Moderated by a Computerworld editor or partner, these facilitated discussion groups are designed to get conversations rolling quickly and ideas flowing freely. We’ll fire off a few questions to get things started, and then guide the conversation to uncover best practices and great ideas.

Please note, space is very limited and is on a first-come, first-serve basis.

Our world is overflowing with information, and it’s growing bigger every day.  According to IDC, the “digital universe” has doubled in the past two years alone, and it will continue on that track through 2020, when it reaches 40 zettabytes – that’s 57 times the amount of all the grains of sand on all the beaches on earth!  There’s gold in all that data. Business leaders know that the right information, analyzed in the right context, can lead to better decision making, action and results. And yet, IDC estimates that less than 1% of the world’s data is currently being analyzed.

Part of the problem is a lack of the right tools,  and skill sets to make sense of all that data. Big data requires a different approach from traditional information management, and integrating those efforts can be challenging. What’s more, there’s often a disconnect between IT and business leaders who are pursuing their own Big Data & Analytics agendas. For the enterprise to realize the most business value from big data a more collaborative approach is required.  Join us for this informative and interactive roundtable discussion.

Sponsored by IBM

How to find the Big Data killer app? What are the technical and business issues that companies need to overcome in order to properly leverage Big Data? What are the biggest misconceptions/myths about Big Data? What are the implementation and operational obstacles? How can IT help enable businesses to derive value from Big Data? Compare notes with your colleagues during this peer-to-peer roundtable session.

Every day, every one of the 86,300 drivers at UPS is confronted with an enterprise performance impacting choice – what route do they drive? This is a bigger cognitive deal than many might imagine. There are more ways to deliver a UPS route than there are nanoseconds in the Earth’s existence.   Every day, every information professional will be confronted with a career-trajectory defining choice to make – what are they going to do with all this data? This is a more important decision than many might imagine. Futurist Thornton May shares results of a six year, six university, six hundred organization study of with-data value creation.

A key component of Intel IT’s enterprise security strategy is its Security Business Intelligence (SBI) platform, which uses big data technologies to collect aggregate and analyze enterprise activity for incidents such as the unauthorized transfer of data. With an average of over 6 billion new events logged every day, Intel’s enterprise generates a tremendous amount of data to search for breaches and anomalies. The challenge is collecting and analyzing this data fast enough to contain threats and perform fast remediation. Aziz Safa tells how Intel addressed and solved these challenges in this keynote session.

Enjoy refreshments and make new connections with attendees and sponsors.

The game has changed. Leading organizations are driving fundamental shifts in business models through insights derived from Big Data. Your organization needs the ability to capture, manage, analyze and eventually profit from the deluge of this information: everything from business transactions to sensor data to tweets.  HP HAVEn encompasses hardware, software, services, and business transformation consulting into one comprehensive platform. HP’s HAVEn platform helps organizations make the critical business transformation to connected intelligence and analytics-driven decision making.  Attend this session to learn how this platform will enable your enterprise to gain better insight into Big Data and deliver real-time outcomes.

Big data is good. If you can harness it. Every minute, throughout your entire operation, massive amounts of potentially invaluable data are being generated. But without a data management structure, that data can quickly become inaccessible, unmanageable, and uncorrelated—especially when you consider the emergence of machine data and connected industrial assets. In this session, Vince will share ideas and best practices for building an industrial-strength data management strategy so you can leverage the power of Industrial Big Data and get the most out of your companies most critical assets.

Data is flooding the healthcare system from every possible angle, including clinical, research, financial, government, commercial and consumer sources. Developing a strategy to address the big data explosion is critical. Even more important is successfully communicating that strategy to ensure buy-in and support from all stakeholders. In this session, Cynthia will share ideas that help drive engagement and success for big data and analytics initiatives in your company.

Big Data can’t be achieved without a significant investment in data scientists and capital, at least that’s the impression of this hot tech area. Many would argue that Big Data has a steep learning curve and is a difficult space to enter. But according to the lessons from a project with Experian Marketing Services, it is possible to jump into Big Data and to create a meaningful product and customer strategy without adding additional staff. In this insightful case study full of real world examples, Emad Georgy, who served as VP Software Development of Experian Marketing Services – North America, will detail how transformations to people, process, and technology led to a production-ready strategy, meeting the needs of some of their top clients. Using Hadoop and Hbase among other technologies, and using an agile development process, Experian Marketing Services is undergoing a technology transformation aimed at getting the most from Big Data. Attendees will learn how Experian retrained existing staff to accomplish this Big Data transformation and lessons learned in design, development, testing and operations for a successful Big Data project.

