Shared data at Dunkin' Brands comes in many flavors. With 12,000 worldwide retail franchises—including Dunkin' Donuts, Baskin-Robbins, and Togo's restaurants—acting CIO Rick Broughton is pursuing a business-intelligence strategy that offers an integrated view of products, customers, and business practices across the company. Broughton joined Dunkin' as director of IT strategy in 2004. He also helps run the CIO Roundtable of the Society of Information Management's Boston chapter. Read 12,000 Opportunities At Dunkin' Brands.
Blackjack and roulette may be more popular Las Vegas pastimes, but to Tim Stanley, business analytics is also a game of high risks and rewards. As senior VP and CIO at Harrah's Entertainment, Stanley oversees business-intelligence and CRM efforts, as well as the systems that power the Total Rewards program. Most recently, his team had to meld all of the Caesars properties it acquired for $6.8 billion last year. Previously, Stanley was a partner at USWeb and MarchFirst, and CIO at National Airlines. Read High Stakes Analytics.
Photo of Tim Stanley by Sacha Lecca.
Lose your inhibitions and utility computing can prove its worth, say Jim Cassell and Bruce Guptill (shown). They offer ways to surmount eight common obstacles to the new computing model. Cassell, a senior program director at Saugatuck Technology, specializes in management strategies in the enterprise-systems environment. Guptill, Saugatuck's managing director of research services, advises clients on a range of topics, including management, measurement, software and services, and buyer behavior. Read What's Holding Up Utility Computing?
Business analytics may not be an Olympic sport, but Thomas Davenport can make you a formidable a competitor through his newest research. An Accenture Fellow, he holds the president's chair in IT and management at Babson College and is director of research for Babson Executive Education. His most recent book is Thinking for a Living: How to Get Better Performance and Results from Knowledge Workers (Harvard Business School Press, 2005). Read Competing On Analytics.
Can you hear the rumblings of a hiring boom? Katherine Spencer Lee says it's in the wind. Companies will face stiff competition to attract and retain IT workers as changing demographics and career defections conspire to shrink the candidate pool. Spencer Lee makes it her business to track job trends: She's executive director of Robert Half Technology, an IT-staffing firm that helps clients fill project-based and full-time positions. She has hosted live events on Monster.com and other career Web sites. Read IT Hiring Heats Up.
Better to build or buy business intelligence? Once custom apps were king, but off-the-shelf products are gaining favor, too, says Ventana Research VP and research director Eric Rogge. He heads the firm's BI practice and has worked with clients in the banking, consumer-products, energy, insurance, oil and gas, and utilities and telecommunications industries. Before joining Ventana, he held key positions at WhiteLight Systems, Sybase, and NetLabs. Read BI's New Breed.
