T4G and the New Brunswick Information Technology Council have announced that the second Big Data Congress will be held Feb. 25 in Saint John, and the keynote speaker will be renowned Harvard innovation strategy professor Clayton Christensen.

The event was launched in January of this year and attracted about 600 people, a tremendous turnout for an event in the Atlantic Canadian startup community. The next congress, to be held at the Saint John Trade and Convention Centre, will be able to accommodate 950 people and will include workshops before and after the event. The goal this year is to bring in a broader community and demonstrate how businesses and government can analyze data and improve their efficiency.

 “We want to make the connection between big data science and business,” T4G CEO Geoff Flood said in a recent interview. “We want them to understand how they can benefit from this. We’ve got to provide evidence and make the actual connections.”

For the past two years, Flood has been advocating a vision of establishing a centre of excellence for big data in Atlantic Canada. He’s not talking about an institution established in a specific location but a community of people with expertise in analytics working around the region.

Big Data is the movement to analyze the mountain of information produced hourly by online interactions and use it to predict future spending trends, identify efficiencies or understand behaviour.

T4G, a Toronto-based company with offices in Fredericton, Moncton, Saint John and Halifax, and the council hope the congress raises awareness beyond the region’s borders about the development of the industry on the East Coast.

Flood said he’s “disappointed but not surprised” there have not been more organizations in the region adopting the practice of analyzing data to improve performance. Most of the activity has involved startups commercializing analytical tools and universities enhancing computer science programs to include analytics.

The organizers of the Big Data Congress, he said, are striving to demonstrate to government and big business the returns that companies can achieve through big data practices.

Headlining the discussion will be Christensen, who was recently named 2013’s most influential management thinker worldwide by Thinkers50 for the second time running. That achievement has been matched only by management legends Peter Drucker and C.K. Prahalad.

Other speakers include John Weigelt, national technology officer for Microsoft Canada; Kevin Ashton, general manager of Conserve, the clean-tech division of consumer electronics giant Belkin; Kevin Slavin, the head of the Playful Systems division of MIT’s Media Lab; and Hilary Mason, data scientist-in-residence at Accel Partners, a leading Silicon Valley venture capital firm.

The program for the 2014 will be expanded to include a technical workshop Feb. 24. Keynote speeches and panel discussions will take place on Feb. 25, and a technology-themed event for New Brunswick high school students will be held Feb. 26.