Sense and respond

By Michael Goul  |  Chairman, Department of Information Systems

“Sense and respond” as a business concept has been around for some time. It means an organization must pay attention to what is actually happening in its environment rather than focus just on internal process efficiencies, command and control structures, etc.  IT-enabled sense and respond capabilities are at the heart of many of today’s analytics initiatives. Sense and respond is as much a theoretical lens for information systems design research as it is for the practice of creating and managing the curriculum of information systems programs.

For the W. P. Carey School’s information systems department, sensing capabilities depend a great deal on the insights and guidance provided by our Executive Advisory Board. As a case in point, the department recently launched a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Data Analytics. Our new recruiting video just recently went live. It joins our other recruiting video for our Bachelor of Science in Computer Information Systems program. The two videos seem to paint a picture of two different career paths, but will they be that different in five to 10 years? This business data analytics program came about as a result of the recommendations and influence of our Executive Advisory Board.

In the curricular details, two course slots are reserved for majors to take courses outside of the analytics skills and knowledge areas — students are encouraged to look to marketing, supply chain, economics, finance or other disciplines of business for important and applicable contexts. The orientation of the new program is not to grant a degree that yields elusive, high-brow data scientists; instead, the view of our advisory board and faculty is that it will take teams of qualified analytics specialists to address the existing skills shortage in the area. On November 21, we will again meet with our Advisory Board to work through additional details of the curriculum, given how analytics are playing out in business (e.g., Davenport, 2013 ).

We will also continue to refine what needs to be offered in the computer information systems curriculum in light of big data’s increasing prominence. New opportunities arise in these spaces every day, and our board helps us keep our eye on the ball. Sense and respond competencies are especially important when the reliability of forecasts is in doubt, given extreme ongoing volatility and change in the business environment. Such is the case with the fields of business data analytics and information systems.

The W. P. Carey School has a thriving Master of Science in Business Analytics program and Master of Science in Information Management program. The question remains how businesses will ultimately fuse their analytics capabilities with their conventional IT and business capabilities. I have been hearing stories about data scientists throwing a predictive model ‘over the wall’ for IT to deploy, only for IT to discover that the cost of sourcing and preparing the data the model requires wipes out the lift.

Will analytics always be separate from IT, will there be an uneasy partnership? Or maybe analytics will belong to functional areas while IT remains centralized? This is difficult to forecast; our department’s sense and respond competencies will be key to keeping on top of this evolution. Sensing is important, but so is responding. Our advisory board members have good memories. We always take time in our meetings to show what we have done to address what we learned from them at a prior meeting. Our curriculum committees have been hard at work preparing for this November’s meeting. Sense and respond is not a one-shot phenomenon. The competency is dependent on whether an entity can keep the pace up over the long haul. This will be not be the first or last meeting where we debate hard choices, but one of many more to come.