“Now you see Big Data stories almost everyday. The pace of the development is amazing.”
Education hasn’t kept up with development, said Deng.
“We are facing a huge deficit in people to not only handle big data, but more importantly to have the knowledge and skills to generate value from data — dealing with the non-stop tsunami.
How do you aggregate and filter data, how do you present the data, how do you analyze them to gain insights, how do you use the insights to aid decision-making, and then how do you integrate this from an industry point of view into your business process? The whole thing is hugely important for the future.”
Deng’s College of Computing and Informatics is already offering Master’s and Ph.D. programs in Bioinformatics. Partnering with the College of Health and Human Services and the University Graduate School, they have developed the first Health Informatics Professional Science Master’s program in North Carolina. “This degree is to train people with solid skills of technology and analytics while being expert in the business of health and healthcare, and making the two working together.”
Now, working with the Belk College of Business at UNCC, the College of Computing is developing a new Professional Science Master’s degree in Business Analytics and Informatics, integrating big data and analytics with business process and management concepts. Their industry advisory group has attracted experts from Bank of America, IBM, SAS, Cisco, McKinsey, Lowes and Ernst & Young.
Because the university is still growing – the enrollment at Deng’s college has increased by 60% in four years – it is offered an opportunity to introduce new programs without ithreatening existing faculty.
“Our faculty are quite receptive to this idea and help to drive these developments,” said Deng.
They realize the need for an interdisciplinary approach to the integration of technology with vertical education in areas such as finance, banking, healthcare, medicine, energy or defense.
“I expect that in two or three years we will have a set of collaborative and interdisciplinary degree programs focused on data and how it integrates with business processes and key industry sectors.”
The university is also working on executive education programs to improve the skills of employees who have to keep up with fast moving changes in their business. The McKinsey study estimated that the US needs to retrain 1.5 million managers who can understand the value of data and know what questions to ask.
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