by dr. Michel Ballings (@MichelBallings)
Day 1
Representatives of 19 companies came to the Holiday Inn World's Fair Park in Knoxville on November 9 and 10 for the Fall 2015 edition of our Business Analytics Forum. In total there were 120+ attendees. Click here for the agenda. The main tag line was 'Combining Analytics and Maturity Model Concepts to Enhance Effectiveness'. Here you see dr. Chuck Noon, head of the department of Business Analytics and Statistics, kick off the Forum:
Then it was time for Aaron Burciaga (@ADBurciaga) to talk about best practices for completing a maturity model assessment. Aaron is the Analytics Applications Platform North America Lead and Global Defense Analytics Lead at Accenture. He is also the INFORMS Analytics Maturity Model Chair.
Next Craig Brabec, Chief Analytics Officer at Caterpillar Inc. gave a talk about Analytics and Innovation at Caterpillar.
Then it was time for John Hart and Josh Eldridge from Scripps Networks Interactive. John is responsible for all digital analytics standards and governance at Scripps Networks Interactive.
Next Mark Ewing from Eastman Chemical Company, Supervisor of the Business Analytics Team, talked about Enterprise Analytics Maturity Leveraging R.
Time for lunch! We definitely have worked up an appetite.
After lunch Essam Alshreafi, Project Manager at St. Onge Company, talked about Analytics Maturity and Analytics Professional Success. An interesting point that Essam made is that it is not enough to be aware of one's own analytics maturity, it is one's level of maturity relative to the company's maturity that is important.
Next dr. Jennifer Golek from Capital One talked about working in analytical organizations.
Then Howard Kirkland, Vice President - Stowers CAT, interviewed Eric Johnson, Vice President Information Services - Jewelry Television, about his experiences in managing increasing levels of organizational maturity.
Aaron Burciaga (@ADBurciaga) and dr. Randy Bradley (@randyvbradley) concluded the first day by leading the attendees through a live maturity model assessment. Attendees anonymously answered assessment questions and received feedback and guidance. The goal was to help them understand different interpretations of the questions and how to use the results when defining an improvement strategy.
We concluded the day with a reception at Scruffy City Hall at Market Square Knoxville. Thanks to everybody for making this a great day.
Day 2
We started out the day by hearing about news from the department. The session updated us on the current status of our degree programs, goals for the future, and how we would like to partner with companies. First dr. Chuck Noon talked about our three areas of focus: degrees, research, corporate engagement (capstones, executive education, forum, full time jobs, internships, curriculum input). He explained that we are taking a more integrated approach.
Next it was time to hear from the people in charge of our degree programs. Charlie Cwiek is in charge of our undergraduate major in Business Analytics. Charlie did a great job explaining the evolution of the undergraduate program. Some key skills that were added to the program are R, SAS, SQL, and optimization.
Then dr. Mandyam Srinivasan, director of the Ph.D. program in Analtyics talked about how first we had two Ph.D. programs, one in statistics and one in management science and how we now have one unified Ph.D. program in Analytics that spans management science and statistics. The program is aimed at delivering Ph.D.s that are able to teach analytics, and performing cutting edge research, which is integrated with industry needs (i.e., translates theory to practice).
Next dr. Missie Bowers, director of the Master's program in Business Analytics took us through some of the highlights of the Master's program. She talked about how we changed the program entirely. We introduced experiential learning, and in response to industry needs, we introduced soft kills, and more programming (R). In response to industry needs we also introduced the following electives: customer analytics, supply chain analytics, and text analytics. In Spring 2016 we will add Python and Big Data. We continue to really listen to our corporate partners and keep the finger at the pulse of Business Analytics. In addition to hard skills, our students are set apart by their fundamental understanding of business, formal training in business soft skills, and the capstone experience. Some interesting highlights related to the health of our program: we had 170 applications for our Fall 2015 incoming class, of which we accepted 36. Maybe the most interesting point: the mean starting salary of our students is $80,200.
Then it was time to listen to the experience of some of our students. Graduate student Jake Darlington talked about his internship at Ernst and Young.
Jessica Tyler taked about her internship at Catalist. She touched upon the importance of being able to handle large datasets.
Alex Lockwood talked about his internship at Georgia-Pacific.
To wrap up this session, dr. Chuck Noon talked about our research efforts and corporate engagement. He emphasized that sometimes practice is ahead of academia and that sometimes academia are ahead of practice. We need to bridge the gap and work together.
After the break dr. Sean Willems explained how one can identify the best course of action to successfully implement change that might be desired after doing the analytics maturity assessment. Sean's talk focused on selecting the right projects and how to qualify a project road map that will maximize the chances of a successful implementation.
To conclude the Forum we enjoyed a nice lunch which provided ample opportunity to reflect on our analytics maturity self assessments and exchange ideas.
As a final note, many thanks go to Julie Ferrara, the main organizer of this event, for all the meetings, planning, identifying and contacting speakers, updating the website (e.g., agenda, speaker bios), and emailing attendees with details.
Also, a big thank you to Janice Wade and Jane Moser to help make this forum a success.
