The Current State of Analytics in the Corporation: The View from Industry Leaders

Business intelligence and analytics in general are currently experiencing a resurgence in interest from both the business and academic communities. As a response, a Business Analytics Special Interest Group (SIG) was formed at Villanova University in 2007 to better link these two communities and support the growing needs of business. As a multi-disciplinary group composed of both analytics professionals and academics, one of the first tasks was to investigate how businesses viewed analytics and how they were incorporating them in actual practice. With this in mind, an interview questionnaire was developed and senior-level executives from a diverse group of sixteen different firms were interviewed in a group context. Their responses led to the development of a new, integrated analytics curriculum and the establishment of a new Analytics Round Table. The results from this series of semi-structured interviews are presented in this paper.