How business analytics can help budding managers navigate their way through the new normal

Business analytics is among the recent innovations to have sharpened insights for companies, helping managers unlock their firms’ hidden potential that would otherwise stay untapped. The COVID-19 pandemic has been a turning point for the debate around business analytics as the remote work culture pushed businesses to turn to analytics and avoid potential pitfalls.

Business analytics usually involves the use of methodologies like data mining and statistical analysis to analyse and predict trends or outcomes for business operations and ultimately, make more informed decisions.

The spotlight on this tool has highlighted the necessity to train budding managers to deploy business analytics skills in their day-to-day business life. ABBS School of Management (ABBSSM) is among the premier B-schools in the country that included business analytics in its curriculum early on to ensure its courses were in tandem with the changing times. Established in 2009, ABBSSM aims to offer contemporary management education, which is necessary to adapt to a continuously evolving business environment. Blending classroom lessons with practical learning, the institute empowers its students to strive ahead and take giant leaps.

Decoding the data

The postgraduate programmes it offers include a PGDM with a business analytics certification course. The institute has tied up with Virginia Tech in the United States to offer a completely online business analytics certification from experts in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning. The programme includes sessions, a project and a review. It is ideal for those wanting to pursue a career in analytics.

The institute encourages candidates from various backgrounds to apply to the programme. ABBSSM’s data science and artificial intelligence certificate programme offers an innovative approach towards learning. Students can look forward to analysing data, and studying technologies, security, architecture and other approaches used in creating sustainable solutions. The faculty also teaches students how statistical, machine learning and optimisation models can be made relevant, more accurate and secure.

“There is a new light of dawn in data. It’s everywhere and is almost free. It’s up to us how we harness the data power for our social and business benefit. You can build business decisions on data or opinions. In my opinion, data is much safer,” says Prof (Dr) Kshitiz Sharma, Professor, ABBSSM.

Prof (Dr) Naresh Babu EM, Professor, ABBSSM, says, “Data is the new fuel for the economy, the digital economy. We should tune our economic engine to run faster than others.”

Lessons for the future

From agile techniques to business intelligence to cloud computing, students will learn from some of the best experts in the industry. The curriculum of the course includes data management, predictive analysis, classification and clustering, big data, neural networks and deep learning, natural language processing and image recognition. The students will also get a chance to apply their skills in predictive analysis and machine learning on various projects. The primary aim of the programme is to impart hands-on training to students and help them acquire analytical skills to explore patterns in data for making better managerial decisions.

During the programme, the students get access to a live community on the Databricks platform which enables them to explore data using machine learning models. Apart from Databricks, they also get access to a common platform where they can use tools like SQL, Python, R, Scala, Hadoop and Spark.

The importance of data-based insights for businesses has been rightly surmised by another ABBSSM faculty member Dr. Subhash R Kulkarni, who says, “If you want to differentiate your business from your competitors, work with customer data and design your business strategy.”

After completing the course, students can expect to get a comprehensive understanding of the technologies and practices needed for assessment of past business performance and achieve their KPIs. For more information about the course, click here.