Ep #8: How Johns Hopkins IT Embraced BI Disruption and Loved IT with Geof Corb

Learn how to manage BI disruption of tools, to your advantage

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This week on Analytics on Fire, we’re back again with another incredible interview; this time with the Deputy CIO of Johns Hopkins University, Geof Corb, on how he and his team learned to embrace BI (business intelligence) disruption and love it. Geof has been in IT for 17 years and now manages an IT team of 140 people for Johns Hopkins, a $10-billion-a-year organization.

On today’s episode, we ask Geof how and why he started a wave of disruption of his SAP implementation at Johns Hopkins. Geof shares the exact methods that he and his team used for that process, as well as some of the challenges that they had to overcome along the way.

What we found interesting is that, within his organization, Geof manages two completely diverse groups of users and business cases that his team has to cater to – the university information systems and the health system. Listen in to discover some of the methods they use to deal with not only the disruption, but also with promoting user adoption.

If you’re in the mode of charging forward and being a bit more disruptive with your BI solutions, this episode is for you!

In This Episode, You’ll Learn:

  • Geof’s background in IT and his current responsibilities with Johns Hopkins.
  • How and why he started a wave of disruption of his SAP implementation at Johns Hopkins.
  • His tactics and techniques for driving user adoption.
  • The challenges of managing two completely diverse groups of users.
  • How he enabled self-service to overcome multi-departmental needs.
  • How he handles different data user “personas.”
  • How they empowered people to create their own analytics.
  • The drivers behind disrupting their own BI process.
  • Why he tells his staff, “Technology is the easy part.”
  • Why a continuous investment in change management is the key to success in BI disruption.

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Links and Resources mentioned in this Episode:

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Categories: Business Intelligence, Data Visualization, Podcasts, SAP
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