Better Business With Data Analytics

Business Analytics gives us the tools, the language, the ability, the superpower to look at very inaccessible large bits of data and link them to our lived experience. It sometimes tells us things about our lived experience that we wouldn't know otherwise, surprising things, things about how people react to various stimuli, and so on.

For example, years ago, I was a consultant working on a dataset at a consumer-packaged-goods company before I came to Columbia. They had a bunch of vending machines that issued soft drinks – the machines where you go to a fountain, take your cup, put it under the machine, and fill your cup with the soft drink. We had data, terabytes and terabytes of data, that the machine recorded every time someone got a soft drink. It was an extremely large dataset and extremely difficult to process. We spent a week or two getting it into our systems and getting the capabilities of looking into it. And as we were working through the dataset, suddenly something emerged. We saw that every time someone used the machine, there was a long pour. They put in the cup, they pressed the button and there was a long pour. Then, there was a short break followed by a short pour. We realized it's the foam going down in the cup. Once the foam goes down, you put the cup back to refill the last bit. To me, that story exemplifies why I fell in love with the business analytics field. You have the lived reality that we work with and then you have these datasets that are very hard to look at. In theory, it's easy to say, "The data shows X." But, in practice, it's very difficult to extract that from these very large, very complex files.

Data analytics adds depth to business intuition. The data from the vending machine didn’t discuss foam. It was the experience and knowledge of working in the CPG industry that provided the needed context to the data. There's a reason why the business world is not only engineers. While the data's so important, intuition still plays a very big role. The benefit of this class and data analytics generally is to give you the ability to back up your intuition with data. I’ve heard back from former students who've said that when they are sitting in a room with engineers, data scientists, and analysts in their company, the data analysts mention a concept thinking that the former student will never know what it is. And they know what it is. They were able to gain respect and really integrate with those team members. One of the big things participants get out of the class is the language, the communication skills, the street cred, for lack of a better word, the credibility with engineers.

Business analytics is going to increase competitiveness in the future. It's going to increase the importance of using data. A lot of the boring automated tasks are going to become very data-driven. There's going to be a lot of data-driven automation that's going to, I think, shift what people spend their time on. I think it also opens a whole new set of potential business models.

For example, dynamic pricing has been absolutely world-changing for a broad range of industries. The very first-ever low-cost airline created was called People Express. This was years and years ago. They were destroyed within a year because of analytics. American Airlines introduced dynamic ticket-pricing and introduced more analytics-based pricing for their tickets. And People Express died within a year acknowledging that that was the reason. It was just analytics. Since then, it's really affected, some might say infected, every part of our everyday life. The Uber rides you take are sort of priced based on demand. There's a great example one New Year’s Eve where surge pricing broke and they weren't able to increase prices based on demand. Suddenly, there were no Ubers available in the whole city. It is really analytics and dynamic pricing that makes that business model even possible. Without it, there would be no Ubers, there would be no ride-sharing. Online sales is another example. Amazon would change their prices dynamically over time. That’s an example that we actually touch on in the class.

Without dynamic pricing ride-sharing could never have existed. The gig economy could never have existed. So, I think business analytics opens up new business models. It also increases the importance of who needs to be hired. It's always been important to be a generalist. It's always been important to know a little bit about everything. I think it's getting more and more and more and more important because now you have to have your fingers in many pies. Everything is data-driven. Everything requires analytics.

Our Business Analytics: Create Value Through Data Analysis program gives a look behind the curtain on analytics. It provides both the strategy and actual hands-on keyboards implementation of analytics. Our participants not only focus on the high level case-based discussions, they also have the opportunity to work through the analytics themselves. While other courses are a light version of what’s taught to engineers, we take a different approach. Ours has a business-first focus. It’s the foundation of every lecture.

We specifically designed the course to get below the headlines. A TED talk on AI and analytics, for example, would just touch on the headlines, "Oh, look, robots do this and now we can predict cancer." This class gets below the surface. When you sit around a table with engineers and they're proposing an algorithm to you, do you close your eyes, bury your head in the sand, and let the engineers do what they want because you don’t know better? With this program, you can really expect answers. It’s like an analytics translator. We provide the best of two worlds. On the one hand, you’ll have a strategy class that's very, very high level. On the other, you might have an engineering class that's very, very low level about the math. Our program creates a bridge between those two ways of thinking. And that’s a true strength of business analytics. It provides an invaluable bridge between different industries and scenarios.