The advisory board has business and academic representatives out of different industries.  Their expertise, from the different roles they fulfill across their organizations, ensure the embedding of relevant and practical topics in the overall program.They are crucial in the lead theme selection and the build-up of the events calendar.  Marketing and communication strategy is also part of the discussion package.  

The board members act as ambassadors for the communities. They also are the moderators in the BI-Award and DQ-Award case selection as they take leading roles in the executive sessions and workshops.  

The extended advisory board is a new initiative, new representatives from the broader business community are invited to join us for additional inspiration across the activities and sustained market relevance.

Meet our Advisory board members

Kurt
Vandebergh

Johan Vranckx, Commercial Director at ENQIO

Johan started working almost 20 years ago in the Belgian Business Intelligence market and held sales and management positions at software vendors en BI consultancy companies. 
Over the years Johan has seen enormous progress and stagnation at the same time. 
Enormous progress In technology and architecture of the BI tools, that makes it technically possible to process massive amounts of data and to distribute information at an unlimited scale through portals.Nevertheless we see stagnation because business users are still struggling with the same issues as 20 years ago to get the right information that sincerely supports them In their decision taking. There is still a long way to go to align business Intelligence with the business.The BI-Community is an excellent networking an knowledge platform to bring business closer to the technical aspect of BI.It is Johan's objective to support the BI Community as a member of the Advisory Board with this mission.Johan will specifically contribute in the area of data analytics and data mining. These areas are underutilized today to help managers to understand better their future opportunities and threats, and by consequence to take better decisions. 

Aart Joppe, Partner - Business Intelligence & Information Management at Deloitte Consulting

Aart Joppe is a partner at Deloitte, leading the Information Management services in Belgium. With 19 year of professional experience, Aart has built up a large experience in Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing and Advanced Analytics. Before joining Deloitte in 2005 he has been leading the global BI Competency Center at Philips Consumer Electronics with responsibility over the global cross functional BI Program with a team of 45 FTE.  With Deloitte he is advising clients on BI Strategy, BI and Data Governance, the setup of BI CC, tool selections and managing complex BI Programs.    

Liesbeth Debruyn, General Manager Elmos NV

Liesbeth Debruyn was destined to become a teacher, but after a few months in education, she left teaching and started as account manager in a softwarehouse in Antwerp.  In 1987 she joined LACO as account manager; 8 years later she was promoted to general manager that she would continue till 2010. One of the key activities of LACO is building reporting systems and Business Intelligence applications : Data analysis and datamining,  Balanced Score Carding, Corporate Performance management, Risk Management . Since November 2010 Liesbeth is general manager of Elmos nv, an ICT service company with 130 consultants,providing high-quality IT services to the top 500 compagnies in Belgium.

Dirk Sunderman, Senior Team & Program Manager Isabel

Dirk A. Sundermann is a senior team and program manager with over 25 years of experience in the ICT industry. He has worked in various domains being Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Human Resource, and Business Intelligence and this across various industries like software consulting, banking, pharma, and telecom.Dirk has been involved in reporting, and analysis since 1992 with the delivery of management reports for the Scandinavian Region. Early in the 90's, he had the opportunity to introduce one of the first reporting tools (Brio Query) to unlock the data of the in-house Sales Force Automation. Later in his career, he had the responsibility to manage also a BI team, and launched the introduction of a European Data Warehouse. More recently, he managed the evaluation of various data warehouse appliances to finally decide the most optimal solution which also included the adaptation of the development processes.Dirk is an advocate of end-to-end BI with data accuracy from the source application and no manual interventions. For him, tools are enablers and not the solution to the business questions and challenges.He is also a believer that reporting, analysis, and BI must be integrated into daily used applications, and made available at all levels of the organization (BI for the masses) so that better informed decisions can be taken. He believes that BI is still a hot topic in most companies, and that there is still a lot to do.

Öykü Işık, Assistant Professor, Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School

Öykü Işık is an Assistant Professor at the Operations Technology and Management Competence Center of the Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School. She joined Vlerick in 2010.Öykü holds a BSc degree in Computer Science and Mathematics and an MBA degree from Istanbul Bilgi Univesity in Istanbul, Turkey.Öykü earned her PhD degree in Business Computer Information Systems from the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas. Her PhD dissertation examined the phenomena BI success and how it is affected by different BI capabilities as well as the decision environment. Her main teaching and research interests are in the areas of Business Intelligence, IT management and Business Process Management.     

