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I recently had the opportunity to attend the VA Governor’s Education Summit “Innovate to Educate” was the theme throughout the summit. Speakers and panelists discussed both the challenges we face in today’s schools across America as well as innovative ideas and best practices being implemented in an effort to raise
I love to teach SAS programming and in this blog, I hope to share best practices, tips, tricks and answer some frequently asked questions by our SAS users. I’m constantly learning more nuances of SAS and more programming languages like SQL. Why the interest in language? As you probably know,
In a classic Saturday Night Live skit back in the 70s, Dan Aykroyd portrays a man promoting his book about being mauled by a bear. Aykroyd says, “I want to emphasize – Never feed a marshmallow to a grizzly bear like this” He places a marshmallow partly in his mouth
This post is about an estimate, but not the statistical kind. It also provides yet another example in which the arithmetic mean is not the appropriate measure for a computation. First, some background. Last week I read a blog post by Peter Flom that reminded me that it is wrong
Let's pretend for a moment that you don't have SAS installed on all of your office computers. But you've got some great content locked away inside SAS data sets. Is there a way to get to the content of that data, without having to push the data through a SAS
Today I'm in San Diego at the 2010 meeting of the Western Users of SAS Software (WUSS). I am giving several presentations on SAS/IML and SAS/IML Studio: A tutorial workshop on SAS/IML Studio for the SAS/STAT User. The material in this tutorial is a small sampling of Chapters 4–11 of
This is the second in my two-post interview series with Gert Laursen and Jesper Thorlund, authors of the book, Business Analytics for Managers: Taking Business Intelligence Beyond Reporting. Part one covered data visualization and the cross-functional purpose of business analytics. Here, we talk about analytic talent, measuring innovation and educating
In this blog and in the book Statistical Programming with SAS/IML Software, I present tips and techniques for writing efficient SAS/IML programs for data analysis, simulation, matrix computations, and other topics of interest to statistical programmers. When I was writing my book, one of the reviewers commented that he wasn’t
Many forecasting software packages support hierarchical forecasting. You define the hierarchical relationship of your products and locations, create forecasts at one or more levels, and then reconcile the forecasts across the full hierarchy. In a top-down approach, you generate forecasts at the highest level and apportion it down to lower
How can you change a programming trick into a programming treat? Try this algorithm: If you develop a clever snippet of code, squirrel it away. This snippet is a "trick." If you use the trick a second time, copy and modify the code. The trick has become a "treat." If
More than 30 Premier Business Leadership Series attendees gathered for a roundtable discussion of social media in retail. "Is Your Company Antisocial? How to Effectively Engage Consumers Through Social Media and Mobility," was hosted by Michelle Thomas, Senior Brand Marketing Manager at Zappos. She was joined by Lori Schafer and
When Chris Brogan started his social media marketing agency New Marketing Labs, he stated that he would only work with Fortune 100 companies. He had no clients at the time, but lo and behold, Fortune 100 companies came calling. Now the agency’s client list includes Sony, Microsoft, PepsiCo, all of
How do you maintain a local feel in a central organization of 810 department stores in 45 states? Speaking at The Premier Business Leadership Series in Las Vegas, Steve Nevill, Executive Vice President of Inventory Management and Support for Macy’s.shared how the retailer (which had $23.5 billion in sales in
Organizations have massive amounts of data at their disposal, yet they often fail to utilize it in any meaningful way. But analytics is enabling many firms to aggressively use their data in key business processes with impressive results. You have more information at hand about your business than ever before,
Jim Davis, SAS CMO’s keynote address at the Premier Business Leadership Series this morning was about anticipating and managing change, including these six questions all organizations need to ask: Where should we leverage business analytics? Any part of a business can benefit, but the payoff is greatest where you are