Instructor Biographies

Dr. Amr Awadalla is chief technical officer, vice president of engineering, and cofounder for Cloudera, Inc. Before Cloudera, he was vice president of product intelligence engineering at Yahoo! Inc., where he worked since June 2000 after Yahoo acquired his first startup (VivaSmart). Dr. Awadallah received his PhD from Stanford University in 2007 and his BS/MS degrees from Cairo University in 1992 and 1995, respectively.

Bill Baker is the chief technology officer for Visible Technologies. He is responsible for managing all aspects of technology development for Visible Technologies' comprehensive social media management platform, TruCast

Maureen Clarry is the founder and president/CEO of CONNECT: The Knowledge Network (CONNECT), a consulting firm that specializes in helping IT people and organizations to achieve their strategic potential in business. CONNECT was recognized as the 2000 South Metro Denver Small Business of the Year, and has been listed in the Top 25 Women-Owned Businesses and the Top 150 Privately Owned Businesses in Colorado. Maureen also participates on the Data Warehousing Advisory Board for The Daniels College of Business at the University of Denver and was recognized by the Denver Business Journal as one of Denver’s Top Women Business Leaders in 2004. She has been on the TDWI faculty since 1997, has spoken at numerous other seminars, and has published several articles and white papers. Maureen regularly consults and teaches on organizational and leadership issues related to information technology, business intelligence, and business.

Steve Dine focuses on helping customers implement successful, highly scalable and maintainable data integration and business intelligence solutions that align to the unique requirements of each individual organization. He built and led a successful global business intelligence program for a major global medical manufacturing company and led the business intelligence practice for a Colorado-based consulting company. With more than 10 years of business and IT experience, he combines hands-on technical experience with strong business acumen. Steve earned his bachelor's degree from the University of Vermont and a MBA from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Wayne Eckerson is the director of TDWI Research. Eckerson is an industry analyst and educator who has covered data warehousing and business intelligence since 1995. Eckerson is the author of many in-depth groundbreaking reports, a columnist for several business technology magazines, and a noted speaker and consultant. He is the author of Performance Dashboards: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Your Business (2005) and the creator of TDWI's BI Maturity Model and Benchmarking Assessment service.

Laura Edell-Gibbons is a senior technical consultant with Mantis Technology Group. She brings 10 years of extensive subject area expertise in the performance management space as well as data architecture and modeling at an enterprise level. Early in her career, she saw the value of linking scorecards to dashboards and relational reporting sets and then applied it when she launched end-to-end scorecard and dashboard reporting systems for Expedia, Hotels.com, and Microsoft. In late 2008, she co-sponsored an eight-month eye-tracking study with UW to assess whether the average dashboard/scorecard experience had improved when viewing multiple visualization components and to assess the strength of correlation between likelihood of intent and actual human behavior. This revealed the root causes that can prevent end-user adoption of new performance management systems. As a Six Sigma Black Belt, she has championed the concept of “Six Sigma Intelligence” and was published by iSixSigma on the application of the Six Sigma toolset to BI. She has been written up in several case studies and quoted by TDWI, eWeek, and InformationWeek, as well as in the book, Drive Business Performance: Enabling a Culture of Intelligent Execution.

Boris Evelson serves business process and applications professionals. He is a leading expert in business intelligence (BI)—a set of processes, methodologies, and technologies used to transform raw data into meaningful, useful, and action-oriented enterprise information. Boris delivers strategic guidance, helping enterprises define BI strategies, governance, and architectures and identify vendors and technologies that help them put information to use in business processes and end-user experiences.

Lenin Gali is responsible for all database, data warehouse, and business intelligence applications at ShareThis. Prior to joining ShareThis, Lenin was senior systems integrator and later headed the PMO at the catalog division of HSN. Lenin has also led many database consulting engagements in Europe and North America for banks and telecom companies. Throughout his 15-year IT career, Lenin has been an active technology user and manager of databases and data warehouse technologies.

Jim Gallo has more than 25 years of information technology experience. He serves as both a senior data architect as well as a senior data warehouse architect, focusing his attention on delivering value through business intelligence and analytics. Gallo has delivered multiple business intelligence architectures and solutions to clients that included Fortune 1000 companies, the U.S. Department of Defense, state government agencies, and an international bank. He has several magazine publications dealing with data warehousing and business intelligence.

