Analytics for All

Business analytics, data science, machine learning, and visualization are hot topics.  These are things that most organizations can benefit from, and it doesn't always take technical skills to be a force to bring analytics to your company, even a small or medium sized business, or a non-profit.

This webinar will discuss how to get started in finding analytics opportunities in your organization and join the data science / analytics revolution.  The webinar will be accessible to all skill, knowledge, and experience levels. Some of the topics we’ll discuss include: 

• What we even mean by analytics, big data, machine learning, and visualization
• How to find places where you’d benefit from more use of analytics tools, with some examples
• Learning more by sharpening the questions
• Staring points:  Your own data, and public data
• Tools make it easier
• Some things you can do to get started

About John Watts
John Watts, MBA '83, BA '81, is a data science, economist, innovation, and business strategy expert with 20+ years’ experience and a proud UB alumnus.  John has served clients both as an independent consultant, and with leading firms including Radian Partners, Unison, Havas Health, FTI Consulting, PRTM, Vivaldi Partners, Opinion Research Corp., Accenture and EY.  His work brings together three key areas:  Business and competitive strategy, innovation and product/service development, and data-driven approaches. 

John frequently works on business and functional strategies addressing client issues like “What new offers should we build around the Internet of Things?  What would that take?” “How can we use text analytics to support product development?” or more simply, “How can I use available information to make a hard decision, quickly?”

His first career was in academia, with tenure track roles at Chicago Booth and Purdue.  He continues to serve Chicago Booth as coach to New Product Development and Marketing Strategy Labs teams.  He has also served several terms as President of the American Statistical Association’s 1000-member Chicago Chapter and on national ASA committees

John holds MS and Ph.D. degrees from Carnegie Mellon.  He has been participating in the world of applied analytics for over 30 years, since his classmates at Carnegie Mellon demonstrated the possibilities of interdisciplinary thinking around business, statistics, and computing.