Each Focus Session will begin with a keynote presentation by a recognized expert in the field. Following this, a thought leader from SAS will discuss how SAS technologies address the issues, concepts, and recommendations presented in the keynote. Each Focus Session will conclude with case studies in which organizations review their experiences implementing the proposed ideas and technologies.

SOFTWARE PROJECT MANAGEMENT AND SKILLS FOR MANAGERS

Keynote:
Overview of Team Building
Denise Brown, ATI Inc.

Topics include:
· Responsibilities defined.
· Project manager, team members and senior management responsibilities in a project environment.
· Teams in a multi-project environment.
· Conflict management guidelines.
· When teams report to peers: What to do?

Denise Brown, PMP, founder and president of ATI Inc. excels in using her extensive corporate experience in culturally diverse management environments around the world to provide clients with a strong practical approach for defining and delivering results-oriented seminars. ATI Inc. was founded in 1997 as a privately held corporation headquartered in Chesapeake,Virginia. As a member of the Project Management Institute, (PMI), Denise utilizes her experience of managing projects with budgets in the multimillion dollar range to successfully plan projects of varying complexity to meet clients’ needs.

Keynote:
Working Effectively with the Angry, Critical Client: Real World Solutions to Help You Get the Job Done
Steve Flannes, Flannes Associates

The angry-critical client causes more personal anguish and work disruption for the knowledge professional than do complex technical problems.

Interactions with angry-critical clients often leave us experiencing fear, anxiety, anger, self-doubt, and helplessness. These interactions also hinder our ability to concentrate and make solid technical and business decisions. Frequently, when faced with angry-critical clients, we withdraw or "give in," allowing project scope to expand inappropriately.

In order to get the work done and to manage our careers (as well as our own emotional well being), we need to find ways to deal with the angry-critical client, regardless of whether we are dealing with an internal client or an external client.

This paper will help you identify different types of angry-critical clients that you may encounter in your work, and will offer you specific, tangible tools that you can use to "manage the relationship" with this type of client. These tools help you focus not on "changing" the other person, but instead, will help you focus on approaches you can use to alter the cycle of anger and criticism, while simultaneously keeping you directed towards achieving a quality work product.

Steven Flannes has provided a wide range of organizational consulting services to private companies and public organizations, focusing on employee development, organizational and project team development, survey research and analysis, career interest and style assessment, individual management development, executive coaching, and consultation to members of the executive team.

INNOVATIVE METHODS IN STATISTICS

Keynote:
Recent Developments in Missing Data Analysis
Roderick J. Little, University of Michigan

Likelihood-based tools for handling missing data have expanded in recent years, and these tools are becoming more widely available to the practitioner in programs such as SAS Proc MI. The speaker will review recent developments, including multiple imputation methods and maximum likelihood methods for ignorable and non-ignorable missing data mechanisms, and robust missing data inference. Some future directions for software development in this area are offered.

Roderick J. Little is Richard D. Remington Collegiate Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Michigan, where he also holds faculty appointments in the Statistics Department and the Institute for Social Research. He has over 150 publications, notably on methods for the analysis of data with missing values and model-based survey inference, and the application of statistics to medicine, the social sciences and the environment.

PHARMACEUTICAL FOCUS

Keynote:
Data Standards and CDISC: A Statistical Perspective
Stephen Wilson, Ph.D, FDA

With eCTDs, the CDISC/Standard Data Tabulation Model, and CRADA-generated electronic review tools, the FDA has taken some giant steps to improve the efficiency of regulatory review. Are we done yet? We have places to put data and tools to help us ask questions — now comes some of the "hard part." How do we unambiguously communicate the business of our regulatory science (statistical plans, results, programs, etc.)?

Note: This is the Tuesday Keynote Lunch Presentation, Option 1, and is an extra fee event.

Stephen Wilson has worked as a Statistical Reviewer and Supervisory Mathematical Statistician in FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) for 17 years and is currently the Deputy Director of the Division of Biometrics II. He received his doctorate in Biostatistics from the University of North Carolina/Chapel Hill in 1984.

ETL

Keynote:
ETL: The Heavy Lifting That Makes BI Possible
Ralph Kimball, Ralph Kimball Associates Inc.

Everyone knows that "ETL" stands for Extract,Transform, and Load. But beneath the name, is there any discipline, or best practice or technique? Or does ETL simply degenerate into a thousand little sub-cases? In this keynote, Ralph will show how ETL has emerged as a mature practice with a set of powerful approaches that every ETL system designer must consider when building a platform for an organization's BI systems.

Ralph Kimball is known worldwide as an innovator, writer, educator, speaker and consultant in the field of data warehousing. He has remained steadfast in his long-term conviction that data warehouses must be designed to be understandable and fast. His books on dimensional design techniques have become the all-time bestsellers in data warehousing. To date Ralph has written more than 100 articles and columns for Intelligent Enterprise and its predecessors, winning the Readers' Choice Award five years in a row. Ralph received a Ph.D. in 1972 from Stanford in electrical engineering (specializing in man-machine systems).