Data overload is one of the biggest problems in business today. Companies are awash in data, both structured and unstructured, generated from myriad computer and communications systems. And there appears to be no end in sight. A recent report on Roche Pharmaceuticals, for example, published in Manufacturing Executive, MA’s sister publication, revealed that Roche has two petabytes of data under active management, a volume that is growing at 60% per year.

Roche is far from alone. Nearly all companies are experiencing explosions in data volume. IBM, for example, estimates that computing systems are generating 15 petabytes of new information every day, which it claims is eight times more than all of the information in all of the libraries in the U.S. (A petabyte, according to Wikipedia, is one quadrillion bytes, or 100 terabytes. Numerically, it is 1,000,000,000,000,000). This uncontrolled growth has resulted, paradoxically, in productivity problems in companies as people struggle to deal with the growing tide. In addition, decision-making has gotten harder as companies try to make sense of it all.

So it is no surprise that the technology called business intelligence, also known under the broader categorization of business performance management, is a hot ticket these days for many companies. Analytical tools that can help separate the wheat from the chaff are at the top of IT purchase lists.

As a result, there is a growing market for people with the skills to effectively use these tools and manage the business issues associated with them. Hoping to capitalize on this need, IBM and Fordham University 0n Wednesday said they are collaborating on the development of a business analytics curriculum to help prepare college students for careers in a variety of industries that will be big users of these tools.

Fordham’s Schools of Business is introducing a course called Business Analytics for Managers that will be based on IBM technology (IBM, of course, owns Cognos, one of the market leaders in business intelligence technology). Beginning in the spring of next year, IBM said, Fordham students will be able to obtain training in BI, data analytics, data warehousing, data mining, dashboards and scorecards, and online analytical processing (OLAP) techniques. Students will also be able to learn about managerial decision making and how analytics technology can improve such functions as marketing, sales, finance, business development, human resources, and manufacturing.

Will industry–academia collaboration of this kind help get the data explosion under control? Probably not, but it will give more people the skills to deal with its effects. And that’s a good thing.