WHEN Singapore Management University (SMU)undergraduates started the current academic year inAugust, they could choose a new subject as theirsecond major: analytics.

This prepares them for widely sought-after jobsand professional roles. They can pick up skills inprocessing, managing, analysing and making senseof large amounts of data, in addition to pursuing theirbachelors in one of the core SMU disciplines ofbusiness, accountancy, economics, social sciences,law and information systems.

Companies are paying attention not just topotential hires from SMU in analytics, but to thepossibilities that emerge from educational andresearch project collaborations, as SMU is widelyregarded as standing at the cutting edge of researchefforts in the area of analytics for business, consumerand social insights.

For example, through their Living AnalyticsResearch Centre, a five-year research partnershipwith Carnegie Mellon University, they are working onconsumer and social analytics projects with Citibank,StarHub, Resorts World Sentosa, Sentosa Island andBuzz City, collaboratively working towards a newapproach to analytics that is experiment-based,closed-loop and iterative, and network-centric.Through their LiveLabs Urban Lifestyle InnovationPlatform, they are developing new approaches tomobile sensing and analytics that enable nextgeneration ‘context-aware’ analytics for consumerand social insights in projects with CapitaMalls Asia,Changi Airport Group and SMU students.

Professor Steven Miller, founding dean of SMU’sSchool of Information Systems (SIS) and theuniversity’s vice provost of research, said “Very fewplaces in the world can bring together strong academicresearch capability with industry projects,application-oriented research, and government fundingfor analytics at this scale, this depth, and this speed inthe way that Singapore is doing. Our ability tocoordinate across the private sector, government,university and national research institutes has enabledus to move quickly in this rapidly evolving area, and isalso helping to get more people trained through theirparticipation in joint industry-university projects.”

The data explosionIn the last 10 years, technological developments,combined with social trends such as user-generatedcontent, smartphone usage, and widespreadparticipation in online social network communities,have caused an explosion of demand for trainedanalytics professionals. Companies now try to gain acompetitive edge using what is known as ‘Big Data’.

Big Data connotes the massive increase in thescale and diversification of data generated, as well asdata collected and analysed. Data is now beinggenerated and collected in huge volumes, at highspeeds, and in all kinds of varieties – not onlynumbers, but also text, emails, SMS messages,photos, videos, etc. While it has become dramaticallycheaper to collect and process data on a per unitbasis, companies are finding they need more andmore people to work in the ‘data value chain’ –organising and managing data, analysing data,interpreting outputs, and communicating conclusionsto an ever expanding number of people inside andoutside the organisation. As a result, business

spending and investments related to Analytics areincreasing rapidly even with the correspondingreduction in per unit cost of doing this type of work.

“Sophisticated analytics is getting more embeddedinto the everyday transaction processing foraccounting and finance, risk management,compliance, procurement, operations and supplychain, and sales and marketing. The number ofpeople involved in creating analytics output and thenumber of people using these output have vastlyexpanded. Analytics has now gone mainstream,” saidProf Miller.

Plenty of job opportunities are being created.SMU’s own Bachelor of Science in InformationSystems Management, or BSc (ISM), has grown froman initial intake of 93 students in August 2003 to acurrent annual intake of 280 students, resulting inmore than 1,100 students enrolled in the programmetoday. “In addition to the specialised courses wherewe teach data and decision analytics, we also injectanalytics-related thinking and content into nearly all ofour information systems courses,” Prof Millerexplained.

Under the BSc (ISM), information systemsapplications and analytics methods are deeplyintegrated with real-world business scenarios,management issues and decision-making trade-offs.

Even when students do the core IS courses likesoftware engineering, data management or enterpriseweb solutions, they have to apply business thinking tothe way they go about designing and creatingsoftware solutions, and these software applicationsoften involve analytics-related capabilities.

In addition, nearly all the BSc (ISM) students takea second SMU major from accountancy, business,economics, social sciences, law or a specialAdvanced Business Technology 2nd major within SISitself. As of this year, they can also take up theuniversity’s new cross-disciplinary analytics 2ndmajor, which is designed and managed by SIS for theentire university.

Under the Analytics 2nd major, there are fivedifferent tracks: marketing analytics, operationalanalytics, accounting analytics, urban and regionalanalytics and advanced technology for analytics.Each of these tracks is specially designed to closelyalign with job opportunities and professional careersin the public and private sectors.

For example, those trained in operational analyticscan pursue career opportunities related to supplychain, demand forecasting, or manpower andcapacity planning and management. Those trained inmarketing analytics have opportunities in digital andsocial media, digital marketing, and other areas ofmarketing as well.

Prominent multinational technology firms havecome knocking. “Facebook and Google in Singaporehave recently hired our undergraduate SIS studentsbecause of their combination of information systemscapabilities, the SMU business and managementbackground, and specific analytic courses taken likecomputational thinking, visual analytics and datamining,” said Prof Miller.

The Big Four accounting companies have alsohired large numbers of SIS undergraduates forconsulting and advisory work that very often includesanalytics. In addition, the Big Four have also request-ed SMU’s accounting school to train more students inaccounting analytics. “As a result, we have partnered

with our School of Accountancy to create theAccounting Analytics track in our new Analytics 2ndmajor,” said Prof Miller.