Kurt Vandebergh, CFO

Kurt Vandebergh is a hands-on Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and Chief Information Officer (CIO). Pevious positions include CFO at ECHO, Director Finance & Administration at HDM NV and Financial Director at Optimal Parking Control. He started his career as senior auditor within Coopers & Lybrand (Now known as Price Waterhouse Coopers).In 2009, Kurt Vandebergh, together with his team has been selected as 'Best Finance Team of the Year' (organised by 'CFO Magazine') and has won the first 'BI-Award' for Corporate Performance Management organised by bi-community.org.Kurt Vandebergh earned his Commercial Engineer Degree from the University of Leuven (KUL) in 1992.

Peter Lathouwers, European BI Manager NIKE

Peter started working with Nike as a consultant in 2000.  He took active part in the 1^st datawarehouse project for the Nike European Logistics center.  Became a fixed member of the Nike ELC Application Engineering team in October 2002 mainly focusing on “reporting stuff”.  Becoming the manager of the team he was part off, he started growing the reporting team into a real BI-team.  Currently he holds the European BI Manager role with responsibility to formulate and deploy the Nike Europe BI Strategy besides servicing all BI-related initiatives for Nike Europe Inc.  High on the priority list are the further positive evolution off the team's BI-maturity level together with the adoption of “Agile BI” and integration of the affiliates (Umbro, Converse, Hurley, …).

Prof. dr. Koen Vanhoof, Vice Chairman Faculty Counsel Applied Economics (BEW) and Professor Business Intelligence at the University of Hasselt

is major research interests lie in the areas of data mining, statistics, knowledge engineering and modelling, computational intelligence methods, decision support systems and soft computing . The application domains are information management, marketing and finance, mobility and traffic safety.

He has authored and/or co-authored over 40 peer-reviewed journal articles and about 6 book chapters and 60 conference papers. He is co-editor of the International Journal of Information Theory and Applications. 

Currently he is responsible for the courses Business Intelligence, Business process modelling, Knowledge discovery management, ICT project.

He has been appointed as a guest professor in Jagilionski University (Krakau, Polen), University of Antwerp (Antwerp, Belgium), University of Maastricht (Maastricht, Netherlands), University of Economics (Sofia, Bulgary), Technical University (St. Petersburg, Russia), Academy of Economics (Wroclaw , Poland) and Erasmus University (Rotterdam,Netherlands) respectively. Currently he is vice-dean research at the Faculty of Applied Economics and project leader of the Business informatics research group at the University of Hasselt.

Walter Vanherle, Management Advisor and Managing Partner WODAN GROUP

Walter is independent business and technology advisor.   He is currently managing start-up companies and advisor to SME’s on technology integration, marketing, innovation and innovation management.  He was member of the BI-Award Jury in 2011 and is adopted as active member of the BI-Community board since. His background is about implementing end to end business innovation from idea, over market creation and early client adoption to product and service management.  In his career he was responsible for client projects related to Enterprise Program Management, IT Strategy and IT Management, Enterprise Information Management and Large scale ERP implementations.  He served throughout his career as business alliance director towards a large range of business partners. Walter is Fellow of KU-Leuven FEB Faculty and member of the PDMA Association. He graduated in 1983 as Commercial Engineer in Business Administration and Applied Informatics and is an Alumni of IMD Business School. He started his career as consultant with Data Resources (McGrawhill group) and subsequently held various sales, marketing, project management and business management positions with Wang Computers, Tandem, Ingres, Amdahl and Deloitte Consulting.

Ivan Schotsmans, Managing Director BI-Community.  President of Mirecorporation.

Ivan founded in 2008 BI-Community.org (Business Intelligence Community) fueling an end user community with an ever-increasing member interest from end-user clients, academics, BI Software vendors and service providers. Ivan is early adapter of new technologies and follower of TIQM^© (Total Information Quality Management), a framework developed by Larry English. Active for more then 30 years in business intelligence management assignments with an overall international client base.   Next to his client work, Ivan took management roles in industry service organizations like DAMA, TDWI, IIBA, and IAID. In 2009-2010 Ivan served as Global Director Events for IAIDQ.