Cindi Howson is the founder of BIScorecard, a resource for in-depth BI tool reviews based on exclusive hands-on testing. She is the author of Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI a Killer App and a frequent contributor to Intelligent Enterprise and Business Intelligence Network. Prior to founding BIScorecard, Howson was a manager at Deloitte & Touche and a BI standards leader for a Fortune 500 company. She has an MBA from Rice University.

Mike Lampa combines strategic vision, business management experience, business process and data modeling expertise, and program management and group facilitation skills to implement solutions for business operations and decision support automation. Mike is currently responsible for the design and deployment of data marts enabling enterprisewide consumption of BI reporting, analytics, and operational integration. Previously, Mike ran a DW/BI consulting company for 12 years. Mike has 30 years of experience in strategic planning, program management, and designing, building, and supporting IT solutions.

Mark Madsen, co-author of Clickstream Data Warehousing, is a former CTO and consultant with many years of experience in IT. Over the past 10 years, Mark has received awards from TDWI, the American Productivity & Quality Center, and the Smithsonian Institution for his data warehousing and business intelligence projects. As a consultant, he has implemented systems for many public and private organizations in different industries.

John O’Brien, CBIP, is president and executive architect of Zukeran Technologies, a firm specializing in data warehouse systems architecture and strategy. John’s 18-year career in IT and engineering is made up of in-depth engagements that provide unique insight into data warehouse evolution. He has extensive hands-on knowledge of all phases of IT projects and architectures, particularly related to the architecture and management of ongoing growth and evolution of large-scale, real-time systems and processes. John holds a BS in engineering and an MBA.

Anthony “Tony” Politano is the author of the book Chief Performance Officer. He is an expert in the fields of performance management, MDM, BI, and DW. He is regularly published in trade journals and magazines, including a regular column in DM Review, and he has taught and given keynote speeches for TDWI for more than five years. Tony received his master's degree from Howe School of Management at Stevens Institute where he is currently a PhD candidate.

John Rome is an associate vice president for the University Technology Office at ASU, but his business card says "Director of Business Intelligence." Rome was one of the early pioneers of data warehousing in higher education and currently leads the enterprise data services team at ASU, responsible for databases, the data warehouse, and business intelligence. He has more than 20 years of IT experience and received a BA from Clarke College and an MBA from ASU.

Philip Russom is the senior manager of research and services at The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI), where he oversees many of TDWI’s research-oriented publications, services, and events. Prior to joining TDWI in 2005, Russom was an industry analyst covering BI at Forrester Research, Giga Information Group, and Hurwitz Group, as well as a contributing editor with Intelligent Enterprise and DM Review magazines.

Rob Schmidt leads th eBusiness Account Management team for the Dell Data Warehouse. In this role, he is responsible for Program Prioritization, Program/Project Management disciplines and all aspects of the business relationship with the Dell Data Warehouse team.

Prior to joining the Dell Data Warehouse team, Mr. Schmidt held various management/leadership roles in Application Development, IT Operations and Data Warehousing in EMEA, APJ and the US. His data warehouse experience includes implementation of Marketing Automation business processes and systems, development of BI teams and building out the transition and implementation of one of the earliest Teradata Dual Active environments at Safeway Inc.

Mr. Schmidt earned a bachelor's degree in business administration and MIS from Chico State University in Chico, CA.

A co-founder of OpenBI, Bryan has over 20 years of experience in business intelligence, the last 15 of which have focused on the delivery of BI technology services and the most recent 3 solely on Open Source Business Intelligence. Bryan's most recent positions were as Director of Technical Architecture for Fair Isaac Corporation, Director for Braun Consulting, and Manager for PWC Consulting.

Dr. Dongyan Wang is responsible for NetApp's enterprise BI organization, including BI applications for all business functions, enterprise data warehouse, BI, and data governance. Under Dr. Wang’s leadership, NetApp has deployed an innovative and truly integrated enterprise BI solution for a multibillion-dollar company.

Prior to NetApp, Dr. Wang led large BI and IT initiatives for Cisco Systems, including enterprise BI, customer intelligence, finance BI, management, and HR BI. His BI leadership helped Cisco win top awards for customer intelligence/enterprise BI and the Intelligence Enterprise RealWare Award. Dr. Wang holds a PhD and master’s and bachelor’s degrees in EE and CS.