“How can analytics education help prepare India’s next-generation decision science experts?”
Author: Prof Kartikeya Bolar
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Earlier, organizations from different sectors used to drive decisions through legacy systems which used to process mostly organization-specific data recorded as a result of the organization’s activities. Hence, the skill set to run such practices was limited to using specific underlying technology. During this period, large technology organizations used to promote training programs specific to their proprietary technology. With the advent of the Web 2.0 era, the scope of decision-making wasn’t limited to organization data alone. It was rather about harnessing the power of data from social media platforms, which was abundant because of continued indulgences and interactions of different individuals. There were rich possibilities for analyzing the data in various disciplines. Web 2.0 also brought out some fantastic philosophies like “crowd-sourcing,” “open-sourcing,” and “customerization,” which opened technology doors to every individual. On the analysis front, conceptual knowledge from various computing disciplines like statistics, operations research, structured query language, data mining, data structures, and algorithms surfaced and was used frequently to seek insights and foresight. The Mysterious blend of analysis and technology formulated analytics education’s backbone.
Many universities and institutions have started providing analytics education in the past decade. While analytics education primarily catered to Technical and Analytical skills, which surfaced very early, the education remained incomplete without the knowledge of the field where these need to be applied. Further, since the result of the application was to get insights and foresight to solve the business problem, communicating these ideas and translating them to necessary strategy and actions was also equally important. With these ideas, the formal analytics body of knowledge would contain the following
- Statistics
- Operations Research
- Data management and Datamining
- Data Visualization and Storytelling
- Structured Query Language and Database management
- Programming Languages for Analytics
- Business Intelligence and Analytics
Further, courses on Strategy Simulations in a specific domain will also aid in synthesizing insights and foresight. These courses form the base knowledge or essential competencies of analytics which every future decision expert should be well-versed even if they are not experts in all of them.
The body of knowledge is further amplified by promising developments in artificial intelligence (AI)and machine learning(ML). While most AI and ML applications are still in nascency, future decision experts will benefit immensely from applications like image analytics and natural language processing.
While the body of knowledge seems to be very exhaustive and would be helping future decision science experts, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. The forthcoming decision science experts must indulge in these courses by taking up projects and internships. They should participate in competitions to learn from their peers and experience. In this regard, universities and institutions should look at every opportunity to interact and collaborate with corporate organizations. The best possible collaboration will be in the form of customized training programs or getting into data consultancy contracts. These initiatives can help aspiring analytics professionals seamlessly transition into any organization.
There are enough good reasons why future decision experts should have formal analytics education. One strong reason is that having formal analytics education shall help the decision expert look at the business problem in a perspective backed by logic and not just gut feeling. The other reason is that analytics education will bring down the mental stigma due to the limited range of traditional thinking. Analytics education provides a wide range of solutions for business problems. Essentially formal analytics education will make the dreaded path of decision-making less uncomfortable as well as exciting, given that the aspiring decision expert takes a confident plunge.