Patrick Alesi, Senior Vice President and Co-manager, Business Continuity Management, Lehman Brothers

Mr. Alesi has held his current position at Lehman Brothers since March 2002. From 1997–2000 he worked on Lehmann Brothers' business continuity plans as an assistant vice president. Mr. Alesi’s current responsibilities include Incident Response Management and Strategic Planning as well as Regulatory Compliance for Business Continuity.

Dusty Clevenger, Senior Manager, Strategic Planning and Business Development, Archer Daniels Midland Company

Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM) is a global leader in the agricultural processing value chain. They trade, transport, store and process corn, oilseeds, wheat, and cocoa into products for the food, feed, industrial and energy industries. Major products for ADM include biodiesel, ethanol, soybean oil and meal, corn sweeteners, flour, and other value-added food and feed ingredients. GIS has become a critical tool at ADM to better understand agricultural feedstock supply, manage an extensive transportation network, and plan for the future.

Mr. Clevenger’s presentation will cover the story of GIS growth at ADM from a single desktop license just three years ago to a skilled GIS staff today, developing server applications and spatial analysis at all levels of the corporation. He will also explore the key milestones and critical success factors of ADM’s GIS experience including fitting technology to their business, quantifying business value, as well as building and maintaining momentum.

Brady Foust, Ph.D., Professor, University of Wisconsin-Eau Clair
"Geospatial Technology and the Insurance Industry: Potential and Problems"

Brady Foust is Professor of Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Clair. He has almost forty years of theoretical and applied research in the areas of retail site location, insurance and tax geospatial solutions, and the design and implementation of large spatial databases.
His academic research has ranged from technical articles on the uses of GIS to monitor the expansion of the rural/urban interface, the definition of primary and secondary retail market areas, and the effects of cultural and natural barriers on market areas to cultural geography topics such as the geographic origins of American Thoroughbred bloodlines, the spatial dimensions of Vietnam War casualties, and the origins of NCAA Division I football players.
Dr. Foust was a founding Senior Partner of Matrix Research which help ESRI develop the ArcView 3.x versions of Business Analyst and for many years an Executive Vice President of Proxix Solutions, a leading provider of insurance and tax solutions and a robust, parcel level geocoder, PxPoint.

Dave Miller, Director, GIS and Healthcare, Walgreens
"Retail GIS and the Question of Where"

In retail, the question of “where?” is huge. Where are my locations? Where are my current customers? Where is the potential for my product? Where are my competitors? Where should I go next? Where is the unserved demand? Where should I advertise? Where are my service areas? Where should I focus recruitment? Where do I send resources in an emergency?
Mr. Miller's presentation will answer these questions and offer a rare look inside one of the largest retailers in the country. As we cultivate GIS across the enterprise with several hundred users, we deal with the challenges and opportunities of where we can and should go.

James B. Pick is Professor in School of Business at University of Redlands.

He is past chair of the Department of Management and Business and past assembly chair of the School of Business. He is the author over 100 scientific papers and book chapters in the research areas of management information systems, geographic information systems, population, and urban studies, and author of ten books, including Geo-Business: GIS in the Digital Organization (forthcoming December 2007, John Wiley and Sons). He was Senior Fulbright Scholar at Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City in 2001 and Visiting Researcher at University of California Irvine in 2005, and has received teaching and research awards from University of Redlands. He serves on four journal editorial boards. He received his B.A. from Northwestern University and Ph.D. from University of California Irvine.

Grant Thrall is Professor of Geography at the University of Florida.

His research interests are business geography and market analysis, GIS applications for urban systems, economic geography, and land use theory. He holds a Ph.D. in Geography and Economics from Ohio State University. He serves on the board of the American Real Estate Society and is co-editor of Journal of Real Estate Literature. His publications include over a dozen books including the 10-volume Scientific Geography Series (1984-1987) and Business Geography and Real Estate Market Analysis (2002, Oxford University Press) as well over a hundred articles. He has been advisor to FannieMay, Centers for Disease Control, and U.S. Department of Justice, as well as providing volunteer expertise to his own town of Gainsville, Florida.

Susan Wachter is the Richard B. Worley Professor of Financial Management and Professor of Real Estate at Wharton School of University of Pennsylvania.

Her interests are in modeling of housing defaults, homeownership affordability, GIS, neighborhood change, and methods for pricing real estate. She is author of ten books and over 100 publications, and serves on five journal editorial boards. She founded the GIS Lab at Wharton in 1998 and currently serves as Director. From 1998 to 2001, Dr. Wachter served as Assistant Secretary for Policy Development and Research of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Among her awards are the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Lifetime Achievement Award and distinguished teaching awards from Penn.

Jay Zhang, Ph.D. Vice President, JPMorgan Chase
"GIS and Terabyte Data Help Banks Survive and Thrive in Today’s Housing Market"

We are in the midst of a very severe housing market downturn. Home values have declined in most markets, mortgage delinquency and foreclosure have soared, and the trend is expected to continue at least until the end of 2009. Some of the largest banks have written down hundreds of billions of dollars on their mortgage backed securities. Dozens of mortgage lenders have gone out of business. The largest mortgage lender in the U.S., Countrywide Financial, was severely damaged and acquired by Bank of America.

The mortgage crisis yet again highlights the importance of data and analytics in the whole life cycle from product development to distribution, marketing, and risk management. Banks today have access to more data than ever before, which, if used properly, can greatly improve marketing results, accurately model and manage risk, and effectively expand the branch network to ensure the long-term success. This presentation demonstrates how the data from numerous sources, together with GIS tools, have been used to improve the effectiveness of marketing, risk analysis, and branch network expansion.