Iowa State’s College of Business is offering a new Master of Business Analytics program starting this fall.

Business analytics combine the work of statisticians and data scientists with areas of business.

“It’s actually a combination of business areas, business domain, business stakes and the computational sciences,” said Sree Nilakanta, associate professor of MIS and program director for business analytics at the College of Business.

Nilakanta said data science isn’t enough for organizations anymore. Businesses are looking for people who have business analytics skills along with knowledge of business operations.

“Data science will only focus [on] how companies use the data, but we assume that they need to do more than that. They need to have a basic understanding of the business decisions that are affected by the data that organizations collect,” he said. “They have to include the business domain areas as well as the statistics, which is used for manipulating the data, understanding the data and also all of the competitional requirements of large-scale data.”

The new program has been in the works for about two years. During that time, Iowa State has hired more than 20 new faculty campus-wide with some expertise in business analytics. Four of the faculty work in the College of Business.

“About two years ago, the university president — President Leath — created and initiated [what is] called the “Big-data Initiative” to hire faculty to do teaching and research in that area,” Nilakanta said.

There are courses in business analytics provided for undergraduates in the information systems major, but for those who want to receive a master’s in business analytics, 24 months of work experience in the field is required.

“To do the master’s program… as long as the applicant has science technology or engineering and mathematics background, a degree in that field or experience working in this domain of dealing with large-scale data, then they should be fine,” Nilakanta said. “The only other criteria that we have required at this point is that they have at least 24 months of work experience in this area.”

The number of applicants for the program was more than double the expected number for this fall.

“We initially thought we would get about 20, but we have 48 new applicants into this program,” Nilakanta said.