My summer reading selection: Process improvement anyone?

Rachel Alt-Simmons
Rachel Alt-Simmons|July 18, 2011

I am one of those rare people that enjoys process; not rigid process and military-like discipline, but order. Wasted effort drives me insane. I’ve been on projects all through my career where I feel like the project teams are constantly reinventing the wheel, because nobody bothered to capture any documentation [...]

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Visualize your thoughts with a mind map!

Rachel Alt-Simmons
Rachel Alt-Simmons|June 22, 2011

I have recently discovered “mind mapping.” Mind mapping is not a new concept, but since I (re)learned it, I’ve found it to be an excellent tool for analyzing business problems and processes. I thought you might find it interesting too! Here’s an example: The other day, I was thinking about [...]

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Making the jump to visual thinking

Rachel Alt-Simmons
Rachel Alt-Simmons|June 20, 2011

The SAS office in New York City has one of the best views in the city. Sitting on the 47th floor of a skyscraper on 7th Avenue, the Executive Briefing Room overlooks Central Park and it has a highly distracting view – especially on such a nice sunny day. What [...]

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SAS and JMP: “You got your chocolate in my peanut butter!!!”

Rachel Alt-Simmons
Rachel Alt-Simmons|April 18, 2011

Remember the old Reese’s peanut butter cup advertisement? Two people are walking down the street – one eating peanut butter, the other chocolate – they run into each other and the chocolate and the peanut butter get mixed up. They sample the new concoction and marvel at the wonderful mixture [...]

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Trouble with user adoption? Find a buddy!

Rachel Alt-Simmons
Rachel Alt-Simmons|December 9, 2010

If you’re like most large organizations, you’ve got a bunch of business intelligence and analytic applications at your fingertips. In my prior organization, a large insurance company, I believe the magic number of tools that the organization had to support was north of 40. No kidding. Now, this is a [...]

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To code or not to code, that is the question...

Rachel Alt-Simmons
Rachel Alt-Simmons|December 6, 2010

A professional acquaintance and an expert in statistics once told me that if you don’t understand how to perform the process of analytics through programming – the creation of the data flow, the transformation of the variables and the development of the statistical procedure – then you had no business [...]

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Semi-live blogging MWSUG, featuring Jon Weisz

Alison Bolen
Alison Bolen|October 12, 2009

I’m listening to Jon Weisz, marketing director for JMP, talk about data-driven story telling. He’s explaining the differences between statistics and data visualization. Statistics are often used to confirm a hypothesis, he says. Data visualization is used for exploration. Jon’s defining models as approximations: “We’re attempting to experiment and determine [...]

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Live from MWSUG, featuring John Sall

Alison Bolen
Alison Bolen|October 11, 2009

I’m posting this live from the Midwest SAS User’s Group (MWSUG) in downtown Cleveland, Ohio. Attendees are eating dinner, and we’re about to hear John Sall, Executive Vice President of SAS, talk about the history of the company he co-founded along with Jim Goodnight, Tony Barr and Jen Helwig in [...]

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Visualize Whirled Peas?

Mike Nemecek
Mike Nemecek|December 19, 2008

Saw an interesting Tweet (a post on Twitter) from investor and writer Paul Kedrosky today: “geeks only: five best data visualization projects of the year http://is.gd/cwIk” The link takes you to the FlowingData blog (created by a PhD statistics student in NY), and a post on some amazing examples of [...]

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Visualize our newest data visualization products

Alison Bolen
Alison Bolen|June 1, 2007

Take a peak at the SAS BI Dashboard here, via the Enterprise Dashboard Spy. Or go to the JMP site to visualize the great new data visualization features in JMP. If you’re a business user, watch this video. If you’re a SAS expert and want to know how to integrate [...]

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