Lisa Pappas is currently a global product marketing specialist for SAS, focusing on business intelligence and data visualization. While in SAS Research and Development, she led SAS’ accessibility initiative, developing strategies to assess and improve conformance of SAS products to international standards for accessibility (accessibility means usability of technology by people with disabilities). Before joining SAS, Lisa's career in the software industry included engineering project management, web design and development, and technical communication of various genres. She has authored several papers, articles, and scholarly chapters on accessibility, information architecture, and web usability. She was a contributing editor on the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative - Accessible Rich Internet Application (WAI-ARIA) specification. An associate fellow of the Society for Technical Communication (STC), she has received several STC awards including Distinguished Technical Communication in the International Online Communication Competition (1999). A native of North Carolina, Lisa earned her Master of Science in Technical Communication from N.C. State University, with a thesis on socio-linguistics. She is an advocate of public education and volunteers with a charter high school and animal rescue organization.
Business Intelligence is a phrase that means many things to different organizations, which is why all BI vendors have their own definition. The term was coined in 1958 by Hans Peter Luhn of IBM*, who described it as “the ability to apprehend the interrelationships of presented facts in such a
