| Session Date/Time (dd-MM-YYYY 24h) | Speaker | Category | Track | Title |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 02-05-2016 08:30 | Daniel Fylstra | Pre-Conference Session (full day) | Analyze & Interpret | Advanced Analytics for Excel Users: Learn How to Do it Yourself |
| 02-05-2016 08:30 | Avi Singh, Matt Allington | Pre-Conference Session (full day) | Analyze & Interpret | Dueling Dashboards with Power BI and Power Pivot |
| 02-05-2016 08:30 | Sandy Rivas | Pre-Conference Session (full day) | Visualize & Inform | From Zero to Hero: Creating Reports and Dashboards with Power BI |
| 02-05-2016 13:00 | Mico Yuk | Pre-Conference Session (half day) | Visualize & Inform | Visual Storytelling: How to Tell a “Compelling” Data Story That Matters to Your Users |
| 03-05-2016 09:45 | Reza Rad | Breakout Session (120 minutes) | Discover & Integrate | Data Preparation is the Keystone |
| 03-05-2016 09:45 | Sandy Rivas, Miguel Martinez | Breakout Session (60 minutes) | Visualize & Inform | What's New with Power BI, SQL BI, Excel BI and Mobile BI |
| 03-05-2016 09:45 | Dave Mariani | Breakout Session (60 minutes) | Communicate & Lead | The Analyst’s Do’s and Don’ts of BI on Hadoop |
| 03-05-2016 09:45 | Kevin Petrie | Breakout Session (60 minutes) | Discover & Integrate | Simplifying Data Integration and Management in Heterogeneous Environments |
| 03-05-2016 09:45 | Eddie Esquivel | Lab (120 minutes) | Visualize & Inform | Customer 360: Visualize and Analyze Clickstream Big Data with HDP |
| 03-05-2016 09:45 | Jen Underwood | Breakout Session (60 minutes) | Communicate & Lead | Surfing Technology Waves in Analytics |
| 03-05-2016 11:00 | Johnnie Thomas | Breakout Session (60 minutes) | Analyze & Interpret | What’s New with Business Analytics in Excel 2016 |
| 03-05-2016 11:00 | Danielle Stein Fairhurst | Breakout Session (60 minutes) | Communicate & Lead | Present Meaningful and Appealing Business and Financial Analytics |
| 03-05-2016 11:00 | Mark Tabladillo | Breakout Session (60 minutes) | Analyze & Interpret | Why Data Scientists are Excited About R and Python |
| 03-05-2016 11:00 | Andrew Brust | Breakout Session (60 minutes) | Visualize & Inform | How to Tame Changes in the Big Data Market |
| 03-05-2016 13:00 | Sandy Rivas | Lab (120 minutes) | Visualize & Inform | Expedited Power BI Training |
| 03-05-2016 13:00 | Szilvia Juhasz | Breakout Session (60 minutes) | Visualize & Inform | The Art-Science of Data Modeling in the Modern Age |
| 03-05-2016 13:00 | Dean Abbott | Breakout Session (60 minutes) | Communicate & Lead | A Week in the Life of a Data Scientist |
| 03-05-2016 13:00 | Ken Puls | Breakout Session (60 minutes) | Discover & Integrate | From Input to Reporting: A Real Estate Forecasting Model |
| 03-05-2016 13:00 | Rick Grantham | Breakout Session (60 minutes) | Visualize & Inform | Build Interactive Dashboards in Excel |
| 03-05-2016 13:00 | Jen Stirrup | Breakout Session (60 minutes) | Visualize & Inform | Data Storytelling with R and Power BI: Integrate, Analyze, and Visualize |
| 03-05-2016 14:30 | Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic | Breakout Session (60 minutes) | Communicate & Lead | Storytelling for the Analyst: Successfully Communicating Your Data |
| 03-05-2016 14:30 | Paul Turley | Breakout Session (120 minutes) | Discover & Integrate | Building a BI Solution with Power BI Hands-On Micro Workshop |
| 03-05-2016 14:30 | Michelle Ufford | Breakout Session (120 minutes) | Analyze & Interpret | 'Big Data' means 'Big Changes' for Analytics |
| 03-05-2016 14:30 | Ted Way | Breakout Session (60 minutes) | Analyze & Interpret | From Hindsight to Foresight – Advanced Analytics and Machine Learning with Excel and Power BI |
| 03-05-2016 14:30 | Jordan Goldmeier | Breakout Session (60 minutes) | Visualize & Inform | Data Disasters: How Data Visualization and Complexity Lead Us Astray |
| 03-05-2016 15:45 | Ginger Grant | Breakout Session (120 minutes) | Communicate & Lead | Implementing Successful Data Analytics Management Practices |
