Chief Analytics Officer teaches Georgia Tech's practicum course to masters and doctoral students

I'm so excited to continue my teaching responsibilities this spring semester. 

I have a somewhat unique background in that I've been in tenure-track academic appointments and a faculty member at a few academic institutions, and I've worked in industry for several years, plus I've been a consultant for boutique companies. These three paths might seem like major shifts, but my focus has always been on making discoveries with data, initially for marketing purposes, which explains my choice for PhD concentration, and now I apply the techniques toward a broader range of business questions.

The practicum course is important to me for several reasons, and in many ways, teaching a course like this tends to describe the culmination of my three-legged career stool. I believe it's important that students have a real sense of business activities, and perhaps as academics, we can go beyond the near-perfect normative model we often lay out for students when it comes to solving problems with data. 

The practicum course pairs teams of students with company executives, many are from Georgia Tech's Executive Council for the Business Analytics Center, which I serve as Chair. The idea is to create real insights and solutions, given real business problems, working with real professionals in the field, using real or realistic data. This immersion can also mean substantial challenges at times, such as data that doesn't cooperate, problem statements that are fuzzy at best or don't align with goals, or objectives completely unrelated to true empirical decision making. 

I'm sure at times, students may become frustrated at first that their professor did not perfectly create data sets, or ask questions they knew the answer would come out perfectly, or give them an environment suited to students, instead of students needing to adjust to the corporate environment of their paired company. 

I walk the students through a set of project milestones, and they present to me several times before getting in front of their executives for final presentations. Some of the business questions we've solved in the past have included developing deeper understanding for markets, consumers, competitors, providing data-based methods for reduction of safety issues in a retail environment, creating systems to optimize customer experience, suggestions for campaign development to encourage financial donations, among other interesting business problems. 

Final presentations are often conducted at the client's location of choosing, and Georgia Tech students tend to impress with their creative approaches, targeted solutions, and bold action items. On occasion, the audience is elevated and the students are asked to return for additional presentations, usually after the semester is over and after grades are submitted, which they typically oblige gladly. 

Behind the scenes, I'm told there's a decent amount of turmoil and strong discussions within the teams, which again may represent the reality among effective and creative data science teams in business. I suspect these talks probably spur more thought into the project as students are forced to choose, describe in detail, and defend their modeling decisions and positions. 

While it's important that students learn real corporate skills and that's my biggest motivation behind continuing to teach practicum courses, I also enjoy being able to present my students as a way of helping companies answer important business questions. 

I've been using data for answering business questions since 1991 when I first started working at Southern Company. We are in a really good place as an analytics community, I'm excited to see the progress and look forward to enabling collaborations between academia and corporate for the benefit of future analytics professionals. 

bw

Beverly Wright, PhD, Certified Analytics Professional (CAP?)

Partner of Data Science Practice

 Professor of the Practice, business analytics, Georgia Institute of Technology

Chair, Executive Council, Business Analytics Center, Georgia Institute of Technology

 C: 770-823-2396

E: [email protected]

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