Business Analytics MBA Specialization

Today’s business environment is all about leveraging data to make decisions. This program prepares students for data-driven business communications, project management, and analyses with the goal of driving ethical and effective actions. They’ll start with a real-world problem, determine what data to collect, manipulate and interpret the data, create visualizations, and ultimately be able to tell a data-informed story to both technical and non-technical audiences that drives business impact.

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Courses and curriculum

Business Analytics MBA Specialization course descriptions

All Rize MBA Specialization Programs, including Business Analytics, are designed to be taken in any order as to create maximum flexibility when it comes to adoption. These courses do not stack. Depending on your MBA program requirements, all students must complete the 3-4 courses below.

Storytelling with Data

Storytelling is one of the oldest and most powerful tools for action, and this course empowers MBA students to transform raw data into compelling narratives that drive business decisions. By the end of this course, you’ll be able to create data queries and visualizations, integrate data into business planning, and effectively communicate your findings, helping organizations turn data into a strategic tool for competition and innovation.

Spreadsheet Modeling for Decision-Making

Spreadsheet tools are the most universal and easily accessible program for most people to use and interpret data—and a vital skill for any analyst to know. In this course, students will learn data cleaning, financial modeling, optimization, and data visualization using PivotTables and PivotCharts, enabling students to analyze complex datasets, create forecasts, and effectively communicate insights to support data-driven decision-making in business contexts.

Python for Business Analytics

This course is designed to introduce MBA students to the fundamentals of Python programming with a special focus on its application in business analytics. By the end of this course, students will learn how to set up a Python environment, manipulate and analyze data using NumPy and Pandas, and create visualizations with Matplotlib to drive business decisions.

Managing AI Projects

AI projects can help predict trends and optimize operations, allowing businesses to understand not just what has happened but what will happen—and what should be done about it. By the end of this course, students will be prepared to drive financial and operational impact by managing AI project lifecycles: developing comprehensive project plans, managing data and models, ensuring effective deployment, and communicating progress and outcomes to stakeholders.

Subject Matter Expert: Dr. Michael Parzen
Senior Lecturer of Applied Business Analytics at Harvard Business School

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ACADEMIC ADVISORS

Rize MBA specializations leverage the courses you already have:

Our Academic Partners will work directly with you to build a unique MBA program with specializations, leveraging and integrating courses you already have in your catalog.

A potential Business Analytics MBA specialization could look like this:

Example core courses from your institution

Managerial Economics

Financial Analysis

Quantitative Business Analysis

Strategic Management

Legal Environment of Business

Innovative Decision Making

Business Analytics MBA Specialization courses from Rize

Storytelling with Data

Spreadsheet Modeling

Python for Business Analytics

Managing AI Projects

Why Business Analytics?

Whether it's identifying market trends, optimizing operational processes, or personalizing customer experiences, at its core, business analytics is all about extracting actionable insights from data—and communicating it to others—to help businesses stay ahead. Companies that champion data-driven insights in business are 77% more likely to have significantly exceeded their business goals.

Studying business analytics opens doors to virtually any industry, offering a ton of flexibility and the excitement of applying your skills everywhere from finance and IT to start-ups and hospitals. Business analytics professionals thrive on the diversity of problem-solving opportunities across an organization, from sales and finance to warehouse management.

Why the Rize MBA Business Analytics Program?

Flexible and practical

This program is a flexible three-to-four-course online asynchronous concentration emphasizing real-world, practical applications of business analytics through a data lens—and the skills to communicate them effectively. Through hands-on assignments and presentations, students won’t just learn technical skills—they’ll learn a strategic manager’s mindset, enabling them to lead with confidence in data-driven decision-making in the classroom and beyond.

Powerful, contextualized technical skills

Business analysts will almost always have some role in translating technical information. It is therefore important that students develop literacy around ‘hard’ analytical tools like those used for data querying, visualization, and modeling. Rize’s Business Analytics specialization allows students to graduate with the ability to meaningfully discuss and apply these tools.

Focus on using analytics for strategy

Each course uses case studies where students learn to find the data or analytical framework to meet and anticipate client needs. (When a CEO says she wants X and Y, what separates a good business analyst from a great one is predicting she’ll need Z as well.)

Interdisciplinary and cutting-edge

Just like today’s jobs, our program is interdisciplinary and touches AI and machine learning, so that our graduates are prepared to pivot as technologies and companies adapt. After graduation, students will be prepared to meet the demand for data-driven business analytics expertise in almost every industry.

Getting started...

One, flat subscription fee grants access to all 5 specializations with our new MBA bundle. Leveraging 8-week, online, asynchronous courses, the bundle will provide you, and your students, the flexibility and agility to stay on the cutting edge of new offerings and labor market needs.

Ready to learn more about Rize's MBA specializations?

Fill out the form below and someone from our Academic Partnerships team will be in touch with you shortly about launching these specializations.