Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/124472
ness schools that want to add analytics to their curricula. (See "Resources for Educators" on page 52.) IBM, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, SAS, and Teradata have university alliance programs that make software, case studies, and research reports available either free or at minimal cost. For example, Oracle makes available database, reporting, and analysis software such as Hyperion. SAS offers SAS Enterprise Miner, its data mining/predictive analytics software. IBM provides Cognos, another reporting and analysis product. Online Resources—For the past 12 years, I've been involved with the Teradata University Network (TUN), a free portal for faculty and students with interests in analytics, business intelligence, data warehousing, data mining, and database management. This network is led by leading academics and financially supported by Teradata. Through the portal, faculty and students can access software such as Teradata, MicroStrategy, and Tableau, as well as articles, webinars, cases, assignments, course syllabi, and even large datasets offered though the University of Arkansas. In fact, I do not use a textbook in my analytics classes. Instead, I rely on the resources available on TUN. Get Ready for Launch More schools are recognizing the importance of analytics by launching new certificate programs, MBA concentrations, and graduate degrees in the field, most often as part of their business, engineering, or statistics programs. One of the first and best-known programs is 54 May/June 2013 BizEd Trends in the marketplace are making it clear: The era of Big Data and analytics is here. the Master of Science in Analytics at North Carolina State University. SAS has been an important contributor to the program, which is offered through the school's Institute for Advanced Analytics, and the program has its own facility on campus. SAS also supports a similar program at Louisiana State University, and it's working to create analytics centers and master's programs at the University of South Carolina and Lehigh University. Just this year, Northwestern University rolled out an online Master of Science in Predictive Analytics offered through its School of Continuing Studies. And this fall, the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University will launch its nine-month Master of Science in Analytics, a graduate program designed to prepare students who possess undergraduate degrees in STEM disciplines to become data scientists. Deloitte Consulting has partnered with the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University to offer a certificate in business analytics for Deloitte's professionals. Deloitte also has entered a fouryear partnership with the Quinn School of Business at University College Dublin in Ireland to open the Deloitte Data Analytics Lab. In fall 2012, our faculty at the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia in Athens introduced its first analytics concentration. As part of the concentration, students take courses in data management; business process management; business intelligence; emerging analytics technologies, platforms, and applications; predictive analytics; and a number of analytics electives. These courses are designed to provide the mix of business, data, and modeling skills a student will need to be an analytics professional or manager. We added this concentration because our MBA students were asking us for the training, employers were asking us for graduates with these skills, and our faculty recognized the great opportunities that analytics presented for our programs. But business schools may need to do even more to integrate analytics into their curricula. Trends in the marketplace make it clear: The era of Big Data and analytics is here. Effective business strategy, financial modeling, customer relationship management, supply chain optimization, and marketing will require more than balloons, suckers, and focus groups, as FAC discovered. Unless we want our business students to be symbolic members of FAC's "old team," we need to give them a thorough understanding of the power of data—and how to use that power to drive their organizations forward. Hugh J. Watson is a professor of management information systems at the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia in Athens.