Mining Your Own Business: A Primer for Executives on Understanding and Employing Data Mining and Predictive Analytics

Jeff Deal is the Vice President of Operations for Elder Research, Inc. Working out of the firm's corporate headquarters in Charlottesville, Virginia, he oversees operational, contractual, and financial matters. Drawing on his more than twenty-five years of management experience in business and government, he regularly helps organizational clients clarify and attain their data analytics goals. A frequent speaker on the subject of organizational challenges to meeting data analytics goals, Mr. Deal is the program chair for the annual Predictive Analytics World - Healthcare conference, which annually attracts leading analytics professionals in the healthcare industry from around the country. He holds a Master of Health Administration degree from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, and a Bachelor of Arts degree from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, where he was a member of the wrestling team. Jeff and his wife, Jennifer, have four children. In his spare time he enjoys hiking, reading, and an increasing amount of recreational travel with his wife, now that their kids have all moved out of the house.

Gerhard Pilcher, Chief Executive Officer for Elder Research, is responsible for the firm's northern Virginia office. He has more than thirty years of industry and consulting experience with commercial businesses and government institutions in the United States and abroad. His specialties include fraud detection, financial risk management, and healthcare outcomes. Mr. Pilcher earned a Master of Science degree in analytics from the Institute for Advanced Analytics at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina. He is an adjunct faculty member in the math and statistics masters degree program at Georgetown University, and a regular instructor at the SAS Business Knowledge Series course, "Data Mining: Principles and Best Practices." Gerhard currently serves on the advisory boards of the Institute for Advanced Analytics and the Masters in Science in Business Analytics program at George Washington University. Gerhard and his wife, Denise, have two children. In his spare time, he especially enjoys outdoor activities, including mountaineering and trail running.