| 03-05-2016 15:45 | Mark Tabladillo | Lab (120 minutes) | Analyze & Interpret | Visualize Data Science with Sharable Jupyter for R and Python |
| 03-05-2016 15:45 | Daniel Fylstra | Breakout Session (60 minutes) | Analyze & Interpret | Prescriptive Analytics: Decision Models with Real Business Payoffs |
| 03-05-2016 15:45 | Scott Ruble | Breakout Session (60 minutes) | Visualize & Inform | Deep Dive with NEW Excel 2016 Charts |
| 03-05-2016 17:00 | Kevin Potcner | Breakout Session (60 minutes) | Analyze & Interpret | Accurately Measure Marketing Impacts by Controlling Geographic Differences |
| 03-05-2016 17:00 | Avi Singh | Breakout Session (60 minutes) | Discover & Integrate | Power Pivot versus Power Query |
| 03-05-2016 17:00 | Theresa Palmer-Boroski, Dimah Zaidalkilani | Breakout Session (60 minutes) | Discover & Integrate | Get Latest Insights by Connecting to Your Data using Power BI Content Packs and PBI Gateways |
| 03-05-2016 17:00 | Idan Cohen | Breakout Session (60 minutes) | Visualize & Inform | Advanced Real-Life Tricks that Prove Excel is Still the Best Dashboard Tool |
| 04-05-2016 09:45 | Peter Myers | Breakout Session (120 minutes) | Discover & Integrate | Big Data Analytics with Structured and Unstructured Data |
| 04-05-2016 09:45 | Riccardo Muti | Breakout Session (60 minutes) | Visualize & Inform | Microsoft BI On-Premises: What’s new in SQL Server 2016 Reporting Services and Analysis Services |
| 04-05-2016 09:45 | Ken Puls | Lab (120 minutes) | Discover & Integrate | Building Power Query templates in Excel 2016 |
| 04-05-2016 09:45 | Leila Etaati | Breakout Session (60 minutes) | Visualize & Inform | An Analyst's Journey to Self-Service BI |
| 04-05-2016 09:45 | Jason Horner | Breakout Session (60 minutes) | Analyze & Interpret | Spatial Analysis Jumpstart: Beyond Bubble charts |
| 04-05-2016 09:45 | Alex Hambelton, Paul Westerman | Breakout Session (60 minutes) | Communicate & Lead | Taking the Analytics Reins: An Oregon Lottery Case Study |
| 04-05-2016 11:00 | Michael Greene | Breakout Session (60 minutes) | Communicate & Lead | Re-Tooling the Business of Government |
| 04-05-2016 11:00 | Danielle Stein Fairhurst | Breakout Session (60 minutes) | Analyze & Interpret | Performing Scenarios, Sensitivities, and What-if Analysis in Excel |
| 04-05-2016 11:00 | Sanjay Soni, Miguel Martinez | Breakout Session (60 minutes) | Visualize & Inform | Microsoft BI in Action |
| 04-05-2016 11:00 | Mico Yuk | Breakout Session (60 minutes) | Visualize & Inform | If You’ve Ever Tried to Visualize the “Perfect” KPI and Failed |
| 04-05-2016 13:00 | Miguel Llopis, David Smith | Breakout Session (60 minutes) | Discover & Integrate | Power BI Desktop Deep Dive Including R Integration |
| 04-05-2016 13:00 | Stacia Varga | Breakout Session (60 minutes) | Visualize & Inform | Getting Your Story Straight with Data Visualizations |
| 04-05-2016 13:00 | Peter Sprague | Breakout Session (60 minutes) | Communicate & Lead | IT-Enabled BI – The New Trend Towards Governed, Self Service Analytics |
| 04-05-2016 13:00 | Adam Worobec | Breakout Session (60 minutes) | Analyze & Interpret | Risk Analytics on the Microsoft Platform |
| 04-05-2016 13:00 | Dean Abbott | Lab (120 minutes) | Analyze & Interpret | Predictive Analytics for Business |
| 04-05-2016 14:30 | Jeff Lumpkin, Christian Berg | Breakout Session (60 minutes) | Visualize & Inform | Finance Storytelling - Visualization Best Practices with Power BI Desktop |
| 04-05-2016 14:30 | Grant Paisley | Breakout Session (60 minutes) | Discover & Integrate | Build an Activity-Based Costing System for Analysis |
| 04-05-2016 14:30 | Bill Saltmarsh | Breakout Session (120 minutes) | Visualize & Inform | Visually Exploring Data Sets to Find Meaning in the Data |
| 04-05-2016 14:30 | Marco Russo | Breakout Session (120 minutes) | Analyze & Interpret | DAX 2015 News and Patterns |
