Gain Essential Skills in this Growing Field

The Advanced Certificate in Business Analytics is aimed at helping professionals gain expertise in accessing and manipulating data, and applying analytical techniques to extract information from data and use it to predict future trends and behavior patterns.

What is Business Analytics?

The field of business analytics has grown significantly over the last few years, providing business users with better insights from operational data stored in transactional systems. Business analytics stands today as one of the most strategically important fields in corporate information technology. Executives can now analyze sales trends and customer purchase patterns to improve their marketing strategies and better target customers with product offers and advertising. To illustrate the current momentum of business analytics both in industry and academia, here are some examples:

• In April 2009, IBM announced the creation of a 4,000-person organization focused on helping corporations analyze data to make better and smarter decisions; its biggest foray in business consulting since it acquired PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting in 2002 (source: Business Week)

• Gartner Group identified business analytics as one of the top ten strategic technologies for 2010, together with cloud computing, client computing, virtualization and green IT among others. According to Gartner, "the new step is to provide simulation, prediction, optimization and other analytics, not simply information, to empower even more decision flexibility at the time and place of every business process action. The new step looks into the future, predicting what can or will happen".

• McKinsey Global Institute's May 2011 "Big Data" report states that by 2018 demand for people with deep analytics talent could be 50% to 60% greater than the supply.

Students who complete the Advanced Certificate in Business Analytics will develop expertise and skills in the areas of Data Management, Decision Making, Statistical Data Analysis, Management Science, Online Analytical Processing, Business Performance Management, Data Mining and Predictive Analytics.

Who Should Apply to Marist's Advanced Certificate in Business Analytics Program?

The Marist College Business Analytics program does not require a technology or computer science background and is open to all individuals currently holding a bachelor's degree who meet the admission requirements. Individuals working in the following employment sectors should strongly consider developing their knowledge of Business Analytics so as to stay competitive in their field:

• Strategy Managers
• Researchers (physics and engineering, social science, medicine)
• Business Analysts and Consultants
• IT Professionals
• Advertising and Marketing professionals
• Health Care Administrators
• Finance Professionals

Why Choose Marist College to Study Business Analytics?

Students of the Advanced Certificate in Business Analytics acquire hands-on experience with cutting-edge analytical methods and software tools, leveraging the use of information technology to help improve decision making. All courses taken in the certificate program are graduate IS courses and may be later applied to the Marist Master of Science in Information Systems (MSIS) program. The 4 courses sequence (12-credit) can be taken online, on ground, or a combination of online and on ground.

Marist College's School of Computer Science and Mathematics is housed in the campus' Hancock Center; a 57,000-square-foot facility overlooking the Hudson River. Designed to help fulfill the Marist goal of infusing information technology into all of its academic disciplines, the Hancock Center includes two computer labs, 30 faculty offices, seven classrooms, six conference/seminar rooms, an executive presentation center, and a National Science Foundation-funded enterprise computing research laboratory. Many of the existing regional and global technology initiatives for which Marist has earned a leadership reputation, including the Center for Collaborative and On-Demand Computing, the Open Source Development Lab, the Institute for Data Center Professionals, and the IBM-Marist Joint Study Project reside within the walls of this innovative state-of-the-art building. Marist College through the School of Computer Science and Mathematics has been recently awarded a $3 million dollar state grant to establish the New York State Cloud Computing and Analytics Center.