Elissa Fink

Cross-channel success in retail is all about coordination of data in an era where the number of channels and the amount information flowing through them keep growing. Think of the data streams from a variety of channels, including brick-and-mortar, websites, pay per click, email, direct mail, mobile devices, catalogs and more, and it's easy to see how the combined flood of information can reach the multiterabyte scale in a company's data network. The challenge comes in making sense of all this "big data" and teasing out important relationships and patterns from the noise.