Alumnus uses data to drive company's communications strategy

Nandkishor Patil

Degree: Rutgers Master of Information Technology and Analytics

The job he landed: Senior analytics consultant at CVS Health, New York.

His day-to-day: Business teams at CVS Health develop content to promote ideas and thoughts on healthcare issues. The content is distributed on social media channels, websites and through partnerships. Patil works with teams that analyze data. “I don’t work directly with the data,” he said. “My focus is on the strategic implementation of data analytics. My job is to use the analytics to determine what’s working and what’s not, and what can be done better for the next campaign.”

Before the program: He worked for two years as a software engineer and business analyst. “I decided that because of how the industry was evolving, having the specific knowledge of analytics represented an opportunity. In my previous job, I worked on developing solutions for my clients,” Patil said. “To get to the specificity of the solutions, I needed to understand analytics so I could help make the solutions more effective.”

How the program prepared him for his work: “My undergraduate degree is a technical degree. I wanted to be able to sit with managers, so I wanted to have a graduate degree from a business school. Most of the courses I took – six of them – were MBA classes in management, product innovation and digital strategy. A class in 'Management of Innovation Technology' taught me how to leverage digital technology. The knowledge I got in that class helped me to get this job.”

Data this and data that – Is our emphasis on data overblown: “No, no. It may sound overblown, but the importance of data are the insights we can gain from it. In my opinion, there’s still a gap between the data we have and what we expect we will be able to infer from it.”

- Susan Todd