Leo Sadovy currently manages the Analytics Thought Leadership Program at SAS, enabling SAS’ thought leaders in being a catalyst for conversation and in sharing a vision and opinions that matter via excellence in storytelling that address our clients’ business issues. Previously at SAS Leo handled marketing for Analytic Business Solutions such as performance management, manufacturing and supply chain. Before joining SAS, he spent seven years as Vice-President of Finance for a North American division of Fujitsu, managing a team focused on commercial operations, alliance partnerships, and strategic planning. Prior to Fujitsu, Leo was with Digital Equipment Corporation for eight years in financial management and sales. He started his management career in laser optics fabrication for Spectra-Physics and later moved into a finance position at the General Dynamics F-16 fighter plant in Fort Worth, Texas. He has a Masters in Analytics, an MBA in Finance, a Bachelor’s in Marketing, and is a SAS Certified Data Scientist and Certified AI and Machine Learning Professional. He and his wife Ellen live in North Carolina with their engineering graduate children, and among his unique life experiences he can count a singing performance at Carnegie Hall.
COVID-19 has upset nearly every prediction and business plan for 2020 across the planet. Making predictions for 2021 may seem like a fool’s errand at this point, but many trends and consequences are already obvious and emerging from the global pandemic. The last global pandemic of this magnitude, the Spanish
For Climate Month I thought I’d research something on the positive side of the equation. My last two climate posts were a bit gloomy, as they focused on greenhouse gasses and ocean acidification. Instead we’re going to tackle a product adoption issue related to the climate: When might the United
Where in your business process can analytics and AI play a contributing role in enhancing your decision making capability? At the information interpretation stage. As a framework for understanding where analytic and AI opportunities may arise, the simple diagram below illustrates the relationships between data, information and knowledge, and how
It is a generally accepted maxim in business that you can’t cost-cut your way to success. Growth requires attention to the top line, which in turn is largely driven by innovation. Applying analytics to improving innovation suffers from the same lack of direction as does Analytics for strategy, but with
“Ocean acidification is sometimes referred to as global warming's equally evil twin.” ~ Elizabeth Kolbert This is the second post in my two-part series about climate change. You can read part 1 of this series here. When engaging in data exploration for insights, it’s good practice to start with a
“The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.” ~ William Gibson, author The same can be said for climate change – global warming is here, in a big way, but its effects are still an arm's length away for many of us. How is climate change
If you're looking for advice on developing an analytics strategy, there's no shortage of resources, including this from SAS: Building your data and analytics strategy. If, on the other hand, you're looking for advice on how to apply analytics to strategic planning, your search has likely to come up wanting.
“They were the best of asteroids, they were the worst of asteroids.” ~ Charles Dickens Armstrong There are good asteroids, and there are bad asteroids. Good asteroids stay in their own neighborhoods and wait for us to come visit them. Bad asteroids, however, don’t wait for an invitation – they
By now you’ve seen the headlines and the hype proclaiming data as the new oil. The well-meaning intent of these proclamations is to cast data in the role of primary economic driver for the 21st century, just as oil was for the 20th century. As analogies go, it’s not too
There is one equation every retail store, call center, traffic, airport or hospital manager should know by heart. No, it’s not E = mc². The one I had in mind is this: W = 1 / (μ – λ) It may not look like much, but it can mean the
What’s the most important component of analytic analysis? The data? The model? The deployment? Getting the business problem right? All the above? Or does it simply depend on who you ask? While the model gets all the attention, and the data requires most of the effort, there is that step
Andy Dufresne, the wrongly convicted character in The Shawshank Redemption, provocatively asks the prison guard early in the film: “Do you trust your wife?” It’s a dead serious question regarding avoiding taxes on a recent financial windfall that had come the guard's way, and leads to events that eventually win
US health care costs are the highest in the developed world, despite per-capita healthcare spending roughly double that of the others, but with outcomes worse-or-equal-to comparable countries. A 2014 Commonwealth Fund study ranked the United States 11th out of 11 major industrial nations in overall healthcare. An aging population is
