Spécialisation Introduction to Business Analytics and Information Economics

Businesses run on data, and data offers little value without analytics. The ability to process data to make predictions about the behavior of individuals or markets, to diagnose systems or situations, or to prescribe actions for people or processes drives business today. Increasingly many businesses are striving to become “data-driven”, proactively relying more on cold hard information and sophisticated algorithms than upon the gut instinct or slow reactions of humans.

This course will focus on understanding key analytics concepts and the breadth of analytic possibilities. Together, the class will explore dozens of real-world analytics problems and solutions across most major industries and business functions. The course will also touch on analytic technologies, architectures, and roles from business intelligence to data science, and from data warehouses to data lakes. And the course will wrap up with a discussion of analytics trends and futures.

Thriving in the Information Age compels organizations to deploy information as an actual business asset, not as an IT asset or merely as a business byproduct. This demands creativity in conceiving and implementing new ways to generate economic benefits from the wide array of information assets available to an organization. Unfortunately, information too frequently is underappreciated and therefore underutilized.

This first course in the two-part Infonomics series provides a non-technical perspective on and methods for understanding and taking advantage of information’s unique economic characteristics. Starting with dissecting whether the information is or isn’t an asset or even property, students will begin to appreciate the challenges and opportunities with treating it as one. Then the course examines how information behaves in the context of various familiar micro-economic concepts, and what can be gleaned from this to improve the way information is managed and leveraged. This leads to exploring the various ways information can generate economic benefits—or be monetized, including how various styles of business analytics can increase information’s potential and realized value for organizations.

Even decades into the Information Age, accounting practices yet fail to recognize the financial value of information. Moreover, traditional asset management practices fail to recognize information as an asset to be managed with earnest discipline. This has led to a business culture of complacence, and the inability for most organizations to fully leverage available information assets.

This second course in the two-part Infonomics series explores how and why to adapt well-honed asset management principles and practices to information, and how to apply accepted and new valuation models to gauge information’s potential and realized economic benefits. In addition, the course will enlighten students on the critical but confounding issues of information ownership, property rights, and sovereignty. The course will wrap up with an overview of emergent roles for the information-savvy organization of the 21st century.