BI and the Chicken Pot Pie - Everyday Recipes for Business Intelligence and Performance Improvement

This is a true story about how I found the Enterprise Intelligence Platform (EIP) in a chicken pot pie.

America's Test Kitchen (produced by the amazing folks at Cook's Illustrated) explored the lovely world of chicken pot pies recently. You know, the kind of delicious buttery chicken treats like this. Well, if you aren't familiar with the folks from Cook's, they produce an amazing publication that systematically (think Consumer Reports) perfect the best recipes, recommend the ultimate cooking products, etc. with a precision and process that is mind boggling. Add in the magazine's world class illustrations to the mix and you have a publication worthy of coffee table display.

I digress.

Buttery, flakey pie crust, chicken, veggies and "secret sauce" that binds it all together in a lovely warm bundle. How could I look at something like that and make the segue to the Enterprise Intelligence Platform? It's easy.

Let me break it down.

The creamy " sauce that joins together in perfect harmony the chicken and veggies is the common metadata layer and our SAS(R)9 architecture.

It's the glue that runs throughout the pie. The secret sauce is incredibly important and is our unsung hero that really can make the pie awful, or the best treat ever. It integrates all the ingredients! Plus, the sauce is also is a lot like our Intelligence Storage because it is optimized for the best consistency and texture to keep the veggies and chicken clinging to the fork.

The chicken is data integration.

Now, without chicken, you have no chicken pot pie. You have to have chicken. And it HAS to be the optimum, plump, scrumptious, "as close to perfect chicken" that you can find. Chicken that. though distributed in different places in the pie, is consistently chopped/sliced/cooked and blended. You have data (chicken). You need to know where data is, you need to be able to access it, cleanse it, define it, optimize it. Chicken and secret sauce are great, but what happens when you kick it up a notch.

The veggies and spices are the amazing analytics capabilities.

Here our choices are bountiful and our veggies are *THE BEST*. The spices work to add flavor to the pie, the kick. Where do you want to take your pie? The veggies let you go down so many roads. I can add potatoes, corn, peas, carrots. I can explore all the possibilities of what is going to work well with my chicken. And as you know, SAS has the ULTIMATE ability to explore the possibilties. Combinations of veggies that you never expected would be lovely, varying amounts of one thing over another to see how it comes out. We can play here, we work better than anyone here and we make our pie UNIQUE here. Our secret sauce is consistent cause we mastered it. Our chicken is optimal and poised for greatness. The veggies, the extras, let us create a MASTERPIECE.

So how do we share this fantastic symphony of flavors.

The crust, the pie is business intelligence.

Business intelligence is a presentation layer - and that's my focus here at SAS. I worry about the buttery golden color, the slits that let the steam escape, the ability to hold all the cool stuff on the inside in and make it irresistible on the outside of the pie. And I need to be able to present the pie to you in the way you want it. For example, you may want the Swanson's pie in a little tin that you heat up in a toaster oven, or you may envision your pie to be something "fancy" with just a top crust and served in Italian stoneware. It's all about what you want, and we have to deliver the contents the way you want it.

That's the pie as I found it that Sunday afternoon. And I swear, this is a true story.