The use of research and analytics to drive business decisions and automation of tasks represents the future for business leaders. The decision-making practices across different institutions have gone through a revolutionary change with the increased accessibility to data and the use of computer systems. Increasingly, businesses, nonprofits, and other organisations are interested in the better use of available information in operations, tactical, and strategic decision-making. Business Intelligence employs the combination of rapidly growing available data, both in organisations’ data stores and through third parties, and the equally rapid development in software interoperability, data exchange mechanisms, and data mining and visualisation techniques. This combination allows organisations to improve their ability to extract and employ the value from this information to meet stakeholders’ needs and improve their efficiency. The survival and growth of modern organisations depend on managing processes and capabilities to effectively use a growing set of highly varied data from different sources to assist organisations’ strategic and operational goals.
The programme seeks to not only prepare competent analysts with a strong grounding in economics, business and management, and analytical tools (statistical, mathematical, and information technology) as its main focus but also groom business leaders in the use of sophisticated tools and techniques for decision-making. With sound knowledge in economics, management, business operation, computer programming, and appropriate tools and technologies, the proposed programme prepares learners with skills to use different methods and techniques of descriptive analytics, diagnostic analytics, predictive analytics, prescriptive analytics, financial engineering, research, artificial intelligence, machine learning and automation. Therefore, the programme rests upon the premise of the skills required to approach and resolve the contemporary business issues faced by organisations as well as create self-employment opportunities for the graduates as independent analysts, investors and researchers both in the national and international markets.