As many of you have already noticed, my LinkedIn profile and the blog profile blurb have changed. I took on an exciting new job in the SAS Solutions OnDemand team. The official title is Software Development Manager, but what I really do is lead a team of fraud solution architects. Observant readers have already asked what this fraud stuff is about and more importantly (grin) if my career move changes my blog's SAS Business Intelligence focus.

Last week, within all of the Fortune Best Place to Work announcements there were specific references on SAS anti-fraud growth. SAS CEO Dr. Jim Goodnight mentioned to the NY Times that the increase in fraud is likely attributed to the recession. At the same time, the recession has also caused governments and industry to focus on fighting fraud as well as reducing the abuse and waste. Jim Davis stated that this was one of the biggest growth areas for SAS in 2011, with a 121% revenue increase. From our customer's standpoint, implementations of the SAS Fraud Framework have returned significant value on their investments.

Step 1. Integrating Data

One of the biggest strengths of SAS software is the ability to read data from a huge number of sources. A recent award for CJLEADS (another product created by SAS Solutions OnDemand) highlights this capability by combining county and state level data across multiple agencies into an enterprise criminal justice information system. To fight fraud, we have to employ the same data integration strengths because data is quite frequently disparate and disorganized. If we waited for a central data warehouse before running analytical models, it might be an additional year (or more) to demonstrate true value. My team of SAS developer rock stars pulls all of the available data from your organization together and prepares it for our in-house analysts.

Step 2. Applying Advanced Analytics

Statisticians in our Advanced Analytic Lab then crunch, slice, model (etc etc) the data to help your organization discover fraud previously hidden below the radar of your known business rules and anomaly detection checks. With the additional forecasting and social network analysis SAS provides the unique look into data relationships.

Step 3. Displaying Alerts and Capturing Findings

This is where my star team comes back into focus. We then create and implement resulting reports for display within the SAS Social Network Analysis web application browser. The technology behind most of this is SAS Stored Processes with additional reports available through the SAS Business Intelligence clients Web Report Studio and BI Dashboard.

So yes, I will continue to post SAS Business Intelligence topics here. Hopefully some of the topics will be even more interesting!