Business Intelligence and Big Data Analytics: An Overview

ABSTRACT This research investigates the current status of big data business analytics and critical skills necessary to create business value. Business analytics refers to the skills, technologies, applications and practices for continuous iterative exploration and investigation of past business performance to provide actionable insights. Business analytics focuses on developing new insights and understanding of business performance based on data and statistical methods. Big data is used to characterize data sets that are large, diverse and rapidly-changing, as seen by ever-increasing numbers of organizations. Big data require database management systems with capabilities beyond those seen in standard SQL-based systems. According to Manyika et al. (2011), the projected demand for deep business analytical positions could exceed the supply produced with the current trend by 140,000 to 190,000 positions, in addition to the projected need of 1.5 million managers and analysts in dealing with big data business analytics in the United States. Specifically, the emphasis of this research is on how organizations are using big data business analytics and how business school in the United States and across the globe are designing their programs to fill in the talent gap, which leads to a more in-depth analysis on the graduate degree programs in the Greater New York Metropolitan area and potential applications in various industries. Keywords: business intelligence, business analytics, big data analytics INTRODUCTION Business analytics refers to the skills, technologies, applications and practices for continuous iterative exploration and investigation of past business performance to provide actionable insights. Business analytics focuses on developing new insights and understanding of business performance based on data and statistical methods. The term big data is used to characterize data sets that are large, diverse and rapidly-changing, as seen by ever-increasing numbers of organizations. Big data require database management systems with capabilities beyond those seen in standard SQL-based systems. According to Manyika et al. (2011), the projected demand for deep business analytical positions could exceed the supply produced with the current trend by 140,000 to 190,000 positions, in addition to the projected need of 1.5 million managers and analysts in dealing with big data business analytics in the United States. "Increasingly, top thinkers in academia and business believe that analytics, especially analytics connected with big data, is going to be a driving force in our economy and society in the next 10 to 20 years" (Kiron, Ferguson, & Prentice, 2013, p. 3). To ensure continuing relevance for organizations in the future, this research reviews the current status of big data business analytics and critical skills required to create business value in real business operations. Specifically, the emphasis of this research is on how organizations are using big data business analytics and how business school in the United States and across the globe are designing their programs to fill in the talent gap. Potential applications in various areas are also discussed. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 reviews the literature. Section 3 provides a detailed case analysis on graduate degree programs with respect to big data business analytics. Section 4 discusses potential applications in business analytics. Finally, Section 5 summarizes the research. LITERATURE REVIEW Big data refers to huge datasets that are beyond the ability of traditional database software tools to capture, store, manage and analyze, with extreme volume, velocity, and variety (Chan, 2013). According to Das and Kumar (2013), the volume of the digital data will grow to 8 Zettabytes by 2015, which is equivalent to 18 million Libraries of Congresses, 90 percent of which will be unstructured data in the next decade, including text, document, image, video, and other forms of social media data. …