Dayananda Sagar University - Developing Management Professionals with Data-Driven Problem Solving an
Name:
Prof Alok Chakravarty
Prof H N Shankar
Prof Sai Praveen
Prof A. Nagaraj Subbarao
Country: India
Organization: SCMS-PG, Dayananda Sagar University
The School of Commerce & Management Studies, Dayananda Sagar University, Bengaluru, India, is a prestigious Business School with an emphasis on crafting superior business leaders and entrepreneurs. The ethos of the B School is to stay fully conscious of the changing business environment, particularly the technological environment and the need for digital literacy, and to disseminate this knowledge to our students. The school has an Executive MBA program for the working professional and a full-time MBA program, which attracts many graduate students with no work experience.
Awards Categories:
- Excellence in Teaching
Business Challenge:
Our objective at the School of Commerce & Management Studies is to integrate Business Analytics into each functional management area: Marketing, Finance, Supply Chain Management, and Human Resource Management. In this process, we prepare our students for the future and position them to add value to digital transformation.
Besides functional electives such as HR, Marketing, Finance, and Supply Chain, we also offer Technology electives like Business Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, and Information Technology as specialization electives to our students. Students can choose a major and a minor specialization in their second year.
In the first year, we orient the students with foundations of business analytics. In the second year, we offer the following courses to our students who choose Business Analytics as a specialization:
- Data Management Systems: Master Data Management, Data RDBMS, Data Warehouse, No SQL, Big Data, Data Lake
- Data Visualization Using Tableau
- Applied Analytics (in different functional areas)
- Predictive Analytics Using R
- Exploratory Data Analysis using Python
We faced the following challenges while designing and delivering our curriculum:
- Identifying competent faculties who understand functional areas as well as business analytics.
- Address the fear of coding amongst students.
- Focus on problem-solving and not get bogged down in technicalities.
- Addressing the process life-cycle view (such as CRISP-DM or SEMMA) of business analytics.
- Understanding the core concepts of Business Analytics in an easy-to-understand manner.
- Appreciate the integrated and interdependent way in which industry professionals work while executing a business analytics project.
- Exposure to an industrial strength platform that provides hands-on experience in business problem solving to students.
Business Solution:
We at the School of Commerce & Management Studies are proud to be the first Business School in India to have an academic alliance with Dataiku, USA. We were introduced to Dataiku through our senior Prof H N Shankar in early 2021. Dataiku made available a cloud instance with approximately 100 user ids. We are utilizing these for our full-time and Executive MBA program students.
One of the advantages that we received because of this academic partnership was Dataiku's Academy, which is a rich repository of courses such as Basics 101 to 103, Visual Recipes, Visual Machine Learning, Advanced Analytics, and many more.
We begin our orientation to Business Analytics by introducing our students to Basics 101 to Basics 103 and Intro to Machine Learning course modules in Academy. We then encourage our students to take Core Designer certification. We follow it up by solving several Use Cases available in Academy, such as:
- Predictive Maintenance in Manufacturing Industry
- Customer Churn Prediction
- Perform referrer and visitor analysis using Web Logs
- Network Optimization for a Car rental company
- Bike Sharing Usage Patterns
Value Generated:
For the present batch of first-year students, our Dataiku Academy metrics are as under:
- Master of Business Administration
- Basics 101: 111
- Basics 102: 103
- Basics 103: 94
- Intro to ML: 76
- Use Case Predictive Maintenance: 5
- Core Designer Certificate: 10
- Executive Master of Business Administration
- Basics 101: 42
- Basics 102: 42
- Basics 103: 42
- Intro to ML: 42
- Use Case Predictive Maintenance: 42
- Core Designer Certificate: 42
Dataiku Data Scientists Mr Devesh and Mr Shubham conducted an on-premise workshop on Dataiku's platform, and 103 students from MBA 1st Year attended it. We also had a healthy coverage of Dataiku Academy courses in our outgoing batch of second-year students, and that is reflected in our overall placement percentage. Specifically, 90% of our outgoing students who had opted for Business Analytics as a major specialization got relevant analytics positions in good companies.
Ten of our first-year students, along with four faculties, got the opportunity to attend the Everyday AI Conference in Bangalore and that had a major impact on the motivation and understanding of AI and Business Analytics amongst students.
Value Brought by Dataiku:
During the past decade or so, business analytics platforms have evolved from supporting IT and finance functions only to enabling business users across the organization or enterprise. However, many firms find themselves struggling to take advantage of its promise and the richness of data afforded.
The data analytics program at the School of Commerce & Management Studies is working to provide the industry with well-trained resources to address digital world issues. By integrating the Dataiku Platform into our curriculum, we could effectively address the challenges mentioned earlier:
- Identifying competent faculties who understand functional areas as well as business analytics.
- Address the fear of coding amongst students.
- Focus on problem-solving and not get bogged down with technicalities.
- Addressing the process lifecycle view (such as CRISP-DM or SEMMA) of business analytics.
- Understanding the core concepts of Business Analytics in an easy-to-understand manner.
- Appreciate the integrated and interdependent way in which industry professionals work while executing a business analytics project.
- Exposure to an industrial strength platform that provides hands-on experience in business problem solving to students.
It is a problem when organizations decide to embark on a digital transformation journey without having a clear strategy, action plan, or agenda, let alone a vision, for what it might mean and the path ahead. Many organizations face and will continue to face problems as they grapple with the process of change. At the School of Commerce & Management Studies, we think that we have an able partner in Dataiku in addressing this issue in an impactful manner.
Comments
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The rigor brought by the faculty team is amazing. I clearly see that Dayananda Sagar University is ahead of its league in adopting the Technology for effective decision making and value creation. Partnership with Dataiku is surely rewarding and mutually beneficial
