Tuesday evening, MSBAPM and other graduate programs learned how Aetna, one of the biggest health care and insurance companies in the United States, drives change and innovation in the field of analytics and the skills required for teams working in IT Analytics areas. 

The keynote speaker, Joseph Foley, a senior director of IT Analytics, shared how Aetna is using analytics to develop business solutions, key tools used in analytics, big data and the job responsibilities in the field of IT Analytics. Aetna has begun to use analytics to focus on software development and testing, and use machine learning to identify business problems. Foley emphasized the huge business opportunities in analytics.

Using analytics, Aetna has been very successful in having reduced the rate of post implementation defects from 20% to 8%. Foley shared his unique experience developing models during the implementation of his projects and he spoke about decision trees and regression models using Excel. He explained how a model uses predictive variables and explained the real world practical problems that professionals have to deal with. Foley shares that key tools for predictive modeling, data visualization and data wrangling being used by Aetna are as follows: R, SAS, Python, Tableau, Java, Hive and Pig.

Foley concluded with encouraging students to apply to one of the two currently open positions in the field of IT Analytics. He is looking forward to potentially working with recent UConn Masters graduates.