Teaching Analytics: A Demonstration of Association Discovery with SAS Enterprise Miner

In the current age of data analytics, there has been a push for the emergence of technologies that allow for interactive analysis of extensive amounts of quickly produced, highly varied data. These technologies require people (nicknamed “data scientists”) from many business disciplines who are capable of managing and analyzing this data for use in decision making processes. In order to educate and train more of these people, there has been an increase in the teaching of analytical tools in both Management Information Systems (MIS) and Business Analytics (BA) programs. This article will describe details of an exercise on business analytics specially tailored for the Introduction to MIS or BA course. The main goal for this project is to educate first year business students about the importance and usefulness of data analytics without discouraging them with excessive coverage of technical software details.