David Willis

David Willis transforms business data into actionable information. He helps clients use data to deliver customer insight and business intelligence. Once implemented, this information improves business decisions and sales and marketing performance.

• 20+ years UK and International IT experience
• Data analysis, customer insight and segmentation
• Data exploitation specialist
• Business intelligence design and implementation
• Data warehouse architecture, design and ETL
• Trainer for design and implementation
• A technical expert with a thorough understanding of marketing and sales issues

David established Information Drivers as an independent consultancy in 1998. With a strong track record in helping organisations develop information management solutions, he seized the opportunity to create his own consultancy. David specialises in data analysis, data strategy, systems and technologies that exploit data.

His industry experience covers: business procurement, retail, chartered membership,  travel, office supplies, music distribution, pharmaceuticals, education, publishing, finance, banking, local government, the police and charity.

Projects

Here are some examples of David's recent projects:

• Supporting a Chartered Institute attain its strategic objectives. Delivering insight into membership activities to address: retention, cross-sell of products and services, and broaden the Institute's appeal to FTSE organisations
• Delivered supporter insight for a national charity - they're now better able to develop and grow their supporter base. Supporter profiling helped to understand the dynamics of their regular donors - frequencies, amounts and interests
• Showed a consumables retailer who their best customers were, how often they shopped, their value to the business and identified high cost customers so they could transition them to the lower cost web channel
• Helped a travel company understand their sales funnel, increase cross-selling; introducing customers of land based holidays to cruises and vice-versa, start up selling; targeting customers with long-lead time holidays with short-breaks
• Assisted an educational services company to analyse their on-line community; monitor registrations and increase retention and active participation in their community - providing near real-time access to their key performance metrics
• Delivered campaign management capability for an office supplies company; providing prospect and customer selection, campaign creation and measurement and analysis of campaign performance
• Enabled a regional PR business to target its clients with specific help. Their website "stats" reports didn't help - they needed to know what was actually happening on their website!

Key skills

• Analytics, customer profiling and customer segmentation
• Business Intelligence, OLAP analysis, OLAP design and OLAP implementation
• Data warehouse architecture definition, design, dimensional modelling and ETL
• Campaign management
• Data quality management
• Customer relationship management (CRM)
• Business analysis, data modelling, systems design
• Requirements analysis and product evaluation

David participated in Ralph Kimball Advanced Data Warehousing course in 1998. This excellent course strengthen David's existing knowledge of building data warehouse solutions - "Without doubt the best training in data warehousing available" ~ thank you Ralph.

A strong background in IT

Previously, David worked for Pilot Software as the leading exponent of OLAP technologies. He supported their marketing throughout Europe, the Middle East and South Africa. At Group Bull, David worked as a systems architect and integration specialist for database, text based and artificial intelligence systems. Later, he lead Bull's EIS development team.

As widely acknowledged the IT industry is fast paced and forever changing. This brings with it new challenges and opportunities. Key to effective consulting is exploiting current technology and applying lessons learned in other system disciplines. David has previously consulted in  Artificial Intelligence, Communications, Systems Integration and Transaction Processing (OLTP & ERP).