Will the IoT live up to the hype? Yes. A most resounding YES. In fact, it will exceed the hype, because we don't even know all the IoT possibilities yet. We don’t know what we don’t know, and that lack of imagination limits even our hype. Where we are with
If you’ve got SAS running within your organization, which is likely considering that over 90 percent of the largest global firms have SAS, you’ve probably been hearing a lot about SAS® Viya™, which drives many of the latest enhancements of the SAS platform. But amidst all the talk about microservices
You have all seen, or perhaps even created, some really bad graphics: Cluttered, confusing, too small, incomprehensible. Or worse, the author may have committed one of the three unforgivable sins of data visualization by deceptively distorting a map, truncating the axis so as to misrepresent the data, or used double
Let me make this clear right from the start: I needed to answer 44 of the 62 exam questions correctly to earn my BASE SAS Programmer certification, and I got exactly 44 right. No margin of error. I never thought I’d be proud of a 70%, but I’m more than
The “big” part of big data is about enabling insights that were previously indiscernible. It's about uncovering small differences that make a big difference in domains as widespread as health care, public health, marketing and business process optimization, law enforcement and cybersecurity – and even the detection of new subatomic particles.
I sometimes feel bad about being born. Not so much the actual event, mind you, just the timing. I was born during what should have been my mother’s last year of college. At many colleges in those days, when a woman got married, she was forced to move out of
You’ve likely heard the news that the Google DeepMind “AlphaGo” computer not only beat a human expert at the game of Go, defeating the European Go champion, Fan Hui in five straight games, but also beat the reigning world champion grandmaster, South Korea’s Lee Sedol, 4 games to 1. Go
Do you like a good horror story? Then may I suggest “Future Crimes” by Marc Goodman. When it comes to this genre, Wes Craven, John Carpenter and Stephen King have got nothing on Goodman, primarily because Goodman’s story is non-fiction. Scene 1: The present – Your workstation or data center Whether
When the likes of Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking go on record warning about the dangers of AI, it’s probably prudent to take notice. However, before rushing off into full panic mode, some definitions and perspective would be in order. The type of artificial intelligence Musk and Hawking are referring
Like most boys my age at that time, I wanted to be an astronaut. Fate, however, intervened, in the form of nearsightedness, so I had to find an alternative occupation. Coming to my rescue for the launch of Apollo 11 was my father, who presented me with a huge booklet that broke
There’s more than one way to make a poor decision. Bad data, inappropriate assumptions and flawed logic are just three of the missteps you can take on your climb up the Ladder of Inference, a concept first developed by Chris Argyris, professor of business at Harvard, in 1974, and later popularized
What is information? The lack of a working definition plagued both science and the emerging telecommunications industry until the arrival of Claude Shannon and his famous 1948 paper, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”, based on his cryptography work during WWII while at Bell Labs. The landmark article is considered the
Having a mentor is the number one factor in increasing the steepness of your personal learning curve. So says my oldest, Garik, a Park Scholar at North Carolina State University (class of 2012), during a discussion he recently had with the incoming Park Scholar class of 2019. To accept the
Big data, by which most people mean Big Volume, doesn’t get you very far just by itself, but with the addition of Big Variety and analytics, now you’re talking. In fact, most organizations who are making headway into capitalizing on their data assets now refer to the process as "big
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, the trouble is I don't know which half.” ~ John Wanamaker, U.S. department store magnate and merchandising / advertising pioneer. I’m not going to claim that I can pinpoint exactly which half of your marketing dollars are wasted in the space
With all the hype over big data we often overlook the importance of modeling as its necessary counterpart. There are two independent limiting factors when it comes to decision support: the quality of the data, and the quality of the model. Most of the big data hype assumes that the data
Why visualization? Several reasons, actually, the most compelling being that sometimes visualization literally solves the problem for you. I remember an exercise in eighth grade English class where we were asked to describe, in words only, an object set in front of us with sufficient clarity such that our classmates,
