The MPA Distinguished Speaker Lyceum is one of the most important traditions in the MPA program. Last Tuesday we hosted Ms. Camille Stovall, a partner at Deloitte and the Chief Operating Officer of Deloitte Financial Advisory Services (FAS). The conversational interview between Ms. Stovall, Professor Steve Limberg, and my fellow MPA students ranged from how to approach difficult restructurings to the importance of analytics. The latter prompted Prof. Limberg to ask just how analytics are used in the real world.
Last week was the deadline for resume submissions for Spring MPA internships. It was a stressful process and it is such a relief to be done! That being said, I do not have much recruiting-wise to talk about in this week’s blog.
Instead, I am going to talk a little bit about another discipline that I believe is becoming increasingly important in the accounting industry. Management Information Systems, or MIS as it is known around McCombs, is essentially a technology/business hybrid. MIS focuses on bridging the gap between the business world and the computer science world, which is every so important as the distinction between those two fields begins to blur. If you are interested in MIS, you should definitely consider it as your minor.
If you saw the picture above, there is a good chance you didn’t know what that is. That’s ledger paper. Accountants use to use it to report journal entries and reconcile accounts. My Audit professor likes to show it to us occasionally to remind us how important technology is to the accounting profession today.
I stumbled upon a crazy article on Forbes.com this morning about how Target uses data mining in its operations. Data mining is “process of analyzing data from different perspectives and summarizing it into useful information – information that can be used to increase revenue, cuts costs, or both.” Target uses data-mining to discover which coupons/promotions are most appropriate for each customer. By analyzing customer’s purchases over time, Target professionals see patterns that they can then use to interpret buying habits of each customer. The Forbes article describes a situation where Target discovered, based on buying patterns, that a young girl was pregnant and thus, sent her coupons for diapers, cribs, etc. Her father was infuriated and insulted until he realized that his daughter actually was pregnant. Target is definitely not the only company using data mining- so be aware! I think data mining is so interesting, but there are certainly some critics who believe that we are heading towards a Big Brother situation with all of this personal data being stored by different companies.