• Mobile BI
• Finding the Analytics Talent You Need 
• Assembling and Optimizing an Enterprise BI Portfolio
• Mining Real-Time Data for Business Value
• Making Sense of BI and Analytics Technologies Options 
• Strategies for Predictive Analytics
• BI Strategies for Mid-Sized Business
• Open Source BI: Challenges and Strategies
• Assembling a BI Dream Team
• Business Value of Human Data
• Big Data and Impact on IT Infrastructure
  

This session will explore actual award-winning implementation case studies for broadly deployed business intelligence and analytics. The discussion will highlight key strategies for achieving true self-service for all employees, business partners and external customers. Also covered will be the impact of hot technology trends such as Mobile, Big Data, Cloud, Data Quality, Advanced Analytics and Data Discovery. We will illustrate how these trends can be embraced in your strategy.

Hear how organizations are applying data strategies and analytics tools to create quantifiable business value. Come to this session for tips, lessons learned and effective tactics.

Enjoy refreshments and make new connections with attendees and sponsors.

Analyzing data is as much an art as it is a science.  It’s essential to appreciate the human element in data analysis, and a fascinating means of gaining that perspective is to analyze data in the form of human behaviors that can distinguish truth from deception. This session will introduce a methodology for detecting deception that was developed within the CIA for counterintelligence and counterterrorism applications, and show how it can be employed in our professional and personal lives.

The hype around big data is coming to an end signifying the beginning of a long-term adoption trend that will expose myriad opportunities and challenges. In this session, you will learn best practices for creating a big data and analytics strategy based on IDC's Big Data and Analytics Maturity Model. The presentation will provide recommendations on the short and intermediate-term steps your organization can take to advance to higher levels of big data and analytics maturity by leveraging appropriate technology, data, people, processes, and the shifting economics of all of these big data resources.

You won’t want to miss this fun, casual and practical way to network that’s been highly rated by our previous attendees. This is a lightly structured opportunity to meet practitioners who have similar challenges in the arena of BI and analytics, and industry contacts who can solve them. Relax, learn and have fun – all at the same time!

Oversee.net, a technology company that owns and operates a portfolio of websites and mobile apps designed to help consumers make smart, informed purchase decisions, depends on big data utilization to understand the millions of unique visitors who come to its sites every day. To drive high performance, big data and predictive analytics are being integrated –from social media to web visitation to mobile application and usage.  Oversee’s mobile traffic alone comprises more than 25% of all it’s traffic, estimating nearly 58 million unique visitors per month.  As  big data “infiltrates” all aspects of business strategy, the science of processing remains key –how data is manipulated and utilized. Debra Domeyer, CEO and a Director of Oversee.net,  has more than 25 years of experience in technology and Internet Media.  She will share the fascinating story of how Oversee.net is building an in-house team of big data experts and using technologies such as Cloudera Hadoop, Hive, Thrift, and Spark to up the ante on performance.

Big data is the datafication of every activity in business, government and even private life. But the world’s ability to produce data has outstripped most organizations’ ability to use it. This mismatch forces a top-to-bottom re-evaluation of how to bring big data into the enterprise and make it useful.  Come hear Oracle’s latest thinking about the power of big data analytics to run and change your business, as well as stories of innovative companies already putting these ideas into practice.

Enjoy refreshments, chat with sponsors and meet attendees.

How much can you learn in five minutes? Quite a bit. Come to hear these rapid-fire main stage presentations, where you will hear our sponsors deliver quick-hitting yet insightful, info-rich presentations on the latest products, new releases, exciting changes, and more. Topics include:

• 80% of Your Business Data is Missing and You Haven't Noticed
• Big Data & Analytics: Providing the Insights You Want and the Answers You Need
• Big Data In Perspective
• Big Data at the Speed of Business

A select group of winners of Computerworld’s 2013 Data+ Editors’ Choice Awards focus in on the ROI details of their successful Big Data strategies.

Is the data avalanche rolling over you or are you channeling it to improve your business by drawing actionable insights and gaining competitive advantage? If you feel crushed by the data you are not alone. No need to despair - discover how Data Analytics & Business Intelligence solutions can unlock the power of your data.

Location data is pervasive across your business systems. It’s in your customer and supplier records. All of your assets, whether they be fixed or mobile all have a location. And location data is becoming even more prevalent with the widespread use of smartphones and social media on-the-go. If you don’t pay attention to location then you are not getting the full picture. If you do you can transform your entire organization and deliver significantly better business outcomes. In this session you will learn about the four key imperatives of mapping in business systems and how you need to go beyond the basic mapping you’re used to getting from consumer mapping web sites. As a result you will learn how to extract the most value from all of your location data.

Express Scripts manages the pharmacy benefits for 100 million Americans and, in 2012, processed 1.4 billion prescriptions. That creates a lot of data. By leveraging predictive modeling and big data, one of the company’s newest solutions -- ScreenRx -- can predict who will skip doses (in many cases, before a patient even knows it). The opportunity is significant: the United States wastes $317 billion as a result of non-adherence to drug regimens. With actionable data, behavioral science and clinical specialization, Express Scripts identifies patients who are most likely to lapse and positively changes the course of treatment by employing the most relevant interventions. The result: better decisions and healthier outcomes.