Even as the growth of big data is skyrocketing, universities worldwide are struggling, and too frequently failing, to adequately prepare students to meet the demand for employees skilled inbusiness intelligence, or BI. This is the finding of an international survey sponsored byBusiness Intelligence CongressII, a meeting of business intelligence professors and industry professionals co-hosted byTeradata University Networkand theSpecial Interest Groupon Decision Support, Knowledge and Data Management Systems.

"The State of Business Intelligence in Academia 2010"found that while employers need workers who possess both an understanding of BI and business, the vast majority of universities fail to produce qualified graduates. Too often, graduates have a highly technical understanding of BI, without the understanding of business required to apply those skills to business needs, or they have a broad understanding of business, but lack the deep understanding to capably perform BI.

Industry needs new employees who have both technical and business skills: statistics and math, business and communication. However, today universities teach these skills across programs, with no one program completely meeting the needs of industry. Only a dozen graduate schools have an actual BI concentration or degree based on a program that integrates all the content that matters for BI.

The need for highly skilled BI workers by 2018 in the US alone is projected to exceed available workforce by as much as 60 percent, according to a McKinsey Global Institute report in May. That report projects that by 2018 an additional 190,000 "deep analytical talent" workers plus 1.5 million more "data-savvy managers and analysts" will be needed to take full advantage of big data in the US alone.

Relevant Information

• Given the emerging importance of big data and data analysis, hiring managers reported a pent-up demand for the skill sets, and they are having a difficult time finding enough qualified students. They are most interested in students with hands-on BI experience (74%), and experience with emerging topics (66%), and working with large data sets (54%).

• In an effort to provide the comprehensive understanding that students need, professors often turn to corporate educational resources. The corporate educational resource used most often isTeradata University Network,used by just under half of the professors and students.

• BI is offered as a concentration or degree at the undergraduate level at only three schools out of 129 surveyed. At the graduate level, 12 schools offer BI as a concentration or degree.

• Individual BI courses are taught at the undergraduate or graduate levels at 80 schools – but the course is offered by a single, isolated area of the university (e.g., an MIS department, a statistics department).

• Hiring managers report they most often hire new BI talent from business information systems (51%), followed by computer science (41%), other areas of business (38%), and math or statistics (34%).

• Survey respondents indicated that hands-on experiences have twofold importance since business students can gain BI technology proficiency and computer science students can experience BI-supported business applications.

• 339 students from 62 universities worldwide took part in the survey. Forty-three percent indicated that they would like to see a clearer link between the study of BI and jobs.

• Professors responding to the survey were from more than 129 universities around the world, includingAustralia,Brazil,Bulgaria,China,Denmark,Germany,Hungary,India,Japan,Norway,Singapore,Slovenia,Switzerland, andthe United States.

• The survey findings were presented to theBusiness Intelligence Congress IIinSaint LouisonDecember 11and 12, 2010. Compared to theBI Congress studyconducted at the end of 2009, the BI Congress II study was exponentially larger in that it included not only more academic professionals than in the previous year, but it also included students and industry professionals.

• The survey was conducted byBarbara Wixom, co-Executive Director of theTeradata University Network, an associate professor at theUniversity of Virginia'sMcIntire Schoolof Commerce and Director of UVA's M.S. in M.I.T. graduate program, and by Thilini Ariyachandra, an associate professor of MIS in theWilliams Collegeof Business atXavier University. It was sent to members of the Association for Information Systems and their students and a variety of professional BI channels, a triangulated sample of faculty, students and industry professionals. Respondents were university faculty, students, and industry hiring managers or recruiters from all over the world.

• Workforce data provided by McKinsey Global Institute, "Big Data: The next frontier for innovation, competition and productivity,"May 2011.