Several of my recent posts have introduced the need for leveraging a strategic approach to information management backed by industry luminaries such as Gartner. Now it’s time to take a look at our definition of Information Management and discuss how it can be used by IT to effectively manage their information infrastructure and by the business to drive better decisions based on trusted insight.

SAS Information Management provides

…unified technology solutions and strategy and implementation services

…that allow organizations to fully exploit and govern their information assets

…resulting in competitive differentiation and sustained business success.

Ok, that’s a bit of a mouthful, so let’s take a look at what constitutes our approach

• First of all, it’s not just a set of software components or products, it is a set of software-based solutions that are augmented by years of expertise that are delivered as services that span strategy and implementation.
• The scope of the Information Management solution addresses the entire information continuum… not just the data management and governance capabilities that are associated with most vendor approaches. Data is most useful to organizations if it plays a key role in making decisions, decisions based on trusted information. Based on this critical reality, SAS extends the base data management capabilities to support analytics and decision management, providing a complete, strategic information management approach.
• It’s well proven that leveraging analytics can improve business processes, lead to better decision making, identify previously unknown insight, etc. Providing comprehensive analytics management makes it possible for organizations to realize the advantage of advanced analytics. SAS delivers this through an integrated approach that delivers optimal results based on sophisticated analytical models, loads of analytical models, and virtually unlimited number of variables and data volumes. This is only feasible with a strong set of capabilities and analytic disciplines that are integrated from data to decision.
• Ultimately it’s about making better decisions faster than your competitors, which requires the ability to integrate information and analytic services directly in the operational applications, along with event processing, business rules, and workflow support. The SAS Information Management approach provides a closed loop cycle that feeds the result of the information and analytic service back into the process, which results in superior decisions.

Data Management: SAS / DataFlux  provides unified data management capabilities that include data governance, data integration, data quality and MDM

Analytics Management: SAS provides complete analytics management that includes model management, deployment, monitoring and governance of the analytics information asset

Decision Management: SAS provides the ability to easily embed information and analytical results directly in the business process while managing the business rules, workflow and event logic necessary to drive effective decisions

The SAS approach is differentiated from the data management / integration vendors that are solely focused on data. And although the mega-vendors have many of the piece parts, they don’t deliver an integrated, comprehensive solution. This reality leads to the following differentiated value:

• Comprehensive data management capabilities augmented with the power of analytics – SAS Information Management extends a unified set of data management capabilities spanning data integration, data quality, MDM and enterprise data access capabilities with industry leading analytics. This combination of advanced data management capabilities augmented with industry leading analytics drives information efficiencies that lead to business gain.
• Complete solution for IT that allows information and analytical processes to be operationalized with minimal infrastructure and people cost – Organizations are asked to do more with less, which places pressure on IT and the business leaders responsible for managing information and providing analytical results. SAS provides combination of technologies and best practices that streamline the entire analytics and information continuum while providing infrastructure options that effectively leverage scarce computing resources. This approach can help organizations increase the number of decisions that are aided by analytics since additional analytic initiatives can be addressed with minimal resources.
• Facilitates collaboration and governance for key business and IT stakeholders that results in business acceleration – SAS is uniquely positioned from a technology, process, expertise and sales model perspective to positively drive IT and business collaboration that results in business acceleration. Unlike data integration vendors that are primarily focused on providing IT value, SAS bridges business and IT with a broad range of product / technology capability, expertise to establish center of excellence or competency center best practices, and extensive strategy and implementation services based on extensive internal resources and a complementary partner network.
• Flexible infrastructure supports multiple data management scenarios and analytical disciplines leading to greater business agility – SAS Information Management provides the flexibility to support all types of integration scenarios, including both operational and analytical integration scenarios. SAS also provides support for a variety of analytical disciplines based on flexible infrastructure options that supports “total data” analytic scenarios as well as the ability to analytically filter data based on organizational relevance using a stream it, score it, store it approach.
• Ability to accommodate big data, including the ability to extract analytical value from non-traditional data sources such as unstructured text – SAS provides a broad range of capabilities and infrastructure options to support the volume, variety, and velocity associated with big data. This includes rich text processing capabilities that are powered by advanced analytics that allows organizations to extract analytical value from new sources of data such as social media sources that can augment more traditional data sources.
• Comprehensive decision cycle support - SAS provides first mover advantage by driving accurate decisions within your competitors decision window.

Ultimately, it’s about supercharging your data management approach through the power of analytics to drive superior. It’s providing the capabilities and expertise that you need to more easily manage your data as a trusted, valuable information asset and to augment that trusted information with analytics to effectively drive operational and strategic decisions. This can best be achieved by leveraging a comprehensive information management strategy.