| 04-05-2016 14:30 | Uri Maoz, Sima Maleki | Breakout Session (60 minutes) | Analyze & Interpret | Lightning Talks: Predictive Anomaly Detection; Predictive Analytics Using XLMiner |
| 04-05-2016 15:45 | Miguel Llopis, Johnnie Thomas | Breakout Session (60 minutes) | Analyze & Interpret | A Deep Dive on Empowering the Business Analyst using Power Query and Power Pivot in Excel 2016 |
| 04-05-2016 15:45 | Douglas Barrett, James Baker | Breakout Session (60 minutes) | Discover & Integrate | Lightning Talks: New Business Insights Capabilities of SQL & SSAS; Improving Your Data Project with Data Warehouse Automation |
| 04-05-2016 15:45 | Jen Underwood, Stephen Giles, Ted Way | Breakout Session (60 minutes) | Communicate & Lead | You Just Pour Your Data in the Data Lake, Right? |
Event Date: 02-05-2016 08:30 - Category: Pre-Conference Session (full day) - Track: Analyze & Interpret
We'll start the morning with the core ideas of data science, including an overview of statistics and machine learning, and focus on your key role in visualization and feature selection. By lunchtime, we'll move into a deeper understanding of data and predictions.
In the afternoon, we'll examine data-driven what-if models, and how to maximise decision trees, Monte Carlo simulations, and/or optimization to find the best choices, for business plans and processes with many future scenarios, and individual decisions.
Event Date: 02-05-2016 08:30 - Category: Pre-Conference Session (full day) - Track: Analyze & Interpret
In this full-day session, Matt Allington and Avi Singh of PowerPivotPro put that ecosystem through its paces for your benefit. Better yet, they have selected 10 real-world examples from their many years of experience, and will cover these patterns in their entirety so you can return to work and apply them immediately. All attendees will be provided with these examples in electronic format, complete with inline explanations and tips on adapting these patterns to your own needs, including:
• variance from target/budget • outlier detection • performance against market • Opportunity Gap Analysis • Trending and Smoothing • geo targeting • customer retention • inventory burndown • Pattern based Reports • entity summaries.
Avi and Matt will treat this as a friendly competition as to who will provide you with the clearest real-world impact. Attendees will also receive a full-color copy of Rob Collie and Avi Singh’s new book, “Power Pivot and Power BI, 2nd Edn.”, as well as eight laminated reference cards.
Event Date: 02-05-2016 08:30 - Category: Pre-Conference Session (full day) - Track: Visualize & Inform
As part of this course, you will learn:
Interactive Portion
Power BI Desktop: • Data mash-ups - Discover, transform, and combine data from various sources. • Data model - Create relationships, categorize data and author business calculations. • Interactive visual reports - Author professional reports to slice/dice data to discover insights.
Demo / Discussion Portion
Power BI Service: • Create operational dashboards, explore data using interactive reports, get insights and natural language questions, and share dashboards with co-workers for getting insights. • Understand how to collaborate with co-workers and publish dashboards and reports to your organization.
Dashboards: • See how to apply the learnings and create reports and dashboards on organizational data.
Power BI in practice: • See live examples of how a real business incorporates dashboards and interactive visual reports as a primary communication and decision making medium, not only for managers and owners, but also as a vertical integration with employees, vendors and even customers. Get inspired as to creative ways you can use Power BI.
Please remember to bring the following for the interactive portion: • A laptop (At minimum, 2-cores and 4GB RAM, 64-bit strongly recommended) with Microsoft Power BI Desktop installed. o Please install the most recent version available here. o NOTE: Internet connectivity will not be available, be sure to install PRIOR to class.
