IY SMU Publication: Enterprise Innovation Date: 16 November 2009 Headline: Learning business tools in school

By Allan Tan

When I graduated from college, my first employer asked me whether I was familiar with the business applications that the company used. Back then, when you graduate from university or college, a lot of what you know is academic. Any experience you may have using business applications will have been garnered during bouts of work around summer break.

Much has changed since then. Many educational institutions have discovered the importance in inculcating real world environments into the learning curriculum to gain industry recognition, additional funding and attract top students to study. But the technology cycles adhering to Moore's Law, graduates still face the hurdle of meeting industry expectations.

With companies now storing sizeable data about their customers, learning to interpret what the data is telling you about your customer is becoming an important, if not critical element of doing business. Sadly few graduates of computer science courses are adequately skilled to join the workforce with a working knowledge of business intelligence (BA) and business analytic (BA) tools.

Dr. Steve Miller, founding dean for the School of Information Systems at the Singapore Management University says students coming out of certain types of programs (e.g. l nforrnation Systems, Computer Science, Engineering, quantitative areas of social sciences and business, statistics and applied math) will be familiar to some extent with academically oriented analytic models, and with basic approaches to using software tools for analyzing data. Information Systems and Computer Science students will even know how to create, query and manage databases.

However, "there are big gaps in what they have been exposed to in school versus what we need them to be able to do once they enter the workforce. They do not have enough experience with managing and using large scale data sets. They do not have enough experience with real-world business intelligence & analytics scenarios, where the data is not necessarily aligned with what the theory says is required, and where the questions or hypotheses are not clear at the outset," said Dr. Miller.

University undergraduates are almost always exposed to data in static settings, where they take a long time to study a data set, and where the data set does not change over the course of the assignment or the course of the semester.

IY SMU Publication: Enterprise Innovation Date: 16 November 2009 Headline: Learning business tools in school

Tan Poh Choo, practice director at SAS Institute in Singapore agrees that a gap exists between what the industry needs and what educational institutes offer. "Students with statistical and analytics training generally come from the Science faculty's Statistical Department. They are strong in concepts and techniques, with some exposure of technologies, but lack deep industry and business applications knowledge. Hence, ability to model and apply the most applicable techniques to solve real business problems, and to analyze and interpret the results meaningfully is challenged," said Tan.

In May 2008, the Singapore Management University (SMU) entered into a collaborative deal with SAS to build up research and teaching capabilities in business intelligence. Together with IBM, a new SAS Enterprise Intelligence Laboratory (SEIL) was built at the SMU campus. SAS also donated S$180,000 to the SMU to establish scholarships for undergraduate and postgraduate studies in I nfomation Systems Management with a special emphasis on business intelligence technology and applications.

According to Dr. Miller, the SEIL was built to give students experience with managing and using larger scale data sets. Students are exposed to real world BIIBA scenarios, "where an important part of the problem is to figure out how to structure and communicate the problem, and to do this empirically, using the SAS tools to explore the data as part of the process of converging in on underlying problems and important questions. They get experience with going back and forth between real world data, with all of its imperfections and complications, and disciplinary based (e.g. marketing, or operations or economic) theory," Dr Miller explained.

The SEl t exposes students to real-world business conditions allowing them to use actual industry BIIBA tools to solve problems.

How did the SM U select SAS as the technology partner for this endeavor? To be fair, SAS is not the biggest BI vendor in the market. SAP, Oracle and IBM all have equally recognized offerings in the market.

SMU pointed to SAS' depth of experience and expertise that its students required.

"SAS skills are in high demand by companies, governments and organizations worldwide that use SAS to analyze huge amounts of data to make better decisions. SAS careers vary from entry-level programmers to executive positions requiring data warehousing, data mining and analytical expertise, making it more relevant for our students," noted Dr. Miller.

"SMU came to understand how we strive to combine the technology side of information systems with applications oriented IT solutions in the context of business scenarios. As a result, SAS and SMU found that we were on the same wavelength and the relationship came together in a natural way," Tan added.

No one enters a partnership without interest.

