IIST students visited Corporate Executive Board (CEB) offices in Rosslyn, VA on March 17th, 2017 where they learned about the cutting-edge data analytics tools utilized by CEB and the success of CEB’s strategic business model to use open source platforms. Since 1983, the Corporate Executive Board’s (CEB) strategic mission has focused on increasing the potential of organizations’ effectiveness through data-driven decision making, and enhancing the practice of management. CEB’s core values center on four main areas: member impact, force of ideas, stewardship of exceptional talent, and spirit of generosity. The first value, Member Impact, fosters an innovative environment for members to share best practices, successful models, and trends in data analytics, and to collaborate to advance intellectual knowledge. To discover and create these concepts, CEB enables members and colleagues to target, deliver and foster ideas collaboratively. By fostering an entrepreneurial organizational cultural, CEB is a Steward of Exceptional Talent by enabling its employees to be highly successful by setting aspirational objectives, measuring outcomes, and rewarding accomplishments. Corporate Citizenship, the philanthropic arm of CEB, emphasizes a Spirit of Generosity where staff and members focus efforts on driving nonprofit performance by proven practices to deliver innovative solutions.
GW-IIST students were invited to a one-hour presentation by Dr. Peter Ghavami, Head of the IT Development, Data Analytics, and Talent Management and Peter Seigman the IT Chief of Staff at CEB. The presentation provided students with cutting-edge data analytics utilized by CEB and provided to its members. The presentations showcased the success of CEB’s strategic business model to use open source platforms including Python, Hadoop, and Cloudera. Through open source licensing and development, CEB has built a cost-effective data analytic service utilizing natural language, machine learning, data mining, topic modeling, neural networks, predictions, and so forth. CEB’s “Genie,” the organization’s data analytical tool, competes against other industry leaders such as IBM Watson, Google Brain, and Microsoft Oxford.
At the end of the presentation, CEB provided an opportunity for students to ask questions about data analytic organizations. During the Q&A, students asked questions around real time data, challenges with big-data security, and types of open source tools. CEB ended the session by exploring the new frontier of data science – semantic analysis using inference, and reasoning to drill deeper into text data.