Keio Research Institute at SFC

Objectives

When executives of profit and non-profit organizations consider mid- to long-term strategies for their organizations, the departments which devise the strategies gather information and perform analyses based on the instructions of their executives. For example, in the case of marketing surveys (on demand-side data), marketing departments receive instructions from executives and conduct street surveys to gather information on target customer preferences, and then analyze the data to clarify the relationship between cause and effect. These methods are still widely used to conduct surveys in these days. However, due to the explosive proliferation of information technology (IT) in the latter half of the 1990s, individuals are now able to search for and gather information on their own using IT. Incidentally, organizations can now also easily gather vast amounts of information on a variety of customers in the form of data, such as purchase histories. Additionally, infrastructures capable of extracting new knowledge and creating value by performing large-scale analyses on massive amounts of data continue to be improved due to further advancements made in 2010s in the field of IT.
In recent years, this massive amount of data has been generically termed “big data”. There are also cases of decisions being made based on references to correlation analyses which examine the relationship between two factors. This is one of the most optimum statistical-analytical approaches which utilizes big data. Furthermore, in regard to open data the Japanese government announced in May 2013 its “Declaration towards Creating a World-leading IT Nation” as the second Abe cabinet’s new IT strategy. This new IT strategy, which states that the government will provide the public data to the public in a format that allows secondary use, focuses on creating innovation by mutually combining government and corporate data to create new businesses and promote collaboration between public and private sectors. Further utilization of this data continues to change the social systems of the government, public, organizations, and markets. In order to develop personnel capable of supporting the above social systems, the data management creation consortium researches methods for unifying IT, analytics, and design in order to train data scientists to actually implement information strategies that take into account social systems and architects dealing with big data.

Outline of Research Plan

Research

• Research on methods for unifying IT, analytics, and design
• Research on information system concepts for gathering various data
• Research on architecture construction for data processing methods, etc.
• Research on data analysis methods
• Research on personnel capable of utilizing data in organization strategies
• Writing up of case studies
• Creating cases from researching examples of profit and non-profit organizations

Human Resources Development

• Nurturing of data scientists
• Planning training curriculums
• Nurturing of data scientists

Researchers, managers and professors