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

Yesterday as I was sitting in the SAS Media Day room I was so impressed by the number of journalists from around the world in attendance. I met folks from Poland, Russia, Brazil and the list goes on.

The panel I moderated on optimization was so much fun. I almost missed the count in for the video taping because I was chatting with my fellow presenters who were a treat. Bill Nowicki with the Carolina Hurricanes, Bobby Hull with BGF Industries and Larry Mosiman my Customer Intelligence peer at SAS were on the panel.

James Taylor has already posted a recap of the panel and you can read his highlights from our optimization panel in his post. You can also watch the video .

The SAS Media Day fraud panel was very interesting! I walked away with tidbits that marry up well with Antonia de Medinaceli’s fraud modeling presentation I blogged about last week. Here are my highlights from the Fraud discussion but you can also watch the video.

I am looking forward to tomorrow’s SAS Media Day here on the Cary campus because I get to meet new folks and also reconnect with some familiar faces. One of the speakers tomorrow for the SAS Media Day is Rex Pruitt with PREMIER BankCard who was a speaker at last week’s Predictive Analytics World.

Pruitt’s presentation last week The Development of a "Good Customer Score" for Use in Customer Acquisition, Rewards, Retention and Recovery drove home the value of testing new scoring models before production – this can be used as a proof point with senior executives especially when the value, in this case Good Customer Score (GCS), can potentially be debated or management is risk adverse to adopting a new scoring model.

Just got back from two days at Predictive Analytics World in Washington DC. The event's chairperson, Eric Siegel, has an excellent conference on his hands! The attendees are analytically savvy and are using a variety of approaches to deliver value to organizations. It was a very invigorating couple of days!

I have several highlights to share but I'll start with Keep Winning the Eternal Fraud Battles from Elder Research's Antonia de Medinaceli.

It was a great presentation - and I think there were some very tasty bites that those engaged in perfecting their organization's fraud strategy should consider. What were de Medinaceli's suggestions?

Last week I was in meetings with my peers from around the globe that are experts in the fields of busines intelligence and analytics. I had a great time learning about how customers are using SAS analytics in Sweden, France and other parts of the world but also hearing about the cool software updates coming out that will provide customers NEW capabilities. The world of analytics is going mainstream into business processes and the fabric of organizations that want to make "Competing on Analytics" their reality. If you are energized at the thought of learning from leading analytics experts from fields such as data mining, forecasting, operational research and statistical analysis, then GET THEE to DENMARK July 1-2!

I've been away in London for a fantastic vacation and came back to focus some time on training with my peers in the SAS Global Analytics Network for the past week. I have a wonderful blog post I'm working on about the ultimate customer experience I had in London (it has to do with Gordon Ramsay and a bar).

Since I got back home, I've been in sessions learning about the latest developments from SAS for Bayesian analysis, model management, econometrics and sentiment analysis.

So apologies for the hiatus from the blog-o-sphere. For those of you that Twitter (@tkgeorge), you've seen me pick up the pace in the past week and I just sent out a COOL tweet.

I learned Friday that there is a new SAS Statistical Procedures Forum available so that users can ask questions, share experiences, and thoughts on best practices using the SAS/STAT procedures and other statistical procedures in SAS.

I am so happy we have this new conduit for the SAS statistics community.

There are many valuable SAS Discussion Forums. I often monitor the following forums SAS Forecasting, JMP Software and SAS Integration with Microsoft Office.

Now that I am focusing more on analytics, I am learning about so many resources available including one that I thought provided a nice overview of Bayesian analysis procedures.

I need to get back to my sentiment analysis training and learn more about what's coming from SAS in coming months. VERY EXCITING!

Last week at SAS Global Forum I was so incredibly busy but it's such a wonderful week getting to meet so many folks from around the world and talk with them about how they use our software and how we can continue to help them succeed. Coming back to Cary, I will be on vacation till the 13th on a trip to London - and I want to get at least one Pot Pie post in this week if I can.

However, today is April Fool's day - have you played a trick on someone today?

I am so excited to share this link about SAS on the Wii!!!! Check it out here. All of the Pot Pie Readers know that the purchase of my Wii last summer was life changing.

Of course it's April Fool's Day so .... read the link with that in mind.

My fave? Grand Theft Autoregressive Models

Forecasting. What does it mean to you and your organization? For two days in June here in Cary we'll host the fourth annual F2009 conference so that forecasting professionals who help their organizations plan and compete more effectively can share best practices, attend training sessions and network with folks from around the world.

I was fortunate to attend last year and hear some great panel discussion and presentations. As a matter of fact Dr. Anne Robinson from Cisco whose presentation I summarized from the Gartner BI Summit last week was a speaker at last year's F2008. I've blocked these two days in ORANGE on my calendar!

Here are all the details.

This time next week SAS Global Forum (#SGF09) will be in full swing as the opening night session jump starts three days of incredible classes. I have been planning my agenda with a great deal of care since I am taking on a more analytics flavored role at SAS.

Agenda building is now OFFICIALLY in process!

Fortunately I happened to get a link to Maura Stoke's summary of five of the SAS analytics presentations at the conference to help me make some of my decisions. Get this, there will be over three dozen SAS and over twenty user presentations focused on analytics over the course of three days! Maura had some great suggestions.

I'll finalize my plans this week but here are three I'm definitely attending and I'll share more of them with you later this week.

