IIM Ahmedabad conference discusses business analytics

IIM Ahmedabad held a two-day international conference on Advanced Data Analysis, Business Analytics and Intelligence at the institute on Saturday.

Speaking at the inaugural session, Samir Barua, director at IIM A said, "The use of data analytics has increased and it is important to know how the top management views it. But, where such automated high power online transactions take place, the risks associated should also be taken care of."

The conference also discussed the need for transfer of data analytics to the public domain. Professor Kanti V Mardia, senior research professor at University of Leeds, UK who is an expert in statistics, presented the use of new generation statistics for data and business analytics.

"The field of science is vast and statisticians have a vast role to play in the coming decade," said Mardia. Also present at the conference was Ajay Kapoor, V-P (business process reengineering) at Genpact who spoke on the topic from a different perspective.

Stressing on the demand chain optimisation rather than supply chain optimisation to withstand competition, Kapoor said, "Businesses need to know their customers in a better way than in the past. The unstructured data available on social networking sites should be used for data and business analytics for the growth of the business."

The two-day conference will present more than 80 research papers and 20 posters on the topic thus providing several insights into it.