This month we are proud to present a thoughtful blog post from one of early members, Dr Sam Buxton. Sam's words resonate with our presentation earlier this year on what business analytics skills companies want and what tools they use. That talk covered the results of a survey that we ran with over 200 participants. The results showed that companies most value the ability to use spreadsheets, i.e., Excel, a solid knowledge of statistics and the ability to visualise and present data well.  Best, Chris, Chair of BAEF  As an educator of business analytics, it is important to consider the environment in which we teach. Over the summer, there have been some interesting talks on AI in education, embedding business analytics in accounting programmes and what skills and tools do companies require of business analysts. This post focuses on students’ perspectives of the tools they think they need. Teaching business analytics to non-specialists at both undergraduate and master’s levels ...

Presented by one of our board members Dr Marios Kremantzis Brief Description of the Session Marios sits on the organising committee at the BAEF and is Chair of the Operational Research Society’s OR-Analytics-Education Special Interest Group. In this session he will present current work related to two highly quantitative units that adopted Chatbot as a teaching assistant: Prescriptive Analytics as part of the MSc Business Analytics, and Mathematics for Economists, for BSc Economics students. This highly prescient subject promises to be an informative and enjoyable session with other colleagues dedicated to teaching Business Analytics well. Profile: Marios Kremantzis is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Business Analytics at the University of Bristol, where he also serves as the Program Director of the MSc Business Analytics and as Senior PGT Tutor. Additionally, he is the Co-Editor in Chief of the open-access journal Intelligent Technologies in Education (ITEd). With a PhD in Manageme...

  14th August 2024, between 4.30 and 5.30pm Dr Grigorios Theodosopoulos Brief Description of the Session   Grigorios was one of the founding members of the BAEF back in 2021 and at the time expressed an interest in building this community to help him create an MSc in Accounting that proposed to use Business Analytics/Intelligence for the first time. We are fortunate to host him now as he draw on his experience of designing Brunel’s MSc in Accounting and Business Intelligence, to present how things have worked for students and colleagues, after the programme has been delivered for the first time. We will hear about the   “Motivations and Challenges of Embedding and Delivering Business Analytics in an Accounting Postgraduate Programme”   Profile: Grigorios  is a Reader (Associate Professor) in accounting and a member of the Accounting and Auditing Research Group at Brunel Business School since 2012. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, a Certified ...

Today we will be looking at a BAEF webinar focusing on the types of analytics that companies are using today and the kinds of skills that they require from their analysts.  The webinar was live streamed on the 24 th June 2024 and presented a study by Dr Christina Phillips and a Master’s student that she supervised.  Zhuoyi Deng started off by giving an account of what the study was about and then onto its main findings.   The study started off as a project to investigate what companies are doing in terms of their analytics and the type of skill sets that they would like to see in their analysts.   This is from a background of massive amounts of data being generated every day (some 2.5 quintillion bytes a day!) and how some 90% of the worlds current data was generated within the last two years.   This has placed a demand from companies for analysts who are able to make sense of all this information (it is estimated that this will translate into some 300K new p...

  We are proud to announce our summer seminars coming up on 24th June 2024, between 12 and 1pm, Lunchtime session “What Analytics Tools do Companies Use and What Skills do They Require” 14th August 4.30 to 5.30pm, Early evening session “Motivations and Challenges of Embedding and Delivering Business Analytics in an Accounting Postgraduate Programme”   We do hope you will be able to join us for these highly informative and useful events.   First up our Chair, Dr Christina J Phillips and Ms Zhuoyi Deng MSc 24th June 2024, between 12 and 1pm Brief Description of the Session   Back in 2018 Jia Woh, a student at University of Leeds Business School began a QSteps funded project with Christina. The project was designed to look at  ‘What Analytics Tools do Companies Use and What Skills do They Require’   and Jia began this by interviewing 7 company leaders and covering the current literature to develop a questionnaire.   Zoom forward 5 years and the project wa...