In his work as a consultant, John Stinespring was once called in to work with a worldwide fashion design company that was struggling in the market.
The company was traditional, “stodgy,” and its sales were lagging, as Stinespring recalls. It was actively looking to change its image and attract a younger generation of customers. Part of that transition involved determining the right price point to appeal to the new demographic.
That’s where Stinespring came in. “They needed to change who their target market was, but they needed to know how much that market had to spend,” recalled Stinespring, an associate professor of economics at The University of Tampa. “So one of my tasks was to forecast for the next 15 years the average disposable income of males and females from age 15 to 24.”
The data was available. But the company needed to make sense of that data to make use of it. And it worked. The company was Abercrombie & Fitch, which went on to achieve to fashion cult status in the early 2000s.
“That was an example of where predictive analytics comes in at the highest level,” Stinespring explained.
Businesses have always had data to work with: sales data, customer survey data, financial data. But in recent years, the amount of available data has increased exponentially. And companies are now realizing that numbers alone are not enough.
“People are drowning in data, and everyone wants to make sense out of it. But not everyone can interpret the results and make them actionable,” said Ali Jenzarli, professor of information and technology management at UT. “Any company these days lives and dies by how they can leverage the data they have to help them save money, improve operations and increase their bottom line.”
To do that, businesses need analysts, but those analysts have been hard to find. The U.S. is estimated to have a shortage of 1.5 million business analysts, according to McKinsey’s Global Report. At the same time, analytics is one of the top four job functions employers will assign to new hires.
That’s why UT is launching a new online master’s program in business analytics — to train more professionals to find meaning in data so that businesses can benefit as a result.
“Companies have lots and lots of tools right now at their disposal, and anyone can ask a computer program to look at a data set and say, ‘Show me some of the relationships.’ But you end up with a result, and you don’t know whether it makes sense or not,” Jenzarli said. “If you just have the software, it’s not enough.”
Trish Messina, interim chief financial officer at Mad Mobile and a part-time professor at UT’s Sykes College of Business, has seen that firsthand.
Mad Mobile built Concierge, a mobile app that allows retail sales associates to collect more information on customers to increase sales and improve the customer experience. It generates a lot of valuable data, but that data requires interpretation, Messina explained.
“Mad Mobile isn’t doing the analysis of the data, but it allows our customers to make sense of it, either as a way to evaluate sales associates’ performance or as a way to improve customers’ experiences,” Messina said. “Everyone talks about big data, but it’s useless bits of information without people to analyze the data and make it meaningful. And that’s what this degree is going to do: It’s training people on how to make sense of vast amounts of data and make it meaningful for business decisions.”
That data is poised to have a significant impact on the U.S. economy as a whole. The same McKinsey report found that big data analytics was on track to increase annual GDP in retail and manufacturing by up to $325 billion by 2020.
The M.S. in Business Analytics is not a data science program; instead, it’s designed to educate students on how to organize and analyze data in a variety of contexts to make better business decisions. It offers classes in econometrics, marketing analytics and finance-based analytics. And it satisfies a growing demand for jobs in the field. By 2020, the number of jobs for data professionals will increase by 364,000 openings to 2.7 million, Stinespring said. Those jobs have an average salary of around $80,000, according to Glassdoor, making it an attractive field for new graduates.
That’s part of why the program was so appealing, said Thomas Meachum, chairman of the advisory council to the dean of UT’s Sykes College of Business.
“With big data becoming more prevalent in the way corporations are doing things, we’re trying to meet that need so our students can be more marketable,” Meachum explained. “In the world of competing for students, you’ve got to be able to offer programs like this that would make students say, ‘I really want to go there because I want to understand how business analytics helps me develop these insights,’ and then apply that to their careers and their own ambitions.”
The master’s program is scheduled to begin in fall of 2020, and if you ask Messina, that’s not a moment too soon. “I’m so happy that the university is doing this because there is a need out there,” she said. “Businesses are desperate for this kind of skill set.”
Learn more about the M.S. in Business Analytics program at The University of Tampa. For additional information about UT’s graduate business programs, visit www.ut.edu/gradinfo, email grad@ut.edu or call (813) 258-7409.
Mary Johnson is a freelance writer for The Business Journals Content Studio.
