Spears School of Business

Rick Wilson of the MSIS Department (left) and Brent Lightsey with First Light Consulting at the Fall 2021 Oklahoma PowerBI User Group (PUG) meeting.

 

The Spears School of Business hosted the Fall 2021 Oklahoma PowerBI User Group (PUG) meeting on Sept. 10. The Oklahoma PUG group meets quarterly to discuss and learn about contemporary analytics topics, and this was the first time many of the attendees had been on OSU’s campus. Besides industry attendees, Spears School of Business faculty and students also were in attendance. The meeting was sponsored by the MSIS Department and OSU’s recently created Center of Data Analytics (CODA).

 

Brent Lightsey with First Light Consulting was the PUG Chairperson. Topics at the meeting included row-level security in PowerBI, how to integrate R and Python with Power BI, and MSIS faculty Bryan Hammer, Rathin Sarathy and Dursun Delen leading roundtable discussions on web scraping strategies with Python, Big Data Statistics and Health Analytics.

 

“It is important for us to connect with our local industry experts and what better way than to host their practitioner conferences,” said Dr. Rick Wilson, MSIS department head and CODA co-director. “The pandemic kept the attendance less than normal, but we look forward to hosting more of these informative sessions in the future. The field of data science and analytics is constantly evolving and programs like these have tremendous potential for many constituencies here on campus.”

 

Lightsey said, “The Management Science and Information Systems Department at the Spears School of Business are great partners for the business community. They are really equipping the next generation of analytics-savvy graduates for the workforce. The Business Building was the perfect venue for our Oklahoma Power BI User Group event.”

 

OSU’s Center of Data Analytics (CODA) is a newly formed interdisciplinary center to help create the next generation of analytically savvy OSU graduates by facilitating campus-wide faculty and student immersion in data analytics. It is funded by a generous gift from ConocoPhillips to the MSIS Department and CEAT’s School of Industrial Engineering and Management. A formal launch event for CODA is planned for Spring 2022.