Social media spawns Yale - IBM initiative on business analytics training

The Center for Customer Insights  at Yale School of Management is collaborating with IBM in first-of-a-kind project-focused class to help students gain hands-on experience in applying analytics skills in real-world business scenarios

This is a result of social networks and mobile devices having reinvented the way in which people interact with company brands as massive amounts of data are being generated daily on media channels like Facebook and Twitter, consumer blogs and company websites.

The two will also help studdents learn managerial decision making and how predictive analytics technology can improve the effectiveness of key business functions such as marketing campaigns and leveraging customer opinion on the web.

With so much data resting within these sources, it is essential for business executives  to possess strong analytics skills to better harness and measure brand and customer opinion to capitalise on new opportunities.

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that there will be a 24 per cent increase in demand for professionals with management analysis skills over the next eight years. Helping to fuel this increase is the rising use of business analytics by companies in their efforts to learn more about their customers, including buying habits and preferences.

The Yale - IBM initiatyive is aimed at addressing the need for students to build strong analytics skills with a first-of-its-kind "Customer Insight" project-focused class.

The class gives students the opportunity to apply analytics skills to real business scenarios. For example, through social analytics capabilities if a business is not providing the level of customer service required during peak season or peak hours, they can now look at reports from the social data collected that will support the hiring of extra workforce to better serve their customers, and to avoid any negative comments associated with their brand.

"Business analytics is going mainstream, and the explosion of data from the social networks is a sign that the tides are shifting. It's important for us to energise the classroom and that calls for integrating the latest technology into our curriculum in order to prepare students for high-value job opportunities," said Ravi Dhar, Professor and Director of the Center for Customer Insights, Yale School of Management. "With this collaboration with IBM, we are giving students the opportunity to tackle real-world projects, the idea is to focus on learning by doing, and with this type of real training under their belts, students can be productive a lot sooner in their new job roles."