• I am definitely going to Bob Rodriguez's session Methods, Models and More: New Analyses Available with SAS/STAT 9.2.

• Dashboard Reports for Predictive Model Management: Now more than ever empowering executives and other decision makers with the insights from predictive analytics is a differentiator - that often touted evidence based decision making. This particular session will focus on how you can deliver the insights from predictive models via dashboards so that action can be taken - putting the insights in context to the decision maker's day! (Ah the marriage of BI and predictive analytics - Pot Pie nirvana )

• Setting Up the Marketing Plans for Lotte Department Store: This should be a great presentation about how to use data mining to develop marketing plans that "nurture potential VIP customers". Based on the abstract, the presenters will look at the existing market plan methodology and will examine the weaknesses. Then they will compare that to a different approach using data mining.

I will be live blogging next week from SAS Global Forum. Are you going? If so, I hope we get a chance to meet - and there will be a Tweet Up. I'm not sure of the details, but will keep you posted!

Just got back from our first SAS employee Tweet Up - we had 13 folks attend and we had a great time. Everyone is looking forward to catching up with customers and friends at SAS Global Forum (#SGF09) in just a few weeks.

Here's a quick bite for you this afternoon.

Right before I left for lunch, I read an awesome interview with SAS analytics expert (and my boss) Anne Milley on Smart Data Collective. It's part one of Ajay Ohri's two part interview.

Ohri asks Milley about careers in science, challenges for an established versus startup technology vendor and how SAS analytics have maintained market share for so many years.

My favorite quote from Milley,

"At the end of the day, innovation is the only sustainable competitive advantage... A while back, SAS used to stand for “Statistical Analysis System.” If not literally, then philosophically, Analytics remains our middle name."

I always enjoy seeing highlights from PriceWaterhouseCoopers annual global CEO survey. The most recent 2009 survey found that CEO confidence is at the bottom of the barrell. Only 21% of CEOs are confident about revenue growth in 2009 and that is down 50% from last year's survey.

What a difference a year makes, huh? Marry that up with the latest Imperative of Analytics research from Accenture in today's Information Management newsletter and I see a future of positive possibilities thanks to analytics and open attitudes toward evidence based decision making.

Let's explore more...

I was in a fun meeting with our publication folks this morning and found out about a great free guide available for the programmers out there coming to SAS from SPSS.

Of course you do not have to program to use SAS since we also have other point and click and highly visual ways to explore your data, but if you are a programmer at heart who is new to SAS from SPSS, here is something cool!

This handy Primer "Coming to SAS from SPSS: A Programming Approach" explains terminology used and differences you'll experience moving from SPSS to the SAS environment. This is a free download from our site.

You can also download the primer for your Kindle 2 - if you are high tech like that.

Speaking of the Kindle, I read a great review from David Pogue of the Kindle 2 - I Twittered about a while back. Sorely tempted! Do you have one? Do you love it?

Anne Milley has posted her highlights from day two of Predictive Analytics World last week.

I was just in a meeting with Anne I got to hear more about Andreas Weigend's presentation. As per Anne's post, the former Chief Scientist at Amazon kicked off his presentation by asking the audience what the bottlenecks were to doing analytics. The answers from the audience included:

Data Integration
Mentality of some people.
Data quality.
IT.
Communication.
Documentation about what the data means.

My favorite response "Mentality of some people". Understanding is key and I think that reporting (or Business Intelligence) where you can provide contextual analytics to non-analytically savvy business folks in ways that mean something to them will help overcome some of the barriers.

Of course this statement could mean a variety of things - but we often see that translation from your analytics experts can easily be facilitated for the business when delivered in meaningful ways (via dashboards, in a report, using visualization best practices).

I found another blog post today about this well attended event (wow, in this economy it does show the keen interest in predictive analytics). Dennis R. Mortensen said this is now one of his must-attend events.

I wonder when the next Predictive Analytics World will be? If I hear more, will keep you posted.

Starting to see some coverage from Predictive Analytics World today and can't wait to chat with Anne Milley about her keynote and the sessions she attended.

I saw the survey results that Predictive Analytics World released a week or so ago about current and future use of predictive analytics. A nice benchmark to publish before the conference - and it has some interesting insights that received some press.

Our sascom Magazine editor, Alison, captured key highlights from the Analytics 101 Webcast this morning. I had a division meeting at the same time or I would have tuned in with bells on. Tonya Balan was the presenter and is a statistician who can explain analytics in very understandable ways.

Check out Alison's key Analytics 101 takeaways from Tonya's presentation. Looks like during Q&A time someone asked, "How do I get my org to use analytics?"

Answer: Focus. Look for a problem you have the data to solve, get results.

This reminds me of one of my favorite movies, What About Bob. Baby steps.

Analytics can be a loaded term because BI vendors, analysts and classically trained statisticians all have different answers.

At the business benefit level, it means different approaches to answer practically any question, surface hidden opportunities and hone a competitive differentiator to perfection. It's not just one technique and different folks need analytics integrated into their business processes in different ways.

So how do we break down analytics at the highest level so it's an easy to understand for those of us who aren't business analysts or statisticians? What kind of benefits could I derive from each of these areas like forecasting or data mining?

Tune in to the February 17 Web seminar, Analytics 101 at 11AM ET.

This will be a great primer on the spectrum of analytics that are available such as statistics, predictive modeling, text analytics, forecasting and optimization.