Are you using the data your business has to your best advantage? This course teaches you (without lots of math and statistics) how to understand and employ analytics to improve your business results.

Should you blindly trust analytic reports served to you by analysts or statistical software? Be careful if you do!

In the fast-paced market conditions, where competition is fierce, rate of technological change wild and consumers empowered and unpredictable, it has become more crucial than ever to understand the trade-offs between elements that are driving business performance. While data availability is overwhelming, managers are struggling in analyzing the increasing amount of information they have. Never before did managers have this much information on customers, partners and competition at disposal to make informed, smarter decisions; yet they are more than ever criticized about the lack of actionable insights that derive from it. McKinsey Consulting predicted that the United States alone could face a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with deep analytical skills, as well as 1.5 million managers and analysts with the know-how to use data to make effective business decisions. Even for managers who have IT specialists and computer scientists in their team, the understanding of how to avoid “garbage in-garbage out” situations is essential. Practice have shown that business/strategic decisions cannot be left to technologies alone because competitive advantage is still in the decisions that managers make about their investments in customers and markets. The quest to find sustainable advantages to satisfy customers better than competition requires an understanding of how different aspects of marketing investment can be tight together, how to evaluate the current potential and future contribution of each customer and how to reap the advantage from customer relationships and social media investments.

 In this course you learn how to increase the effectiveness of strategic decisions. We use an “Explain-Show-Do-Practice” approach to teaching that encompasses explanations in the lectures followed by a combination of class discussion, case study analysis and practical hands-on exercises in Excel (cloud-based solution). We do not go deeply into the statistics and mathematics behind the methods used in the academic models behind the tools. In this course, we always start from an identification of a strategic business problem (e.g. “Should I invest in option A or option B”). We will then summarize what we know from years of practice and research on what works and what does not. We follow up these insights with an understanding of what data would I need to solve the problem and intuitively how a model/analytics work to solve this issue. We teach you hands-on, based on actual case studies and their datasets how could one analyze the data to get insights. We use a cloud-based solution Enginius (that can use Excel spreadsheets) to make this course highly relevant and applicable to manager’s actual decision-making. Strategically, we then focus our attention on how to evaluate the output that you would get from the software or analytics experts in the firm to make more effective business decisions.

INTENDED AUDIENCE:

• To those reading analytic reports:

1. Executives in leadership positions who want to understand how analytics could be used to improve business performance rather than blindly trust into outputs of analysts
2. For business development professionals and management consultants who need to understand how analytics can create value for their clients

• To those who do analytics:

1. for product, brand and marketing managers who need to understand how to better leverage data and run analytic models in intuitive, simple way
2. professionals who already have background in analytics or computer science, but whose roles and projects are becoming increasingly strategic, so they need to develop further strategic skills to bridge the gap between analytics and business strategy.

Our classroom experience shows it is beneficial to team up the two groups of executives above to teach them how to bridge the gap between analytics and strategy. Therefore, the course can both to managers without extensive marketing background as well as to those who work on marketing issues on a daily base. The highest impact of learning is achieved when concepts are discussed and practiced across the whole company in interdepartmental teams consisting of managers with diverse background: analytics, finance, accounting, operations and marketing, and the class would benefit from interactions and contributions from different backgrounds.

This course would be suited for students who have basic skills and knowledge in business administration. No advanced understanding of mathematics or econometrics is necessary for this course. Basic understanding of statistics (at an undergraduate business studies level) is beneficial for following the course, although some basic concepts that we need will be explained in class and in online materials and exercises. Basic knowledge and use of Microsoft Excel program is preferable, because most exercises are linked to a managerially oriented cloud-solution Enginius. Advanced data science and computer programing skills are not needed for this course (albeit we provide insights for more advanced students in supplemental materials which are linked to programming in R and machine learning algorithms).