Newsroom

George Grattan

Proving once again that the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts, the Data Innovation Network emerged from five earlier Thought Leadership Networks at the university. Like these smaller ventures, the Data Innovation TLN invites collaboration by scholars across disciplines and with external partners.

The Data Innovation TLN traces back to various threads of research activity around the university. These range from efforts to create a “Big Data” research center on campus, to studies of the methods and applications of business analytics, to an analysis of public sector data use, to the roles of data in driving innovation and value creation, to research around data security (and insecurity). The TLN also serves as an umbrella organization for four preexisting academic centers or initiatives at Bentley, drawing on faculty, student, staff, and external partner expertise from:

Workshop Origins and Potential Models

In the Data Innovation TLN’s original vision, organizers proposed a workshop that would bring the project’s external advisers to campus and create an environment in which they could engage with interested members of the Bentley faculty to assess the need and potential for such a network. According to TLN Director Heikki Topi, professor of computer information systems, the founding challenge was “to understand how intelligent use of data is transforming human activity, and the impacts of these changes.”

In June 2015, eight external advisers, seven members of a project task force, and 25 other members of the Bentley faculty gathered for an intensive two-day “conversation” that clarified an underlying vision for the network and articulated its early goals. Advisers included representatives and directors from the Hariri Institute for Computing at Boston University; Warwick Business School; the Center for Technology in Government at the University at Albany, SUNY; the Center for Statistics and Analytical Services at Kennesaw State University; the Social Analytics Institute at Clemson University; the University of Arizona; and the Sloan School of Management at MIT.

Proposed models for the TLN included an academic research center, a consulting center and a membership model. Ultimately, participants identified a “capability integrator model” as the best fit for the network’s desired goals. This model aggregates and synthesizes a range of capabilities that an institution already has in place or will develop in the future. In Bentley’s case, the academic centers and initiatives noted above demonstrated the wide range of data-focused capabilities already in play.

High-Level Goals

The emerging network went on to refine its high-level goals as follows:

  • Enable and support influential transdisciplinary scholarship on data-driven innovation and value creation by Bentley faculty and their partners in broad external networks;
  • Highlight and communicate Bentley’s integrated capabilities in data-driven innovation and value creation to local, national, and global audiences;
  • Make high-quality collaboration with industry and external stakeholder groups on data-driven innovation and value creation projects easier and less costly for Bentley faculty; and
  • Discover the needs of external stakeholders that the network can best serve to become a strong collaborator.

Additional goals are enabling large-scale research projects in collaboration with other universities, and attracting external funding to support research on data innovation.

Academic and Broader Impact

The network’s integrated approach to studying the acquisition, preparation, storage, integration, and analysis of data helps individuals, organizations, and other practitioners achieve their goals more effectively. TLN members recognize the central importance of enabling innovation and value creation at the individual, organizational, and societal levels — but such enabling is possible only through careful effort in prior steps along a value chain. Those steps involve careful attention to:

  • Sources and acquisition of data
  • Pre-processing, modeling, and storage of data
  • Data analytics and visualization

The network’s efforts have potential impact on a wide range of fields. To name a few: auditing, finance, forensic accounting, health care, public safety, and the business and art of music. All of these areas have research underway at Bentley.

A Public Sector Analytics project, for example, will add knowledge around the social and organizational factors that produce different patterns of media use, as well as related societal and institutional impacts. The research will advance the understanding of why social media can lead to organizational change in public agencies such as police departments, how it enables interaction with different types of publics, and how existing organizational cultures and citizen participation shape public sector social media practice.

In another example, the research initiative on Business Analytics will show how to use innovations in analytics to solve practical problems, and how to alert academic researchers to the challenges that industry practitioners face and encourage the development of new data analytics solutions.

As a whole and in its separate components, the Data Innovation TLN will improve capabilities to use data innovation technologies and methods to advance specific individual and organizational goals.

Bentley’s Core Strength

Bentley’s core strength related to data innovation is the ability to bring together technical, domain, and human impact expertise, according to Topi.

“Our community includes scholars who focus on building the technical capabilities of data innovation, those who successfully apply these capabilities in innovative ways in their primary fields of research, and those who explore the implications and consequences of data innovation technologies and their applications,” he explains, noting the school’s “culture of willingness” to bring these approaches together. “Enabling scholarly work at this intersection will allow us to create significant societal value.”

Upcoming Activities and Initiatives

Phase II plans for the network include funding several ongoing and new research initiatives. These studies are:

  • The Public Sector Analytics Project — How Social Media and Data Analytics Enhance Public Safety
  • Business Analytics Methods, Techniques, and Applications Innovation
  • Data Space Project: Big Data Research
  • Security and Privacy in the Context of Data Innovation
  • Implications of Business Analytics for Professional Work
  • Creating Organizational Benefits Through Mining of Enterprise System Data
  • Music Analytics

In addition to supporting such work, the Data Innovation TLN will publicize network activities via a website, newsletter, presentations to the university community and beyond, and similar means.

Network outreach to the wider academic community continues in bringing visiting faculty and PhD students to campus for public talks and working seminars. It will also develop internal resources by, through efforts that include regular workshops for faculty and doctoral students, a research methods seminar, “brown bag” seminars for the community. Plans include supporting post-doctoral fellow and doctoral students if funding becomes available.

Engaging with industry partners remains a priority; possible collaborations include:

  • Conferences and other high-profile events (beginning with a DART conference in the spring 2016)
  • Professional development and executive education
  • Consulting
  • Sponsored research
  • Providing a neutral and facilitated communications platform for industry partners who might otherwise be competitors in this space

Regardless of the specific paths it travels, the Data Innovation TLN will center its efforts on supporting data-driven research. The energy and expertise of external advisory committees, affiliated academic centers and initiatives at Bentley, off-campus research collaborators, and individual faculty members puts the network on track for research excellence, growing partnerships, and self-sustainability.