KEEPING GRADS AT THE LEADING EDGE
Brock University’s Goodman School of Business partners with SAS Canada to keep current in today’s economy
Anew MBA specialization in business analytics is positioning the Goodman School of Business at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont., as a career-advantage leader in one of the hottest areas in the workplace today.
Labelled ‘the next frontier’ in business innovation, competition and productivity, business analytics is the application of big data to help explore patterns, relationships and trends that influence management decisions.
“What makes our program so unique is we are one of the few schools in Canada to have partnered with the software company SAS Canada,” says Anteneh Ayanso, an associate professor of information systems at the Goodman School of Business.
SAS Canada is a leader in business intelligence and advanced analytics software, and the partnership gives Goodman School of Business researchers and students access to its business analytics software, training and services.
Don Cyr, dean of the Goodman School of Business, says that the access to the analytical tools available in SAS enriches the overall learning experience at Goodman. “And it ensures the students are working with highly relevant software that gives them a competitive career advantage.”
Currently, more businesses are moving into evidence-based decisionmaking. For example, many retailers are logging and tracking every transaction, product review, tweet and status update made by their customers — and they need to interpret it.
“Businesses want to get insight into what their customers are looking for and what products they are buying... and they can capitalize on that margin by processing data to guide future business decisions,” says Ayanso, who championed the partnership between Brock and SAS.
“The integration of the SAS software into courses brings tremendous value to the classroom training environment.”
The program trains students to do data decision-making based on data management, analysis and software application. “And students will not just discuss cases as they did in the past in traditional MBA programs,” says Ayanso. “They are now doing computer based training, and are focusing more on logic, management, statistics, and applying that information.”
The combination of data intelligence and software application is the key to the program, according to Tylor Huizinga, an MBA student who has a jump on the business analytics specialization courses at the Goodman School of Business. “The business analytics and MBA program give you the ability to understand the data, to communicate that data efficiently, and to do it in such a way that another business person will understand.”
Huizinga says that the data could be customer data, employee data or even surveys relating to customer satisfaction. “If your company wants to know how well they’re doing at dealing with customers, then understanding that, analyzing it properly, and communicating it to other departments is quite important.”
The business analytics specialization MBA is designed to give students that kind of exposure before they graduate, says Ayanso. Then, they can apply this knowledge in any organization and any domain, whether they end up working in finance, marketing or even the public sector.
“You come out of school already trained.” Research has shown that the demand for people with analytics skills and expertise is growing much faster than other occupations.
The new specialization program was launched officially in 2015 — so first-year students can now declare it as their major.
Brock’s MBA is a two-year program. Students do a one-year specialization after the first year of required courses. If students choose business analytics, they will be taking data management, intro analytics, advanced analytics, and other elective courses in the IT area during their second year. But students in other areas can also take those courses as electives and enhance their own training in marketing or HR to get exposed to data-treatment modeling.