Business Analytics

The Richmond MBA program is offering a business analytics course starting this summer to both complement and augment the existing graduate business curriculum.  Dr. Steve Thompson is the lead instructor and spearheaded the process of designing the class.

The business analytics course is a direct result of a consulting initiative that involves professors Steve Thompson, Doug Bosse and Jonathan Whitaker of the Robins School’s management department, as well as marketing professor Randy Raggio.  Another result of the initiative is that a consulting track will be added to the undergraduate curriculum in the Robins School. 

“I think it’s fair to say that we conceptualized the need for this type of content [consulting coursework], and that conceptualization was validated through conversations with principals at Deloitte Consulting and KPMG,” Whitaker explained. 

Through the consulting initiative, the importance of developing and advancing student skills (both at the undergraduate and graduate level) in analytics was addressed. 

“If you look at the current MBA curriculum, they’re touching on these skills very tangentially and sporadically in multiple courses,” Whitaker said.  “The distinction of the business analytics class is going to allow the students and [Thompson] to go very deep into the topic and approach it in a very rigorous manner.”

The MBA business analytics course will concentrate on how to extrapolate relevant data to answer an issue a company is facing or justify a recommendation made to an organization.

“Let’s say you have some kind of a problem, or maybe it’s an opportunity, but there’s something out there that you want to pursue -- what do you have to help you get there?” Thompson asked.  “You might have some ideas. You might have resources, but you’ve also got lots of data,” he explained.  “The challenge is that the data is always unstructured.” 

The class will educate graduate students on how to make sense of an ocean of data, according to Thompson.

“Nobody wants to just look and see analysis; they want something visual that explains in very clear terms what the information is saying to us. You’ve got a story to tell, and you’ve got to be very clear in saying ‘Here’s the challenge and opportunity. Here’s what I think you should do, and here’s why I think you should do it.’” 

To sum it up, “That’s where a lot of this data analytics comes in, so that we can support our arguments in an objective, evidenced-based way.”

In business analytics, students will be using Microsoft Access and Excel to analyze data.  The course will complement other class offerings in The Richmond MBA, such as business statistics, but it will be relevant to many other concepts and classes within the program.

“As we develop analytical skills, we’re doing it in the context of different settings where yes, we’ve talked about these concepts in marketing. We’ve talked about this in operations management, and now we can try it in an enterprise-level set,” Thompson explained. 

The new course offering mirrors the third proponent of the Robins School’s strategic plan of developing and fostering relationships with businesses and governmental organizations. 

“This course [and the consulting initiative] is going to directly impart a skill set to our students to help them be business and government leaders,” Whitaker said.