Event Date: 02-05-2016 13:00 - Category: Pre-Conference Session (half day) - Track: Visualize & Inform
• how to create a simple four-part visual storyboard on paper in minutes, not weeks • why visual storytelling is more effective than traditional reporting • the one element 98% of data visualizations are missing and how it is negatively affecting user adoption.
Event Date: 03-05-2016 09:45 - Category: Breakout Session (120 minutes) - Track: Discover & Integrate
We will use customer case studies to go through scenarios of preparing data for modelling, and visualization. You will learn how to use features of Power Query such as generators, custom functions, and lots of built-in functions to solve those scenarios. You will also learn some data preparation techniques through Excel itself.
Event Date: 03-05-2016 09:45 - Category: Breakout Session (60 minutes) - Track: Visualize & Inform
Event Date: 03-05-2016 09:45 - Category: Breakout Session (60 minutes) - Track: Communicate & Lead
The good news is that onboarding your Business Intelligence workloads on Hadoop is not as complicated as many vendors might have made it sound. There are a few key concepts to understand but the transition doesn’t require you to rip and replace your technical stack, recycle your current skillset and replace every business analyst with a data scientist.
In this interactive session, Bruno Aziza, Big Data author and business executive at AtScale, will take you through real-life examples of company successes. He will dissects lessons and mistakes gathered along the Hadoop journey. This will result in a best practice sharing session that will leave with a good set of rules he calls “the Do’s and Don’ts of BI on Hadoop”.
Event Date: 03-05-2016 09:45 - Category: Breakout Session (60 minutes) - Track: Discover & Integrate
Event Date: 03-05-2016 09:45 - Category: Lab (120 minutes) - Track: Visualize & Inform
Companies are continually discovering the unique values HDP brings to their organization, including the ability to quickly combine, store, and analyze data from multiple sources. Customer 360 is a common use of big data and in this session, using hands on demonstrations, we will walk through how to quickly gather and visualize customer data. We will then gather a more accurate view of the customer in order to predict their behavior, which leads to increased revenue. We will also explore the unprecedented scale and speed in analytics that differentiates HDP as a technical platform from other solutions.
Event Date: 03-05-2016 09:45 - Category: Breakout Session (60 minutes) - Track: Communicate & Lead
Event Date: 03-05-2016 11:00 - Category: Breakout Session (60 minutes) - Track: Analyze & Interpret
Attendees will leave this session understanding how to use the latest features of Excel to support common business analyst tasks. Each feature preview centers around a typical scenario and provides a step by step approach to accomplishing the end result.
Participants will walk away being able to better leverage Excel to get work done faster.
Scenarios covered will include: • Data collection and manipulation • Ad-hoc analytics • Basic Visualizations • One-Click forecasting"
Event Date: 03-05-2016 11:00 - Category: Breakout Session (60 minutes) - Track: Communicate & Lead
In this session, learn how to develop presentations geared towards executives to successfully convince them of the strategic implications of the analytical outputs of your work. We will explore the best-in-class methods to turn numerical information into powerful visuals, how to summarize your data into a PowerPoint presentation, and how to present your data in a visually interesting and concise fashion.
Event Date: 03-05-2016 11:00 - Category: Breakout Session (60 minutes) - Track: Analyze & Interpret
Why are the data science and analytical communities so excited about R and Python? And why has the popularity of the two technologies increased at such a rapid pace? During this session, Mark Tabladillo, a leading researcher and data scientist, will analyze the realistic merits behind these two technologies. You will be introduced to the basic concepts and use cases for R and Python, including latest statistics on their usage and reasons why they are popular today. You will also learn the important questions to ask when evaluating whether to use R or Python - or both. Using this information, you’ll be better able to inform your analytics team on how to plan for, and use, these technologies within your organization.
Event Date: 03-05-2016 11:00 - Category: Breakout Session (60 minutes) - Track: Visualize & Inform
Pick the wrong platform and you may be in for some turbulence. Pick the right strategy, though, and you'll be prepared for changes coming down the pipeline, including the ones we don't know about yet.
Andrew Brust, Senior Director at Big Data software company Datameer, and ZDNet's Big Data correspondent, will discuss trends and changes in the industry, as well as his predictions for what's next. He'll give you his take on how to navigate the uncertainty, get your Big Data projects moving, and blend Big Data technologies with the existing OLTP and Business Intelligence stacks that you're using right now.
