In Global Demand: Data Analytics Skills
Data analytics is important for any organization’s health and success which is why data skills are in hot demand in the workplace.
As a child, Dr. Jeffrey Bohler would cut out articles from magazines like Popular Science and Popular Mechanics and paste them onto note cards. He would then enthusiastically share the information he collected with his friends and family.
“I guess I was a little bit of a geek or nerd long before those words were more generally used,” says Dr. Bohler. “I’d share those notes with my friends and ask, ‘Did you know about this?’ and ‘Did you know about that?’”
Dr. Bohler didn’t realize it at the time, but this youthful dedication to researching and capturing information and sharing knowledge was the start of a lifelong passion. His childhood efforts would develop into the analytics skills and expertise he now shares with his students as an Assistant Professor in the bachelor’s degree program in global business with a concentration in data analytics at TROY.
As Dr. Bohler explains, data analytics is the science of analyzing data and extracting meaningful information that can be used to make better decisions in an organization. This is something we all start doing from an early age.
“In the beginning, we all have questions about how the world works,” says Dr. Bohler. “We want to know why the sky is blue or why we are smaller than our parents. So we start looking at the world around us and gathering, summarizing and analyzing data in a very informal way. That data becomes information; when we put it in context with other information we have collected, perhaps from school or other experiences, it becomes knowledge.”
While this knowledge has the potential to be useful, it only becomes beneficial when put into practice.
“People say that knowledge is power, but I kind of disagree with that,” says Dr. Bohler. “Knowledge is potential power, but it only becomes powerful when it is actually used. We all know how to save for retirement or how to lose weight, but knowing something and doing something about it are different things. When that knowledge is put into play, it becomes experience. From that experience, we learn about what parts of that knowledge are relevant and applicable and become wiser. We can then ask better questions, gather more relevant data and create more useful information.”
Dr. Bohler explains that almost every human activity produces data of some sort. This data provides a valuable resource to the businesses that seek to market and sell their products and services to us.
“Everything we do involves systems and processes,” says Dr. Bohler. “We buy and sell things; we eat, we travel, we watch TV, we surf the internet, we listen to music. With all this activity taking place, global businesses are drowning in data and they increasingly rely on people with good analytics skills to inform organizational decision-making.”
It’s the data analyst’s job to translate the data into actionable — and profitable — business intelligence.
“Jobs in data science are in such high demand globally because, in a competitive market, companies want to do whatever it is they do better, faster and cheaper,” says Dr. Bohler. “They’ll also want to use this data to understand where they were wasting resources. When I talk about resources, the ones that we traditionally discuss are people, time and money.”
Data can also help an organization manage risk. While Dr. Bohler suggests that predictive analytics can go a long way to reducing the exposure to the risk involved in managing an international business, for instance, he also warns that it does not completely eradicate it.
“If we only had perfect data, we would never make bad decisions,” says Dr. Bohler. “The reality is, we are never going to have 100% of all the relevant data. Most leaders are probably happy enough to make a decision with about 80% of the information they need — less than that, and it becomes a bit of a gamble.
