Course Name Business Analytics

Course Code MIS-5XX

Credit Hours 3
Course Pre-requisite None
Quarter/Year Spring 2020
Instructor Dr. Tariq Mahmood
Class MBA Executive
Session Day & Time
Email of Instructor tmahmood@iba.edu.pk

Course Synopsis:
The general goal of this course is to teach data-driven decision making to would-be and current
managers in industries. The specific goal is to impart the skill of extracting actionable insights in
a smart and informed way, from both small and large data sets, databases and data lakes. As per
the functional roles of managers, this course will abstract itself away from the technical details
of statistics, data mining techniques, data science and machine learning algorithms, and
computer programming (coding). The emphasis is more on generating data-driven thought
processes and to teach only the main principles, technologies and tools related to business
analytics, while steering away from implementation details. This will be made possible through
the use of interactive, visual, drag-and-drop, open-source business analytics tools, on which the
students will be doing thorough hands-on activities with core representative business case
studies related to the local and international industries and markets.

Course Objectives:
 To excite the managers and decision makers about the potential that resides in data and
the value that data analytics can add to business processes
 To provide the managers with a basic understanding of the main concepts of data
analytics
 To provide the managers the basic knowledge on: how to hire and successfully manage a
team of data scientists to solve the core problems facing your business?

Learning Outcomes:
 Thorough knowledge about the common management (data collection, data storage and
data processing) architectures in representative industries, the current data analysis
practices and their limitations for business managers
 Thorough knowledge about the science of data-driven decision making and its
relationship to solving core business problems in representative industries, along with
success stories
 Detailed knowledge about the different types of available business analytics technologies
  Knowledge on why data needs to be cleaned or wrangled and practical skillset (through
hands-on activity) on and how it can be cleaned
 Knowledge on why data needs to be transformed or pre-processed for business analytics
and practical skillset on how it can be transformed
 Practical skillset on extracting initial insights from data through descriptive analytics to
facilitate data comprehension
 Practical skillset on how predictions can be generated from data, based on the different
available algorithms in any representative cloud or open-source predictive analytics
solution
 Practical skillset to building business analytics pipelines, i.e., the sequential collection and
execution of all business analytics activities
 All hands-on activities to be conducted on representative industrial use cases
Tentative Weekly Lecture Break-Down:

Week Theoretical Content Hands-On

Evolution of the IT Department in the industry in the
last several decades and its growing relationship to
business decision making

Standard data management (collection, storage and

processing) architectures being currently used in the
industry, and the limitations of these architectures
for business managers and analytics requirements

1 The consequent evolution of business analytics,

current definitions and standard practices along with
representative success stories

The pipeline and technology stack of Business

Analytics: Data Extraction, Data Cleaning, Data Lake
(if required), Data Transformation, Data
Understanding, Data Modeling, Predictive Analytics,
Live Testing, Model Deployment, Model Update and
Maintenance
2 Data Cleaning Hands-on Activity
Understanding the Cleaned Data through Statistical
3-4 Hands-on Activity
Analysis
Transforming and Preparing the Data for Predictive
5 Hands-on Activity
Business Analytics
Hands-on Activity
6-8 Predictive Modeling with Classification
9-11 Predictive Modeling with Regression Hands-on Activity
12-13 Unsupervised Learning (Customer Profiling/CRM) Hands-on Activity
14-15 Project Presentations

Course Books:
 Business Analytics for Managers by Wolfgang Jank (Published by Springer)
 Business Analytics by James R. Evans (Published by Pearson)

Reference Books:
 Win with Advanced Business Analtics (Creating Business Value from your Data) by Jean
Paul Isson and Jesse S Harriott (Published by SAS)
 Relevant Blogs and YouTube videos

Grading Plan (Tentative):

 Quizzes: 10%
 Assignment: 5%
 Mid-Term: 20%
 Project: 20%
 Final: 45%