Event Date: 03-05-2016 13:00 - Category: Lab (120 minutes) - Track: Visualize & Inform
Sandy will lead you through the full-color printed tutorial from Microsoft’s 'Dashboard in an Hour' series that you can take home with you. This will allow you to have hands on experience to take back and apply to your own data.
You will also see examples of how real businesses incorporate dashboards and interactive visual reports.
Event Date: 03-05-2016 13:00 - Category: Breakout Session (60 minutes) - Track: Visualize & Inform
In this session, we will dissect the “art-science” of model development using Microsoft Excel in a “9 step program” framework. We will explore how thoughtful requirements planning, design, and communication can make the difference between yet another “throw away” model and one that can drive business decisions, deliver real time insights, and even disrupt cultures to accelerate user adoption of modern BI tools.
Event Date: 03-05-2016 13:00 - Category: Breakout Session (60 minutes) - Track: Communicate & Lead
Data preparation often requires skills in SQL, python, or other languages to be able to pull data out of data stores and convert the normalized data into flattened data that the algorithms can use to build models
Modeling requires a qualitative (if not quantitative) understanding of the algorithms, including mathematics or statistics, in order to bulid the effectively.
Finally, modelers should know how to explain the results of their findings to other analysts and to decision-makers and stakeholders.
The session will walk through the building of a predictive model for a retail appliction: predicting the days to next purchase propensity model.
Event Date: 03-05-2016 13:00 - Category: Breakout Session (60 minutes) - Track: Discover & Integrate
In this session Ken will share his tips for building complex models, illustrated through a case study of an economic forecasting model for a large real estate project comprising of over 2,500 units to be built over a 25 year span. Techniques and discussion will focus around: • Model design considerations • Inviting and validating data inputs • Transforming data using modern tools • Creating maintainable reports • Adding model checks to immediately report model errors/issues This is an expert level session that blends together several Excel techniques and technologies into one master solution.
Event Date: 03-05-2016 13:00 - Category: Breakout Session (60 minutes) - Track: Visualize & Inform
This session is intended for analysts that want to move beyond grid-type reports and build visualizations that get noticed by executives. If your work requires preparation of reports in Excel or if you are an aspiring Excel dashboards developer, then this session is for you.
By applying what you learn in this session, the design of your next Excel dashboard will captivate your audience. No special tools or add-ins are required - just a desktop install of Excel and some data.
Event Date: 03-05-2016 13:00 - Category: Breakout Session (60 minutes) - Track: Visualize & Inform
Microsoft's acquisition of Revolution Analytics will directly empower businesses to gain insights into their data, using R.
Join us for a practical insight into how we can dive for the pearls in our data, using Power BI with integrated analyses in R. We will show you how to integrate data and then analyze it for insights, using Power BI and R together. Finally, we will visualize the data in Power BI, showing how combining data analysis and data visualization uncovers the stories in the data.
Event Date: 03-05-2016 14:30 - Category: Breakout Session (60 minutes) - Track: Communicate & Lead
Join this engaging session, during which Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic discusses the untapped potential of combining the magic of story with best practices in data visualization for communicating effectively with data. Being able to tell stories with data is a critical skill in our world of ever-increasing data and data-driven decision making. An effective data story can mean the difference between success and failure when it comes to communicating the findings of your study, raising money for your nonprofit, presenting to your board, or simply getting your point across to your audience. You’ll leave this session ready and excited to tell stories with your data.
Check out www.storytellingwithdata.com for more about Cole and her work and follow her on Twitter @storywithdata.
Event Date: 03-05-2016 14:30 - Category: Breakout Session (120 minutes) - Track: Discover & Integrate
Learn how to cleanse and transform data from multiple sources, model and shape your data, and analyze and explore it with interactive reports and dashboards. We’ll explore DAX language fundamentals and calculations, and define and use key performance indicators and natural language to get insights from your data. You’ll leave with a working BI solution.
The skills you will learn in this workshop apply to the Power BI cloud service and the advanced analytics add-ins for Excel (Power Query, Power Pivot and Power View).
If you plan to attend this session the following information will help you prepare: tinyurl.com/jp5a6sx
Event Date: 03-05-2016 14:30 - Category: Breakout Session (120 minutes) - Track: Analyze & Interpret
Event Date: 03-05-2016 14:30 - Category: Breakout Session (60 minutes) - Track: Analyze & Interpret
Event Date: 03-05-2016 14:30 - Category: Breakout Session (60 minutes) - Track: Visualize & Inform
Event Date: 03-05-2016 15:45 - Category: Breakout Session (120 minutes) - Track: Communicate & Lead
During this deep-dive session, we will discuss practices and methods to foster and continue good collaborative relationships between technical and analytics teams. We will illustrate the methods needed to encourage users to adopt data-driven decision making using the Power BI toolset.
