If you’re in the bakery business and you don’t bake enough cakes, you leave your customers and your bottom line wanting.  If you bake too many, those extra cakes, and your net profit, will spoil. 

Enter Business Analytics. 

By analyzing a vast array of seemingly unrelated information, IBM analytics experts discovered an interesting purchasing pattern among a UK bakery’s clients: they bought more cakes on rainy days and more paninis on sunny ones.  To the bakery, discovering that otherwise hidden pattern meant a 20% increase in profit.

With a generous gift of software from IBM, Auburn’s CoB is now in the business of Business Analytics.

“We have amassed 90% of the world’s information in just the past two years,” explains Neil Isford, VP of Smarter Analytics for IBM North America.  Companies that can sift through this mountain of information will emerge as leaders.  And colleges that teach their students to interpret “big data” will stand at the forefront of an important business trend.  In partnership with IBM, Auburn is shaping its curriculum to equip students with the analytical skills to make some serious bread.

To view the full interview with Dr. Norman H. Godwin and Neil Isford, click here.