Understanding the Language of Business Analytics
For many workers, data literacy is like a foreign language. When you don’t speak the language, confusion and frustration take hold. Ciamac C. Moallemi, faculty co-director of the Business Analytics (Online): Create Value Through Data Analysis program, shares key insights into translating this business language.
According to Accenture, twenty-one percent of workers are confident in their data literacy skills. For many workers, data literacy is like a foreign language. When you don’t speak the language, confusion and frustration take hold.
Yet, data is becoming more and more prevalent in all types of organizations. It’s applied in a variety of functions such as operations, marketing, finance, and strategic planning. Business analytics has become an even more critical capability for enterprises of all types and all sizes.
To get some insights into translating the language of business analytics, we spoke to Ciamac C. Moallemi, co-faculty director of the Business Analytics (Online): Create Value Through Data Analysis program.
What Is the Future of Data Analytics?
There’s been a whole sea change driven by analytics and mathematical models in financial markets. In the past 15 years, they've gone from humans yelling at each other in stock exchanges to a bunch of computers silently trading in a data center somewhere in New Jersey.
As business and society and life become more automated through technology, we're going to have more data and we're going to be in positions to automate many of the decisions in our lives. The role of business analytics is just going to grow in the future. As it goes from relatively minor things in people's lives to impacting major decisions – analytics is going to determine where people get admitted to college or whether people get raises – it becomes increasingly important for people who are responsible for those analytics systems to have a good understanding of what's going on.
What Drew You to the Field of Business Analytics?
My training is in math and engineering. I was always interested in quantitative things, but also interested in not being too abstract and applying them to practical situations. I like impacting the world and I think technology and analytics is a way to do it. And business analytics allows me to have an impact on the world.
What Can Participants Expect from Your Business Analytics Program?
Our Business Analytics: Create Value Through Data Analysis program is very accessible. While we teach technical topics, we carefully pair them up with real-world business cases. This gives participants exposure in terms of the technical methodology while also providing a nice sampling of how analytics are used in practice in business today in a range of different verticals.
Participants do not have to have programming knowledge; we leverage Excel. Excel is an intuitive interface. It's a very graphical style of programming. To do more sophisticated analytics, you’ll need to be on a platform like Python. Our program does have bonus modules that are in Python, but we kept the core aspects accessible to all participants.
We provide the experience of being able to understand this foreign language of analytics in a business context.
Featured Faculty
Upcoming Business Analytics (Online) Program
$1,950
Business Analytics (Online): Create Value Through Data Analysis
2 CIBE Credits
Sign Up for Email Alerts
Sign up for program updates and content relevant to today's business leaders from Columbia Business School Executive Education.