Interview - Rahul Nawab, Co-Founder of Academy for Decision Science & Analytics

Rahul Nawab of Academy for Decision Science & Analytics (ADSA) talks with Analytics India Magazine about the current state of Analytics education in India. [dropcap style="1" size="2"]AIM[/dropcap]Analytics India Magazine: Can you brief us about the course curriculum and pedagogy of analytics education at your institute? [dropcap style="1" size="2"]RN[/dropcap]Rahul Nawab: At ADSA we train our students beyond the conventional education system. ADSA offers a Multi-disciplinary curriculum to bring out the student’s inner analyst and get them ready for real world problems with real world data. We train our students in areas that corporations value: situation analysis, conceiving and developing appropriate models, data preparation, result interpretation, data analysis and synthesis, managerial conclusions and more.  The corporate training project allows the students to work on real data and see through various complexities surrounding this data AIM: How is your institute different from other players in India providing analytics training and education? RN: We are application oriented. Students are taught with a hands-on approach, through case studies. This helps them to hit the ground running wherever they work. We also believe in rounding out the soft skills required by an analyst and hence include a few classes from world class instructors on Business Consulting, Project Management, Leadership and Followership. What really sets us apart is our Faculty. We don’t have just one or two faculty members who teach all aspects. ADSA’s faculty members are specialists in their core area. We have leaders from the consulting world as well as academia. AIM: What technologies are behind learning analytics? RN: Analytics is a science and an art as well. We can say it is a combination of Systematic Approach, Statistics and Technology. One would need all the technologies and software related to data collection (eg File transfers, Oracle, SQL or any other data manipulation tools) and suitable statistical tools for analysis (eg R, SPSS, MS Excel) and finally communication tools (eg MS Power Point, MS Project etc). Comprehensive learning of all these technologies is required for effective and actionable analytics. AIM: What are the major obstacles facing education on data and analytics in India? RN: There are a few issues with learning, coaching and education of analytics. Analytics is fairly new concept (<10yrs old) in India and world wide (<15yrs old). So we are still in the early stages of evolution in terms of understanding the key skills required to be successful in this domain and creating a systematic training, education and coaching system around it to bring in raw talent and create effective analysts. In parallel analytics application itself is evolving very rapidly in terms of our technological ability to work with larger and larger sized data. So in the past we may have capped our analysis by data size but these limitations are no longer true. Finally, the acceptance while India is at cutting edge of playing as a worldwide analytics consultant, the internal demand by Indian firms to leverage analytics is just in its early phases leading to a niche demand to trained analysts which is currently limited to only a few training programs and no real University degree program. AIM: Where do you see the bulk of your business coming from? Do Indian organizations have the same affinity towards BI/ Analytics training as that of organizations from other regions? RN: The bulk of our business will most likely come from corporates, although individual students should form a significant ratio. As I said earlier, Indian companies are in early phase of analytics adoption and as they leverage analytics more and more we will find them to be our key clients. AIM: Can you provide three examples of employers where you have placed your student and name the job titles into which they were placed? What were their average starting salaries? RN: Our students are placed in various industry verticals like Packaging, Banking, Financial, Analytics consulting, telecom etc. Some shining examples of our students are as follows:

1. A fresher management student  placed in packaging industry as an Analyst
2. An IT professional with 20 years of experience is placed as a Sr. Analyst in a Analytics Consulting company
3. A Telecom Marketing professional is heading his career as VP in Telecom Company

Salary of all our students is varied in the rage from 5lac to 30lac PA, as they are placed in different domains and they have varied experience. AIM: What according to you are the most important rising trends in Analytics’? RN: According to me the most rising trends in Analytics are Bigdata and Online Analytics Bigdata: Big Data is the next big thing and it will touch life of all of us. The use of big data will become a key basis of competition and growth for individual firms. In most industries, established competitors and new entrants alike will leverage data-driven strategies to innovate, compete, and capture value from deep and up-to-real-time information. We believe there will be loads of challenges of analyzing Big Data with huge data sets. There will arise a need for high performance computing and specialized tools along with valuable insights. But we are sure its manageable and there are means to meet these challenges and enable business to see results quickly. Online Analytics: Online Analytics is the key growth engine for any business and utilizing this presence through analytics can give businesses an added advantage. Analytics in tracking visitors, analyzing their profile, targeting them with customized advertisement to match their interest, sentiment analysis etc. are latest trends in online analytics AIM: What is your projection of the growth of analytics education in the future? RN: I can see tremendous growth of analytics market in near future. According to IDC (International Data Corporation) Data requirements are growing at an annual rate of 60% and the size of the Analytics market globally is $25 billion, doubling every 5 years. The analytics market is expected to grow to $31 billion by the end of year 2012. (Source IDC 2007). So the scope is very bright. India is also poised to become a significant player in the world of analytics. Immense growing opportunity with markets opening up here + Intrinsic aptitude for mathematics, logic and language = India as decision making capital to the world.

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[spoiler title="Biography of Rahul Nawab" open="0" style="2"] Rahul Nawab is an analyst at heart and by profession. With years of experience in leading and building Analytics teams in Financial Institutions, Rahul understands the practical applications of Analytics. Rahul Nawab has a Masters Degree in Engineering and a Masters degree in Management, both from North Carolina State University (USA). Rahul has founded IQR Analytics Consulting (http://www.iqrdataanalytics.com/ ), a reputed and sought after Business Analytics Service provider. He is co-founder of Academy for Decision Science & Analytics (ADSA) (http://www.adsa.in/ ), an institute close to his heart, where students are trained to deliver results with real-life, practical Analytics techniques and approaches.[/spoiler]