Attendees will leave with a methodology they can implement in their environments to promote successful data-based decision making, with a foundation of proven methods provided to real clients across industries from a technical and management perspective.
Event Date: 03-05-2016 15:45 - Category: Lab (120 minutes) - Track: Analyze & Interpret
Jupyter is the new name for a proven open-source technology called iPython. Jupyter delivers analytics results in HTML and Javascript, allowing both formatted commentary and REPL windows (which will interpret and run code). The Jupyter notebooks now work with several languages, but in this lab session we focus on two of the most popular data science languages: R and Python. The purpose of this lab is to provide mature code examples which allow you to evaluate how this open-source technology might fit in your organization or practice. With Jupyter you can share notebooks using multiple languages, interactive widgets (REPL) and big data tooling. You do not need to know how to code either R or Python to come to this session. However, instead of trivial “hello world” level material, this lab includes several well-developed data science examples in Jupyter. You can run these on your own lab machine within the time frame. Also included will be some code variants which you can apply and run. While Jupyter is targeted at the desktop, the code in these notebooks can be scaled into a production environment. You will see how this might be done (for example) in the Microsoft ecosystem.
Event Date: 03-05-2016 15:45 - Category: Breakout Session (60 minutes) - Track: Analyze & Interpret
What-if modeling in Excel is a great foundation for prescriptive analytics modeling. This session will show you how to turn a what-if model into an optimization model, a simulation model, or an integrated model to make the best decisions when outcomes are uncertain.
The best prescriptive analytics modelers are advisors to C-suite decision-makers -- we'll give some real-world examples. Attend this session to start your journey towards the highest-value analytics expertise.
Event Date: 03-05-2016 15:45 - Category: Breakout Session (60 minutes) - Track: Visualize & Inform
Event Date: 03-05-2016 17:00 - Category: Breakout Session (60 minutes) - Track: Analyze & Interpret
In this framework, comparisons are made between different geographical regions where one region receives Marketing Stimulus A and another receives Marketing Stimulus B. Each geographical region, however, is unique. In order to isolate and accurately quantify the effect of each of those marketing stimuli under study, marketers need to somehow control for all the factors that could influence how each of those regions respond to marketing. In this session, you will learn a statistical technique known as Observation Clustering that can help marketers pair geographical regions that are most similar to each other across many different critical dimensions so that more accurate comparisons can be made.
Event Date: 03-05-2016 17:00 - Category: Breakout Session (60 minutes) - Track: Discover & Integrate
If you do not use Power Query to shape your data model correctly, you end up writing overly complex DAX measures in Power Pivot. If you are using Power Query to do Power Pivot's job, you end up with a highly inefficient data model.
Avi Singh, has worked with numerous Fortune 500 clients, where he has seen Power BI solutions of all shapes and sizes. Avi, would present real life examples of "bad" Power BI behavior and show you how to remedy that with the right dosage of Power Pivot and Power Query. If your goal is to build a healthy - agile and scalable - Power BI solution, this session is just what the doctor ordered.
Event Date: 03-05-2016 17:00 - Category: Breakout Session (60 minutes) - Track: Discover & Integrate
Event Date: 03-05-2016 17:00 - Category: Breakout Session (60 minutes) - Track: Visualize & Inform
Learn real-life dashboard tricks you can only do with Excel as a BI dashboarding tool. Stun your business customers as you view real-life demonstrations on leveraging slicers, sets, pivot tables, cube formulas, and VBA.
Event Date: 04-05-2016 09:45 - Category: Breakout Session (120 minutes) - Track: Discover & Integrate
Numerous demonstrations will reinforce fundamental Big Data theory by showing how to store and prepare data, and how different HDInsight cluster types and data query techniques can address a variety of data challenges. Microsoft Power BI will then be employed to retrieve query results from Azure HDInsight for the purpose of analysis and reporting.
