As a member of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) Analytics Curriculum Advisory Group, Dr Arne Strauss (WBS) will be a facilitator at the next AASCB data analytics seminar taking place in Tempe, Arizona, from 19-20 March 2018.

As part of the AACSB curriculum development series, the seminar will focus on how to develop, implement and deliver data analytics programs and other curriculum components that meet the highest academic standards consistent with AACSB accreditation expectations, as well as the needs of the business community and prospective students. Original content, cases, discussions, group activities, meetings with data analytics executives, and other experiences have been designed to assist business schools initiate and expand their work in this area.

Dr Strauss, who is Academic Director of WBS’ MSc Business Analytics programme, will be a facilitator at the event together with international professors from advisory group.

More information on the AACSB event is available here.

Call for papers: Business Analytics: Defining the field and identifying a research agenda

Research into analytics should seek to both incorporate the unique aspects of the OR discipline, as well as the innovations, concerns and characteristics of the analytics movement. Specifically, this special issue aims to invite OR scholars and practitioners to look at:

• Ethics and governance issues in business analytics: How should data be obtained? What are the ethical implications of using applications of business analytics to influence behaviour?
• Big data and business analytics: What are the limitations and applications of optimisation and other OR techniques to large datasets? What are the challenges for applications of OR methods within distributed systems? What is the possibility that OR models could in fact be the producers of big data, e.g. large-scale simulation models? What new methods/models in response to big data e.g. sentiment mining, can be adopted by OR?
• Organizational issues in business analytics adoption: What are the issues facing organizations trying to adopt business analytics? What is the role of real-time applications of OR in organizations?
• Data quality and business analytics: what methods can be used for hypothesis testing and model validation in large datasets? How can unstructured data be used effectively in OR models? What is the role of multi-methodology in business analytics? What opportunities do open data present for the OR discipline?
• Business analytics and decision support: How can data visualisation techniques be used across the breadth of OR? What role do problem structuring and "soft" OR techniques play in analytics and big data projects?

Other topics that have relevance for value creation and organisational implications are also welcome.