“Students with the right skills in informationsystems, analytics and business applications getheadhunted,” he added. “We even have a fewexamples of our students getting hired before theyeven apply for a job because companies went throughthe SMU resume compilation, saw who had a specificconcentration in Analytics, called them up, and hiredthem.”

Professional trainingIn addition to preparing undergraduates, there arecurrently 150 postgraduate students in SMU’s Masterof IT in Business (MITB) programme.

“MITB grooms people who want to harness thepower of IT in business settings, and who also need tobuild managerial skills for strategic transformation andbusiness change projects. Our MITB graduates oftenwork as internal consultants at the interface of IT andthe various functional units within the company suchas marketing, operations and financial control,” ProfMiller said.

The Masters programme has two tracks: financialservices, for those taking on more complex roleswhere they integrate technology with operations,processes and innovation initiatives across thevarious segments of banking such as retail, pay-ments, trading and asset management; and theanalytics track, with courses in customer analytics,operations analytics, social, text, mobile and visualanalytics, and using cloud computing for analytics.

To graduate, all MITB students need to do acapstone project that usually extends over a12-month period. Recent projects at the intersectionof financial services and analytics have includedmarketing campaign analytics for bank credit cards,fraud detection analytics, as well as analytics forimproving cash and treasury operations.

Prof Miller recalled a notable capstone project by aformer MITB student who was an experienced datacentre manager at a multinational bank. He createdan analytics framework and supporting spreadsheetmodel to figure out how to map the bank’s forecast offuture levels activity by each of its business units intospecific capacity requirements for future ITinfrastructure in terms of servers, storage, electricityand operational costs. “This project was fantasticbecause it required integrating know-how acrossfinancial services business units, operationalplanning, data centre management, and analytics fordemand forecasting,” said Prof Miller.

From Trial and Error to Systematicand Scalable LearningBased on his extensive industry interactions throughthe School of Information Systems and through theLARC and LiveLabs projects, Prof Miller realisedthere are paradigm shifts going on that most of thebusiness community has not caught onto yet.

“Many business people who are aware of analyticsmistakenly think that because there is so muchpublicity for new and better approaches to predictiveanalytics that they can eventually overcome most ofthe uncertainty they face as business decisionmakers. That’s not going to happen, because theworld somehow always finds new and interesting

ways to get more complex and more uncertain.“Another thing I find curious is that some business

people are thinking that analytics is about finding theone optimal answer which you can stick with for anextended period of time. But in today’sinterconnected, complex, and continuously evolvingenvironment, the answers keep changing overincreasingly shorter periods of time,” he said.

“I think companies increasingly need to be in aperpetual state of learning, and they need toproductionise their ability to learn at scale throughsystematic and ongoing experimentation. The ability,termed ‘scalable learning’ by noted researcher andfuturist John Seely Brown (who was recently awardedan honorary doctorate degree by SMU), is what setstoday’s best companies apart from the rest (thinkGoogle). This is a paradigm change from ‘scalableefficiency’, the heretofore dominant paradigm offinding ways to become more efficient at doing thingsat larger and larger scale through standardisingprocesses and limiting process change and processvariability.

“Analytics is the foundation to this new paradigmof Scalable Learning. That’s why I think our researchprojects with LARC and LiveLabs are so important,as they are the initial stepping stones to this newparadigm. We need to move beyond the currentcommon business mindset of using analytics tocrunch data to detect patterns and correlations, andquickly taking business decisions withoutunderstanding the underlying causal reasons forthese patterns.

“For companies to get ‘scalable learning’ right,they need to more systematically useexperimentation within the real-world settings of theircustomers and data – and combine analytics withexperimentation and causal analysis on an ongoingbasis. Companies do trial-and-error learning all thetime. With modern analytics though, we can movefrom trial-and-error to systematic experimentationand substantially increase the efficiency and scale oflearning across the enterprise. This is what ScalableLearning is about,” said Prof Miller.

In conclusion, he noted, “Through our analytics-related education, R&D projects and industrycollaborations, we are getting students, researchstaff, faculty, and our industry partners ‘up theexperience curve’ faster and further with the newgeneration of analytics. This gets more peopletrained, and it gives more people the actualexperience of seeing what can be done today withthese new methods and technologies. We aredelighted that SMU overall, and our School ofInformation Systems in particular, has become animportant part of the national ecosystem for helpingindustry learn-how-to-learn about analytics.”

Modern analytics can increase the efficiency of business learning through systematic experimentation

‘Very fewplaces in theworld can bringtogether strongacademicresearchcapability withindustryprojects,application-orientedresearch, andgovernmentfunding foranalytics at thisscale, thisdepth, and thisspeed in theway thatSingapore isdoing.’– Professor StevenMiller (above), Dean ofSMU’s School ofInformation Systemsand the university’svice provostof research

This is the fifth in a monthlyseries by the SingaporeManagement University. Nextmonth’s feature will examinefuture trends in managementeducation and potential newbusiness models.

Making data relevant to business

A Special Feature Brought to You By Singapore Management University

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