Analytics for Competitive Advantage Course

Overview

Focus on the issues that drive innovation and value with a broad range view of business analytics. With the amount of internal and external information available today, successful managers need the ability to filter out the noise and hone in on the challenges that matter. This starts with asking the right questions. Many managers’ view of the world going on around them is limited to historical operational related data. Those who understand big data and how to use it have the ability not only to look at past performance and why it happened, but also predict future performance and continuously refine strategies to optimize and stay ahead of the competition.

In this eight-week 100% online course, you’ll explore why digitized business processes and data analytics are essential to the performance and competitive advantage of a modern corporation. You’ll refine your ability to ask the right questions to avoid wasted time and effort solving for the wrong issues. Discover different approaches for strategic data management and business analytics as you examine real-world cases of successes and failures with analytics-based business strategies.

What You’ll Learn

Competing With Analytics

• The way business analytics impacts organizational value creation
• Why it is important to have a strategic analytics orientation
• The role of a data scientist
• How to identify the stages of analytics evolution
• The challenges in creating an organizational analytics platform

Using Analytics to Create Value

• What you should know about the changing data environment and its implications for business
• The 4 Vs of data
• What the “Internet of Things” has to do with business analytics
• How analytics impacts industries and firms

Enterprise Data Management & Analytical and Modeling Tools

• The value of enterprise resource planning systems (ERPs) and relational databases
• What a data management lifecycle consists of
• The differences between data storage and processing using structured vs. unstructured data
• Statistical and modeling techniques for data analysis
• Essentials of data mining

Value Chain and Business Analytics

• The role of KPIs and the relationship between KPIs and analytics
• Porter’s Five Forces Model and how it can be used to identify analytics activities
• Two strategic levers in applying analytics: changes in measuring customer engagement and computational computing
• Porter’s Value Chain

Marketing/Sales Valuation Processes

• How analytics has and will continue to enhance marketing and sales processes
• Specific marketing analytics activities that are increasingly used by many organizations today

Enterprise Risk, Supply Chain and HR Processes

• Analytics value creation in the following areas:
  • Enterprise Risk Management
  • Finance
  • Accounting
  • Supply Chain
  • HR

Identifying & Defining Organizational Problems and Opportunities

• Critical factors of enterprise analytics success
• How to evaluate an appropriate enterprise analytics structure
• How to manage an analytics project including value creation
• The privacy and security challenges associated with business analytics

Telling the Story of the Data – Communication and Visualization

• The importance of communication in the analytics process
• The critical role of visualization in analytics
• Different types of visualization approaches

Who Should Register?

This course is designed for professionals who want to create value and a competitive advantage using analytics. With its exploration into analytical tools and strategies and the impact they can have on various business areas, the course helps professionals understand the analytics capabilities they need and ways to get buy-in for implementing those capabilities throughout the organization.