Transforming Your Company’s Data Analytics: Championing the Digital Enterprise
Offered By: University System of Maryland via edX
Course Description
Overview
Organizations are pressured to become digital enterprises for good reason. Today every company is a technology company at its core. Only through integrated information technology systems designed for business analytics can companies sense and respond to changing market demands.
Business agility demands a digital enterprise.
Digital technologies have the potential to transform organizations into lean, agile businesses that are strongly focused on their customers. But, just introducing digital technologies into an enterprise is not enough. Without the right organizational culture, business processes, and active people training, you will not realize the full value of digital technologies.
In this program, we help you see the dynamic capabilities of your organization. Using the fitness landscape model we help managers see where they are in relation to other organizations and how to reconfigure their dynamic capabilities to move higher up the competitive fitness landscape.
These “dynamic capabilities” include both the social and the digital - how we work and the technologies that support it.. Terabytes of processing and machine learning won’t be the solution to your business problems on their own. As companies pursue big data and cloud computing strategies to improve their decision making with actionable insights - the technologies will change. To truly sustainably improve the customer experience and achieve the competitive advantage that the power of data promises, you need the social technologies and processes that are able to adapt along with your data strategy.
This ability to reconfigure and deploy new capabilities within the organization by creating, extending, or modifying the existing resources is a “dynamic capability.” With the speed of technology disruption, business leaders must enable their company to adapt.
This certificate will also teach you about how to discover data sources in your company, and leverage those structured and unstructured data to improve your whole business. From supply chain sourcing to marketing and delivery.
These lessons will help you make the right choices about digital transformation to make your organization better fulfill its mission and delight customers. To get there you must first understand the vision of a digital enterprise, what it looks like, how it operates, and why it’s so powerful in delivering results.
Syllabus
Course 1: Introduction to Transforming with Data Analytics and the Digital Organization
Learn how data analytics powers the digital organization and gives it a competitive edge.
Course 2: Effecting Digital Transformation with Data Analytics Projects
Learn how to transform an organization digitally through simulations and case studies by applying the Disciplined Agile Delivery framework to work through three simulations.
Course 3: Making Evidence-Based Strategic Decisions
Drive alignment among managers, employees and the organizational goals through data analytics and data products. This course on digital transformation will show you how to turn your organization into a decision-making factory.
Course 4: Storytelling and Persuading using Data and Digital Technologies
Learn how to gain traction for your digital transformation initiatives with stories based on data that use compelling data visualizations to build a persuasive business case.
Courses
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Every modern organization is a digital organization or will rapidly become digital. Artificial intelligence, Google/Amazon/Facebook/Uber, and big data have dramatically raised customer expectations and demand.
Organizations that are effective in using data will win in the economies of the mid-21st century. These must-have core competencies include data analysis, machine learning, data visualizations, data mining, and predictive analytics, and deep learning. Organizations that won't or can't digitally transform will go the way of Blockbuster or Border's Bookstore.
The organization that better harnesses the power of data to create a superior customer experience will thrive in the new business realities.
The question is, how does an organization digitally transform? There are many digital technologies for organizations to choose from - too many choices! And digital technologies are only part of creating a digital organization. The employees must be trained in the new technologies, leaders must learn how to use data in making strategic decisions, and the organization's business processes must be reinvented. So many choices to make and the stakes have never been higher!
This course will give you a framework to help you successfully navigate the challenges posed by digital transformation. First, we will discuss how to use the organization's dynamic capabilities to start the digital transformation. Second, we will use fitness landscapes to build a competitive digital business model. Finally, we will implement a strategic foresight function to help evolve the digital business model for the organization's continued success.
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Champions of digital transformation have many data technologies to choose from:
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Artificial intelligence
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Machine learning
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Cloud computing
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Digitization
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Predictive analytics
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Internet of Things
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Deep learning
As a business leader, you may be asking yourself, what’s next? R? Python? Graph Databases? The latest data analytics technology that was launched last week?
How do you craft an effective digital strategy from these technologies? How do you build the data transformation roadmap to give your organization a competitive advantage? How will you digitally transform your organization to give the best customer experience?
In this course, we will explore three case studies to learn the practical tools and methods used to build a digital organization. The first course gave you the theory of the dynamic capabilities, fitness landscapes, and strategic foresight framework to transform an organization. Now, we will put those theories to use in three types of organizations.
The first organizational type is a new startup. You will learn how to build a digital organization from the ground up using the lean startup methodology.
The second organizational type is an established organization. This type of organization has developed processes and deep-rooted culture. The challenge is to help the organization digitally transform while retaining the best aspects of the organization.
The third organizational type is the organization that turns to digital transformation to help save it. This may be the most challenging digital transformation effort because you need to regain customer trust under a tight deadline while your competitors are eager to capture your customers.
For all three digital transformations, we will use Disciplined Agile Delivery to plan and execute the organizational change programs. "Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) is a people-first, learning-oriented hybrid agile approach to IT solution delivery. It has a risk-value delivery lifecycle, is goal-driven, is enterprise aware, and is scalable." DAD is ideal for digital transformation projects.
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Decisions made by humans are rarely made by data alone. Human decision-makers have cognitive biases, are affected by emotions, and make conceptual leaps beyond what the data may suggest. The best way to educate and persuade decision-makers is through stories. Stories built by good data analysis.
In this course, you will learn how to create stories based on data - data storytelling - by using the ABT (“And, But, Then”) Narrative Framework. We will start by using powerful data science techniques to explore and refine your data. We shape a compelling narrative out of the data findings using brain-friendly storytelling techniques.
Once you have your stories, you will learn to create insightful data visualizations and build a persuasive presentation for business professionals - both in-person or online.
The final week of the course deals with Customer Training. Customers want the latest and greatest digital products full of features. But customers don't want to spend too much time learning those features. Customer training helps the digital organization be more strategic by assisting the customer in engaging more with the product.
Using data storytelling skills, you will craft stories to help customers understand how your organization’s products and services will make their lives better. You will learn how to use the data analytics and machine learning in your digital organization to create effective customer training, so your products and services get the traction you need for digital transformation success.
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What makes a good business decision?
How can we combine effective data analytics and feed robust foresight and scenario planning processes?
We need to rethink the organization, and see it as essentially a “decision factory.” Like a factory, employees at all levels make or contribute to decisions that, taken together, gives the organization the competitive edge in the marketplace. The news media is filled with stories of how a minor decision has major ramifications on the organization. In this course, we will learn how to train organizational members to effectively data products in their business decisions.
Digital organizations capture an enormous amount of data. Knowing how to mine and refine that data for strategic decision making effectively is what will separate the winners from the losers. As the business guru, Dr. Roger L. Martin, wrote in a 2013 Harvard Business Review article, knowledge workers turn the "raw material" of data into decisions. Decision-makers need the best data to make the best decisions.
This course will help your organization inventory the decisions its customers, employees, and leaders make and their data needs. We will discuss how to make good decisions and build quality data creation processes. You will also learn how to work with incomplete or ambiguous data and how to learn effectively from experience.
We will close out the course by examining two recent trends in data analytics. The first trend is the use of low-code/no-code tools by non-technical employees to create data applications. We will discuss best practices for creating low-code/no-code applications while providing a robust data infrastructure for the apps.
The second trend is the use of artificial intelligence (A.I.) and robotic process automation (RPA) in data analytics. We will examine the use of these tools, along with two of the most popular advanced data analysis tools: R and Microsoft's Power Platform.
This course is a high-level view of topics that we will explore in greater depth in the Architect certification portion of this program.
Taught by
Bill Brantley
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