Bill Franks

Bill Franks is Chief Analytics Officer for The International Institute For Analytics (IIA), where he provides perspective on trends in the analytics, data science, AI, and big data space and helps clients understand how IIA can support their efforts to improve analytic performance. In his role, he helps guide IIA’s global community of analytics practitioners in determining the best strategy and path forward for their particular analytics journey.

He also serves on the advisory boards of multiple university and professional analytic programs. He has held a range of executive positions in the analytics space in the past, including several years as Chief Analytics Officer for Teradata (NYSE: TDC).

Bill is the author of the book Taming The Big Data Tidal Wave (John Wiley & Sons). In the book, he applies his two decades of experience working with clients on large-scale analytics initiatives to outline what it takes to succeed in today’s world of big data and analytics. The book made Tom Peter’s list of 2014 “Must Read” books and also the Top 10 Most Influential Translated Technology Books list from CSDN in China.

His second book The Analytics Revolution (John Wiley & Sons) lays out how to move beyond using analytics to find important insights in data (both big and small) and into operationalizing those insights at scale to truly impact a business. ​ Bill is an active speaker who has presented at dozens of events in recent years. His blog, Analytics Matters, addresses the transformation required to make analytics a core component of business decisions. He was also named a top 10 big data global influencer by a 2016 social media research survey, a top global artificial intelligence and big data influencer by a 2019 survey, a top 50 most popular North American AI influencer in a 2019 article, and was an inaugural inductee into the Analytics Hall of Fame in 2019. ​ His focus has always been to help translate complex analytics into terms that business users can understand and to then help an organization implement the results effectively within their processes. His work has spanned clients in a variety of industries for companies ranging in size from Fortune 100 companies to small non-profit organizations. ​ He earned a Bachelor’s degree in Applied Statistics from Virginia Tech and a Master’s degree in Applied Statistics from North Carolina State University.