Authors
Jeff Block
Director, Business Intelligence Practice
Capstone Consulting
Born in the St. Louis area, Jeff Block has been a consultant in the IT industry in the Chicago area since beginning his career in 1994. Early in his career, he built his own consulting practice as an independent consultant, focusing on building IT infrastructure for small businesses. Since then, he has worked with both very small and very large consulting firms, has provided technical training and field readiness services for a global software company, and helped launch a startup media company, where he invented much of their intelligence scoring technology.
Jeff joined Capstone Consulting in early 2008 to lead the BI practice and to help Capstone build a new consulting practice in Chicago. Upon his joining the company, Capstone opened their second office in downtown Chicago, and established a close relationship with the Illinois IT Association. Along with billable consulting work and leading Capstone’s Chicago and BI practices, Jeff chairs the ITA Business Intelligence Roundtable and hosts quarterly “BI Summit” events in Omaha, where Capstone’s headquarters is located. Jeff is also heavily involved in Capstone’s marketing group.
Jeff has a passion for building things. In the corporate / consulting world, this translates to leveraging technology, particularly IT, to make business more successful. His broad experience includes executive and technical leadership, program- and project management, process and methodology development, enterprise- and application architecture, relational and multidimensional data architecture and modeling, and software design and development.
Jeff has specific proficiencies in business process management, project management, enterprise architecture, business intelligence, enterprise data warehousing, object-oriented technologies, distributed computing, and various database systems.
Jeff holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the Engineering College at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is married, and loves to spend time with his wife and their 5 year old son. Jeff is heavily involved in Harvest Bible Chapel, where he serves in the youth and children ministries.
Daniel Holke
Business Intelligence Manager
Mutual of Omaha
Dan started his career programming on corporate finance systems for Mutual of Omaha in 1995 and quickly learned that business intelligence went far beyond coding and responding to system issues. Fueled by his love of business, he accepted an opportunity in 1997 to pursue a BI role supporting the sales and marketing operation. Dan discovered that data management improvements were needed in order to provide efficient, quality output to his customers, so he helped lead an effort to build an operational data store that transformed the reporting capabilities for his customers. For the past 6 years, Dan has managed various people and projects focused on reducing the costs and redundant efforts associated with gathering and delivering information. He has supported initiatives to improve reporting on product, customer, policy and sales hierarchy subject areas for individual insurance sales, group insurance sales and financial reporting.
At Mutual of Omaha, Dan is specifically responsible for validating the data warehouse content in order to improve information delivery to finance and group insurance customers. Recently, Dan has led efforts to start a data governance and data quality program for a new finance data warehouse.
Dan knows the importance of bridging the gap between business and IT, and he has experienced great success through strong partnerships. With a balance of business knowledge and technical expertise, Dan is able to utilize the Agile Scrum methods for deploying business intelligence projects to strengthen those relationships.
Dan has a passion for community, having helped to create a young professionals group at Mutual of Omaha, called the Emerging Leaders Network. He also is active in the Greater Omaha Young Professional organization, and the Nebraska chapter of DAMA, for which he helped to coordinate the first-ever DAMA Day in Nebraska.
Dan earned his business degree in MIS and Finance from Creighton University, and holds a Masters of Business Administration from the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He and his wife, Lisa, are blessed to have three boys and a girl to keep them busy. Dan also attends Christ Community Church in Omaha, leads Boy Scouts and coaches various sports for his children.
Tom Huguelet
Business Intelligence Architect
ContextQ
A Chicago native, Tom Huguelet has been in IT Consulting since 1989. Tom got his start on IBM midrange computers, then quickly built that company’s PC-based application development practice. Moving further into data-centric applications, Tom then joined the burgeoning objected-oriented and client/server movement as both developer and trainer. It was during this time that Tom began working on his first true data warehousing installations. Tom architected a business intelligence solution into production in 1999 prior to the SQL Server 7.0 OLAP Services release as a product. After the exhilarating experience of delivering his first multidimensional analytic solution, Tom joined a consulting company that focused exclusively on Business Intelligence.
Tom formed contextQ in 2009 with the express purpose of helping organizations achieve business intelligence excellence by providing training, mentoring, and professional services.
Tom Huguelet believes that Business Intelligence matters. BI is a disruptive (in a good way – like Google, Twitter, and the Web), transformational process that creates an inevitable evolution towards greater efficiency, transparency, and strategic alignment. Tom enjoys working with both technical and business leaders, and considers both strategic architecture and technical implementation leadership essential and inseparable pursuits for success with business intelligence.
Over the past 20 years, Tom has developed deep experience in business intelligence, corporate performance management solutions, database modeling, the balanced scorecard methodology, dashboards, multidimensional databases, data warehousing, as well as object-oriented technologies, and enterprise architecture .
Tom holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Philosophy and German Language from Marquette University, and is an MCSE, MCT, MCDBA, and MCITP. Tom is the proud father of a son and a daughter and is currently engaged to woman with three daughters of her own.
