Analytics Research from Sports to Supply Chains at the Isenberg School

Today's Boston Globe has a wonderful article on analytics and the role that quantitative modeling and data analysis are playing in sports. The article quotes Professor Steven Graves (well-known to us in operations research / management sciences) of the Sloan School at MIT. The article also notes that women are playing an increasing role in analytics in sports and, according to Patriots VP Jessica Gelman, analytics has helped level the field for women in pro sports.

As you may (or may not) be aware, the Isenberg School at UMass Amherst this year named its sports management department the Mark H. McCormack Department of Sport Management, after the founder of IMG, and we inherited his volumes of correspondence, and a sports historical legacy that is unparalleled. The media coverage of this fantastic news continues to this day.

Analytics is capturing the imagination of students, researchers, and business practitioners and at the Isenberg School, research is conducted on a wide spectrum of areas and I find the interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity nature of it fascinating and intellectually invigorating. The Isenberg School is now home to 7 departments, from the "classical" ones such as the Accounting, Marketing, and Management Departments, to my Department of Finance and Operations Management, and the more recently added, Department of Hospitality and Tourism Management and the Resource Economics Department, in addition to our named Sports Management Department.

There is terrific research taking place with analytics at its underlying core and you can view a summary of our scholarly publications, books, and grants received on our website. From research on supply chain network design to transportation operations to efficiency in hotels to a variety of sustainability issues and sports team performance as well as hedge fund failure and risk measures, it is clear that research at business schools is going deeper and broader through analytics, and is transforming practice!