School of Business highlighted in BizEd magazine for business analytics

In the January/February issue of BizEd magazine, “B-Schools respond to the data revolution,” reporter Tricia Bisoux takes a look at how AACSB-accredited schools are incorporating business analytics. Prominently mentioned is the Wake Forest University School of Business. Bisoux writes:

All students enrolled in the Master of Science in Accountancy (MSA) program at Wake Forest University’s School of Business in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, now will learn data analytics skills in their core courses. Last July, the school hired Deloitte’s Tom Aleman as a professor of practice in accounting analytics, so that he could help the school integrate data analytics into MSA courses. Aleman was formerly Deloitte’s U.S. national and global leader of analytics and forensic technology services.

Students now will take four analytics courses throughout the two-semester program. The first, Introduction to Analytics, establishes concepts in data analytics, big data, visualization, and presentation. The second course teaches techniques in data wrangling, which refers to the process of requesting, extracting, and cleaning up imperfect data from different systems and applications. “In the real world,” says Aleman, “accounting professionals aren’t usually handed a nice clean data set. Data fields change over time, systems are updated, and legacy data is often left in its original form. This leads to inconsistencies, gaps and potentially lost data.”

The third course teaches students to master data visualization software such as Tableau and Alteryx, the science of visuals, and the ethics of visualization. The final course focuses on data communications and presentations.

The program closes with a capstone course in which students will work on projects for companies. Students will learn that analytics is “not just about providing a clean spreadsheet to a manager,” says Aleman, “but asking the right questions, solving the business issues, finding the insights, and communicating them to inform the organization’s decisions.”

Read the full story at BizEd.