A Business Analytics Shell for Teaching Corporate Decision Making

This paper presents a new approach to the emerging educational curricula of big data business analytics and the needs to teach students how to use data effectively to drive rapid, precise, and profitable analytics-based decisions. The framework consists of interlinked data-inputs, analytics models, and decision-support tools integrated within a proprietary business analytics shell. We demonstrate the capabilities of the system on examples from different functional areas of the enterprise. The objective is to teach students how decision making is enhanced through analytic methods that integrate the volume, velocity, variety, and veracity of the internal and external information into analytics-based decisions. The business analytics shell uses Power BI, a cloud based Add-Ins, that works with Microsoft Excel 2013 and allows users to share, collaborate, and contribute to complex projects and business reports from anywhere on any devices. All analytics models are fully integrated within the business analytics shell. The decision-support tool is presented as a dynamic business simulation called ’Strategies and Decision Support in Organizations’, designed to illustrate the decision- making process on business and functional levels. The results from this approach allow participants in graduate management courses to better understand how managers measure and evaluate critical functions of their business and prepare them to participate and contribute in a more efficient way to the new challenges and opportunities facing the modern enterprise.