Image: On January 28, Hugh J. Watson, PhD, visited the Institute of Higher Education and gave an open lecture on effective use of analytics, entitled Data Analytics in Higher Education and Elsewhere. Drawing from decades of work in business settings, he outlined the various kinds of analytics, types of information that formed from them, and their applications. He also shared the technologies required for analytical research and processing, professional skills sets needed, and ways that the field is changing. He started by defining “data analytics” as an interdisciplinary field to extract knowledge of insights from data. Initial emphasis in the field was on descriptive analytics, looking to past results to understand what happened. The focus in recent decades has been to mine for predictive analytics, explainable data as a basis for making associations, sequences, patterns, and forecasts to improve decision making. Watson noted that the field is moving toward more prescriptive analytics. He defined this type of data mining as an attempt to find optimal solutions and develop theories of what should occur rather than what has or what will occur. The open presentation was part of Karen Webber’s Data Analytics for Higher Education course. Students, faculty, and staff from across campus attended the lecture, and the exchange led to interesting conversations around the data warehousing of information at the University of Georgia. Dr. Watson is a Professor of MIS and a holder of a C. Herman and Mary Virginia Terry Chair of Business Administration in the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia. He is a leading scholar and authority on business intelligence and analytics, having authored 24 books and over 200 scholarly journal articles. Type of News/Audience: General News
