On Thursday 18th November, Aillum followed through on its invite to deliver a Presentation and Q/A Session to Business Intelligence Honours year students at the University of the West of Scotland.
We were delighted at the response from the students and, were going to write our own overview of the day, but having received the following review from Dr Carolyn Begg, Lecturer, School of Computing, UWS (carolyn.begg@uws.ac.uk), we decided to go with it instead.
We’d like to say a thank you to Dr Carolyn Begg, UWS and the Business Intelligence Students for making it such an interesting afternoon.
The review we received …
The University of the West of Scotland (UWS) prides itself on keeping a close eye on the business landscape to identify new business applications and technologies that are likely to become business critical and hence place significant demands on the emerging workforce (i.e. our graduating students). Web Analytics is such an area.
With this in mind, UWS was delighted to welcome Aillum, in the form of Brian Tait, as our guest speaker to deliver a Presentation and Question / Answer session to our Business Intelligence (BI) Honours year students.
From the first slide, the students were glued to their seats (no, not really) as Brian gave a brilliant expert’s overview of an increasingly important business and BI topic; namely Web Analytics. Brian’s ‘brain-dump’ on this hot topic was truly impressive and the students gained a massive amount of knowledge in a relatively short time (1 hour). What was particularly impressive was that our students received a customised presentation that was ideal for their learning and this included Brian tackling the students’ Coursework using a live client to demonstrate the real benefits of Web Analytics.
This knowledge transfer was followed by an equally impressive Q/A session (1 hour) with students firing questions at Brian on for example, ‘How can SMEs benefit from Web Analytics?’ to ‘How can I get into Web Analytics as a career?’. I felt exhausted just watching Brian in action and at the end of the 2 hours, I had to chase (yes, really) the students out of the lecture room. This never normally happens.
A strong message came out throughout the presentation and Q/A session is that the vast majority of businesses are not recognising nor reaping the enormous benefits that Web Analytics has the potential to deliver. However, it seems certain that when businesses wake up to this potential (and this will happen soon), UWS will have played its part (with the help of Aillum) in preparing our students (i.e. future employees) for a business environment that views Web Analytics as being critical to their success and even for some, their survival on the Web.