Event Date: 04-05-2016 09:45 - Category: Breakout Session (60 minutes) - Track: Visualize & Inform
Event Date: 04-05-2016 09:45 - Category: Lab (120 minutes) - Track: Discover & Integrate
If you've used Power Query for any length of time, you'll have some queries you just can't live without… like that one you use to build a 4-4-5 calendar table for every data model you build. Rather than going through the painful process of copying and pasting the required Excel tables and Power Queries, wouldn't it be nice if you could just click a button in a template workbook to deploy them into your file? That's exactly what this session is about… making you more efficient. From calendar tables to parameter functions, come learn how easy it is to inject new Power Queries into your existing solutions in Excel 2016.
Event Date: 04-05-2016 09:45 - Category: Breakout Session (60 minutes) - Track: Visualize & Inform
Event Date: 04-05-2016 09:45 - Category: Breakout Session (60 minutes) - Track: Analyze & Interpret
Event Date: 04-05-2016 09:45 - Category: Breakout Session (60 minutes) - Track: Communicate & Lead
By using Microsoft’s Power BI tools, our users can access the company’s wealth of data while maintaining a familiar Excel look and feel. This session will show examples of the output, as well as our journey through limited stakeholder interest; challenges with finding the right tools and splicing data from various sources; and achieving high demands for expansion with stakeholders.
Event Date: 04-05-2016 11:00 - Category: Breakout Session (60 minutes) - Track: Communicate & Lead
This session will focus on the actionable steps taken by one local government to enable its workforce, improve customer service, and re-tool its business through the use of BI. Real-life tools and dashboards will be demonstrated that are currently utilizing a diverse set of public and private sector data sources. Governance considerations made at each level of data consumption will be examined.
Event Date: 04-05-2016 11:00 - Category: Breakout Session (60 minutes) - Track: Analyze & Interpret
Event Date: 04-05-2016 11:00 - Category: Breakout Session (60 minutes) - Track: Visualize & Inform
Event Date: 04-05-2016 11:00 - Category: Breakout Session (60 minutes) - Track: Visualize & Inform
In this session, you will learn how to take your KPIs and transform them by identifying 15 key characteristics. Never struggle to purge another KPI with this detailed bulletproof KPI/metric checklist! This is the cure to KPI overload.
Event Date: 04-05-2016 13:00 - Category: Breakout Session (60 minutes) - Track: Discover & Integrate
Event Date: 04-05-2016 13:00 - Category: Breakout Session (60 minutes) - Track: Visualize & Inform
Event Date: 04-05-2016 13:00 - Category: Breakout Session (60 minutes) - Track: Communicate & Lead
Event Date: 04-05-2016 13:00 - Category: Breakout Session (60 minutes) - Track: Analyze & Interpret
Historically, this process has been done with tools produced by a mix of vendors, resulting in a fragmented solution. Through Microsoft's embrace of open-source technologies and commitment to analytics, we now have a single platform on which we can complete every step of the risk analytics lifecycle. In this session, we'll walk through a real-world example and demonstrate how to do risk analytics on the Microsoft platform -- on-premises or in the cloud.
Event Date: 04-05-2016 13:00 - Category: Lab (120 minutes) - Track: Analyze & Interpret
This session describes the six stages of predictive analytics projects according to the CRISP-DM predictive modeling framework: Business Understanding, Data Understanding, Data Preparation, Modeling, Evaluation, and Deployment. Each stage is described from the analyst’s perspective, providing insights into what the science tells us about each stage, and where theory falls short to help us make about how to proceed in building models.
After completion of the lab, participants should be able to load data, perform simple data preparation, and create predictive models from modeling data sets. The data preparation steps will include filling missing values and creating dummy variables. Predictive modeling steps will include sampling, building models with decision trees, logistic regression, and neural networks. Even though we are using only the KNIME software, the principles will apply to any workflow-style predictive analytics software package.
Event Date: 04-05-2016 14:30 - Category: Breakout Session (60 minutes) - Track: Visualize & Inform
Event Date: 04-05-2016 14:30 - Category: Breakout Session (60 minutes) - Track: Discover & Integrate
We will use a real-world health care model to show how we replaced an expensive, difficult to understand and maintain SAS system, with a simple, elegant, and auditable solution based on the Microsoft stack. The rules are table-driven with allocated costs handling built in.
Event Date: 04-05-2016 14:30 - Category: Breakout Session (120 minutes) - Track: Visualize & Inform
Event Date: 04-05-2016 14:30 - Category: Breakout Session (120 minutes) - Track: Analyze & Interpret
The latest version of DAX has many new functions to make writing complex calculations easier than before. The simpler ones are in statistical and financial area, but you will discover many new table functions that are useful to both report developers who write or generate DAX queries, and business analysts creating calculations that require temporary, intermediate tables for different calculation steps.
