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Round 2: Analytics Education for Business Professionals

13.05.2011
My earlier post on this subject, noting the need for educating business professionals beyond IT, stimulated good reflections and comments. Since then, I became aware of a study (Sircar, Sumit (2009) "Business Intelligence in the Business Curriculum", Communications of the Association for Information Systems: Vol. 24, Article 17). Sircar, a professor at the University of Miami (Ohio) School of Business, described the components of a business analytics minor comprising courses in statistics, quantitative analysis of business problems, and data mining. His research at that time showed few business schools with such an analytics curriculum. That finding is disappointing as measured against the large number of IT and business professionals who need to be trained. But there are encouraging signs of change, as I observed in a recent visit to a new center for customer analytics at Yale School of Management.

Analytics is at or near the top of IT spending priorities across a range of industries. Associated with this is the need for skilled business professionals who are comfortable with analytics. I was chatting with an executive from a major insurance company at a recent CIO conference who has led an impressive effort to build programs to implement a 360 degree view of the customers across all channels and product lines for his firm. I asked him how he attracts the necessary talent to make these programs effective. He indicated that he has success looking to graduate students in psychology who are trained and regularly use analytical methods throughout their courses of study. Given the nature of psychology, the analytics would be people or behavior-oriented -- the right fit for the jobs he needs to fill. On the other hand, he has not been able to find these capabilities in business school graduates, as he felt that they are weak on the quantitative methods necessary for his teams on customer analytics.

Clearly, there is a misalignment between the demand for analytics skills and the supply of trained graduates coming out of business schools. There is a critical need to train future IT professionals who will build the data architectures covering wider forms of data (structured and unstructured), the database and system administrators who need to ensure the availability of the information resource, and the quantitative analysts who will employ data mining to explore the data and build analytical models.

We also need to train business professionals who will use analytics in decision making. Companies are recognizing that the ability for decision makers to apply analytics in the decision-making process is essential to improve overall business performance. Given the trend to flatter organizational hierarchies, decision making is more widely distributed -- so analytics must become more pervasive. IDC research showed that training has the highest impact on making analytics pervasive. This implies that the training of future business professionals requires the integration of analytics within domain-specific courses, such as marketing, finance, or supply chain.

"Analytics" is an umbrella term for a variety of techniques and the skills in scarcest supply are the ability to marry the appropriate technique to a specific business problem. With regard to applied analytics, one size does not fit all. Here are some examples of the different analytic techniques required for different groups of business processes:

* Customer processes benefit from the application of people-centric predictive analytics where the business user can learn which attributes are the best predictors of future customer behavior. This knowledge can be applied for developing and measuring the impact of personalized offers to customers. Similar techniques are now being used in employee or HR analytics.