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Data analytics

Sam Woolford

The most recent Bentley Research Colloquium focused on Big Data and a broad range of issues and topics surrounding the topic. This series highlights some of the issues examined or suggested by colloquium presenters.

Attention all college and university students! You may have heard a new world of data analytics is emerging. And that there are lots of well-paying jobs. 

Indeed, data analytics is expected to create 4.4 million jobs worldwide by 2015, but the skilled workers available will fill only one-third of those projected openings, according to Gartner Research. And the McKinsey Global Institute says that the demand for deep analytical talent in the United States could be up to 60 percent greater than its projected supply by 2018.

But before you leap into the big data pool, there are a few things you should know.

To begin, the field is a little murky. Different professional groups are defining data analytics differently based on their perspective. The Harvard Business Review has proclaimed that the hottest new job of the century is that of the data scientist. Yet there is no consistent definition of that term because no single field can claim it. 

From the definitions that I see, a data scientist is someone who can manipulate large data sets, help visualize the data and perhaps do data mining to uncover relationships in the data. It would also be valuable to know your way around statistical modeling, optimization and decision science. This new world of data analytics actually spans the fields of computer science, applied statistics and operations research.

Even with all of that, you’ll need more to succeed in the world of business analytics. The business analytics students I teach at Bentley University develop broader competencies in business to make more effective use of data, statistical and quantitative analysis, and explanatory and predictive modeling to drive better business decisions. We have poured tremendous resources into reengineering costly data systems and are now in need of people with the smarts to analyze the data to improve corporate performance and get the value out of their investment.

That’s what makes training business analytics students so exciting, both in class and through hands-on experience.

At the Center for Quantitative Analysis at Bentley University, we provide professional analytical consulting services to clients such as CVS Pharmacy, HealthMETRICS, Home Health VNA, and National Grid. We improve performance for businesses and train students about business analytics.

Today’s analytical career paths require a new set of skills. Statistical methodology matters but so does business savvy, so that we can answer the questions: What happened? Why is this happening? What if the trend continues? What will happen next? What is the best that can happen?

As we move forward, business analytics must incorporate capabilities that address the needs of big data, which has created a flood of new and unstructured data to analyze. But it must also continue its long history of addressing a broad spectrum of complex business issues.

Aspiring business analysts have to develop additional capabilities to be effective in a business environment. Business problems are often unclear and  may lack a well-defined quantitative framework. And analysts must work with multiple stakeholders, interconnected analyses, uncontrollable factors, messy data and unknown sources of variation. No simple task, to put it mildly.

But with all of that, this is a time of enormous opportunity for those who want to join the next wave of business analytics training and prepare to reach out to businesses in a way that makes a difference.

Sam Woolford is a professor of statistics and director for The Center for Quantitative Analysis in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Bentley University.

 

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