One of the most important new features is the introduction of variables. You can store values and tables in variables that can be used in more complex expressions. This powerful feature also eliminates the need for EARLIER and EARLIEST in all expressions, as you will see comparing the same code written with and without the variables.
During the session, you learn new functions and features of DAX through many practical examples and patterns and learn about common pitfalls to avoid, regardless of which DAX version you use.
A basic knowledge of DAX syntax and some experience in its use is required to attend the session.
Event Date: 04-05-2016 14:30 - Category: Breakout Session (60 minutes) - Track: Analyze & Interpret
“Disrupt the static nature of BI with Predictive Anomaly Detection” – Uri Maoz The static nature of BI today result business insight latency, which cost companies millions of dollars. Data-centric companies like web-based businesses, digital advertising and IoT need to gain crucial real time business insights in order to optimize their business performance. Join Uri to learn how this can be achieved using Predictive Anomaly Detection approach. Uri will share advantages and challenges in implementing Anomaly Detection approach, Industry benchmark and Customers case studies.
“Learn Predictive Analytics Using XLMiner in Excel or Your Web Browser” – Dr. Sima Maleki The best way to learn predictive analytics is to “do it yourself,” which can be easier than you think with the right tools. R or Python programming expertise isn’t required – you just need “analytic common sense,” and either Microsoft Excel, or a web browser. In this lightning session, you’ll get a quick look at how you can sample data from sources like Azure SQL databases and Apache Spark Big Data clusters; explore and visualize your data; transform free-form text into structured data with text mining methods; identify key variables using feature selection; easily apply forecasting and machine learning methods to build your own predictive models; evaluate and compare model performance, from linear and logistic regression to decision trees and neural networks; and “score” new data. 20 minutes won’t make you an expert, but you’ll get pointers to textbooks and online courses where you can learn more.
Event Date: 04-05-2016 15:45 - Category: Breakout Session (60 minutes) - Track: Analyze & Interpret
This session will focus on best practices for gathering and transforming data with Power Query, including more advanced M-Language functionality. With data imported and managed via Power Query, the session will then dive into how PowerPivot and DAX make large data modeling easier.
Event Date: 04-05-2016 15:45 - Category: Breakout Session (60 minutes) - Track: Discover & Integrate
“New Capabilities on top of Microsoft SQL & SSAS” – James Baker Endless data, multiple data sources and wealth of information could be incredible - yet overwhelming. What happens when we want to take an optimal data driven decision, and take it FAST? We will discuss the power of relevant & powerful automatic business insights on top of Microsoft SQL & SSAS and the importance of providing business analysts: - Sharing & Contextual Collaboration funtionality - Rich Analytical funtionality - One, Unified web based solution - GOverned solution for the IT - Dynamic Infographics - End USer oriented alerts & notifications - Rich and comprehensive SDK and APIs We need to be able to put whatever is in the data sources at the fingers of any business user, and that critical point is what we will discuss during this amazing session about Smart Business Insights.
“Use Automation to Deliver Agile Data Projects” – Douglas Barrett
Agile development is the holy grail of data projects. Business users want agility – they want speed, they want access to data and they want to be able to figure out deliverables once they see the data. Traditional IT data projects, tools and data warehouses can't keep up. The desktop tools that the business can use are becoming increasingly sophisticated, but cut IT out of the picture. These solutions are unregulated, unmonitored, localized, don’t keep history, and depart from one version of the truth. Data Warehouse Automation makes IT agile. It solves the primary issue that IT is too slow, they need to know what you want before you start and making changes is painful.
Come and see what Data Warehouse Automation is all about and how it keeps the business happy at hundreds of companies like Costco, Union Bank, VW, Nordstrom with IT led Projects.
Event Date: 04-05-2016 15:45 - Category: Breakout Session (60 minutes) - Track: Communicate & Lead
However, if you don’t take an holistic view of your entire data platform strategy, including governance and the needs of the business, you can end up creating another much larger, much more expensive data silo that is impenetrable to your users and your analytics systems.
This session will help business users sift through the hype surrounding Big Data, and discuss some prevailing concepts and strategies in a vendor-agnostic way. It will highlight the pitfall and opportunities of incorporating Big Data into a larger data platform and help business leaders start with value and not technology.