuum between excel spreadsheets, financial systems, and true robotics. While companies transition along that continuum, it is not a straight path, and data analytic tools are a must. How does your need for the ability to draw fast insights from massive data sets align with your current skill sets and available tools, and how do you make that transition?

Adam Duale is a Senior Manager within the Tax Digital Consulting (TDC) practice, and is based in the Cleveland office of Grant Thornton. Adam has more than 15 years of experience in partnership and corporate taxation. His expertise is in tax system implementations and process improvements, including knowledge of all major tax compliance, provision, and data analytic software packages. Prior to joining Grant Thornton, Adam was a Manager for Deloitte's Tax Management Consulting group. Adam earned his bachelor's degree in Business Administration with a specialization in Tax and Accounting from John Carroll University in Cleveland, OH.

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Chris Reiner, Manager, Data Science, The J.M. Smucker Company

Images as Data: Automating Computer Vision for Real-Time Decisions on the Manufacturing Line

Today, data is everywhere; however, data can also be found in unexpected places such as images. In order to gain insights from this data, sometimes transformations are required using techniques such as computer vision. Ultimately, these insights still need to be available at the right place at the right time to enable decisions to create business value. In this presentation, Chris will explore data to decisions through integrating computer vision on the manufacturing line.

Chris Reiner leads the centralized data science team at The J. M. Smucker Company. He has over 12 years of analytics and Data Science experience, spending the last four at Smucker. Prior to Smucker, Chris held analytics and data science roles within the banking, consulting, and defense industries. He is passionate about ideating, creating, and delivering solutions joining descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive analytics in an easy to use fashion to help empower business decisions. Chris has a bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Engineering, and an MBA with a specialization in Business Analytics, both from The Ohio State University.

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Tim Cambier – PURELL SMARTLINK™ Business Development Sr. Director, GOJO Industries
Jason Slater – PURELL SMARTLINK™ Technology Architect, GOJO Industries

PURELL SMARTLINK™ - Better decisioning through IoT and Business Analytics

For over a decade, the PURELL SMARTLINK™ team has developed IoT solutions that deliver new value for our customers and the enterprise. Building on early technology enablement of our soap and sanitizer dispensers, GOJO has developed the broadest portfolio of IoT–based products and services in our category, providing competitive advantage, and new value streams. Generating almost a million data points per day, we harness the power of data analytics to provide visibility and insights used to improve hand hygiene, optimize workflow and dispenser management, and monitor the health of our IoT devices across the global. The data and services provided by SMARTLINK™ has strengthened our end–user relationships and increased the overall value GOJO brings to the market. This is all made possible through leveraging IoT and cloud–based tooling designed to address the needs of our customers and business today…and tomorrow.

Tim Cambier oversees the investments and commercial activities of the PURELL SMARTLINK™ Technologies business at GOJO Industries. He has over 25 years of experience working in the field of Information Technology, including application programming, network design and implementation, wireless communications, database administration, and large–scale system integration. Over the last 10 years, Tim has focused on utilizing technology to improve the method of hand hygiene performance management and connecting IoT devices in smart buildings. He was also responsible for developing GOJO's firsthand hygiene monitoring system, which is still in use today. Tim holds a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the University of Akron and an MBA in Marketing from Walsh University.

Jason Slater manages the technical teams that develop and support the various PURELL SMARTLINK™ Technologies solutions at GOJO Industries. He has over 20 years of experience in Information Technology with primary focus in software development and management of large system implementations. Jason has been in the current role at GOJO for nearly 7 years. He has spent a good deal of the time on the PURELL SMARTLINK™ team partnering closely with the Microsoft team to leverage their IoT and Cloud solutions to deliver SaaS based solutions to the market. Jason holds a bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Cincinnati.

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Sponsorship Opportunities

Every sponsorship is 100% tax–deductible and will help provide scholarship funds to our deserving Analytics and Information Systems students.

Premier Sponsor, $5,000

• Companies recognized as "Premier Sponsor" throughout the event, on event website, and in all related media
• 30–second commercial spot to be played throughout event
• Opportunity to provide short welcome address to all event attendees
• Large logo featured prominently throughout event and on event website
• Company is verbally recognized through the event
• Medium logo included on emails sent to registrants
• Unlimited access to all sessions on September 17 & 18

Gold Sponsor, $2,500

• Sponsor a Session – prerecorded introduction of speaker and logo featured prominently before & after presentation
• Medium logo featured throughout the event and on event website
• Company is verbally recognized throughout the event
• Small logo included on emails sent to registrants
• Unlimited access to all sessions on September 17 & 18

Blue Sponsor, $1,000

• Unlimited Blue sponsorships available
• Small logo featured throughout the event and on event website
• Company is verbally recognized throughout the event
• Name included on the email sent to registrants
• Unlimited access to all sessions on September 17 & 18

To become a sponsor, please and select your sponsorship or contact Andrew G. Antonucci, Asst. Dir. Development, at aga7@uakron.edu or (330) 972–6376

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Current Sponsors

Premier Sponsor

Gold Sponsor

Blue Sponsor

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About CITe

The Center for Information Technologies and eBusiness (CITe) is a multi–disciplinary center within the College of Business Administration. CITe was created in 2000 with the mission to teach students and develop faculty in the principles and practices of the related disciplines of Information Technology and electronic business. CITe accomplishes its mission by providing scholarships, mentoring, internships & co–op opportunities to students in the information systems discipline, providing resources to conduct research in the IT discipline to faculty, and conducting several outreach activities that promote IT among the local companies.

CITe is made up of an advisory board of Information Technology leaders from the Northeast Ohio region and the College of Business Administration faculty, staff, and students.