According to SAS this partnership will alleviate the current BIIBA skills shortage in the workforce. The proliferation of strong analytical skills can only benefit SAS in the long term. As these skilled students are hired into the workforce, contributing and delivering value to their respective organizations, management will have more reason to support and approve further investment into analytic applications that impact wider and deeper aspects of their business operations.

The bonus for SAS is that familiarity with its technology will make it more feasible for these future skilled employees to recommend SAS as the technology to use in their future companies.

IY SMU Publication: Enterprise Innovation Date: 16 November 2009 Headline: Learning business tools in school

Having been an engineering student way back, I discovered early on that few of the theories I've picked up in college had any practical applications. However, the thought process behind could easily be applied across many aspects of work and living.

Dr. Miller views learning not as a trade-off between mastering theory and acquiring practical skills. "One needs a frame of reference and mental models to absorb and retain know-how, and to know how to apply that know-how in different types of settings. So one has to understand the concepts behind what is being taught," he quips.

That said, he also sees the importance of doing things. "It is not possible to verify if the student really understands, or if the student can apply what they are learning," adds Dr. Miller.

The SIS educational program inculcates the value of "learning-by-doing". "we are very practical and applications oriented. But we do this in a very intellectual way where we care a lot about underlying concepts, and getting students to understand and appreciate the abstractions and representations required to really appreciate what they are implementing. In other words, we require out students to learn both bottom up and top down. It required extra effort for both students and faculty. But the effort is worth it since it results in better outcomes," argues Dr. Miller.

What can graduates of this course expect to achieve when they step out in the real world?

Dr. Steve Miller : Let us address this question in two ways. One way is to consider the industries students can work in when they graduate from our BSc (Information Systems Management) program with a concentration in Business Intelligence & Analytics.

Every industry in the global economy has to manage and analyze data, so in this sense, students with BI/BA skills can work in any sector of the economy. However, the industries which make the most intensive and advanced uses of BIIBA are Telco providers, banks, trading houses, and related financial service institutions, and government and the public sector organizations. In Singapore, there are many organizations in these industries which use SAS in research and development, marketing, fraud detection, customer service and many more such areas.

A second way to understand career paths for those with BI/BA skills is to look at job roles and career paths for new bachelor graduates. Data management has always been important in organizations. These days, it is not business as usual. Data management and the related ability to harness BIIBA is becoming even more important these days at a rapidly accelerating rate. The reasons for this are the explosion in real time monitoring and data collection across the organization, the amount of consumer generated content on the blogsphere, and on rating and evaluation sites which comment on companies and their products & services, the importance of all the e-channels for customer interaction, the phenomenal growth of mobile customers as well as mobile customers, and related contemporary trends.

As such, companies need more business analysts and systems analyst to work across the organization to figure out the processes for data implementing or improving the data value chain: data generation, capture, storage, aggregation and manipulation, analytics, and communication and feed back.

We would like to create a new breed of Business Intelligence & Analytics Analyst (BIAA) who not only knows how to define user, functional, architectural and business requirements for regular IT business solutions, but who can also do this for various types of Business Intelligence & Analytics applications. Hopefully, we can eventually launch a movement of some sort to create this new type of BtAA professional.

IY SMU Publication: Enterprise Innovation Date: 16 November 2009 Headline: Learning business tools in school

Also there will be more job openings and industry needs for software and applications oriented IT professionals who know how to design and implement BIA solutions, whether the project is done within the company, or implementation is handled by a 3rd party software & service provider.

Often, it is the business user-for example, the credit manager in a bank, or the consumer marketing manager in a telco, who is the main force behind the BIA applications and initiatives within the organization. In such cases, our students would be well suited to work in such firms.

In summary, our SMU SIS students who graduate with a second major in Business Intelligence & Analytics across multiple families of job roles: as business or systems analysts, and hopefully a future option of a specialized BIIBA Analyst (BIAA), as members of business applications solutioning teams responsible for implementing BllBA solutions and related data management solutions, or as analytics professionals on the business side who know how to make use of BIIBA capabilities within the context of the revenue producing business units or functional business areas.

The key point is that students with BIA skills can choose careers across a diversity of industries and a diversity of job roles. It is noteworthy that this specialization actually increases one's range of starting jobs, mid-career options and long term career flexibility