any factors go into your strategic global business decisions, from the physical placement of factories and distribution centers, to your choice of suppliers and partners, to your target markets and the business model itself. Businesses have a choice of fundamental global go-to-market investment strategies, from direct foreign investment on the one
I'm a huge Star Wars fan. I got chills when I saw the trailer for The Force Awakens! Last year for SAS Global Forum, I wrote a paper called Star Wars and the Art of Data Science. I explored the scripts from the original Star Wars trilogy (A New Hope,
If you’re one of the hundreds of SAS users registered for PharmaSUG, scheduled for May 17-20 in Orlando, you should give extending your stay some serious thought. In just a few hours, you can set yourself apart with a professional certification from SAS! SAS is offering something no theme park
I read an interesting article recently that suggested analyst and data scientist job positions may be on the way out. The author argued that analytics are being incorporated more and more heavily into operational systems, making “analytic capabilities” more readily accessible to business users without the involvement of a data scientist. Being a data
In April, the free trial of SAS Data Loader for Hadoop became available globally. Now, you can take a test drive of our new technology designed to increase the speed and ease of managing data within Hadoop. The downloads might take a while (after all, this is big data), but I think you’ll
Did you know that if you have set multiple titles in SAS, that there is an easy way to remove them? For example, suppose that you've written the following statements, which call the TITLE statement to set three titles: title "A Great Big Papa Title"; title2 "A Medium-sized Mama Title";
The Boulder, The Cliff, and The Baby Imagine you are faced with this very urgent problem: A large boulder is teetering on the edge of a cliff, at the bottom of which sits a baby, at risk of being crushed. How do you solve this problem? One solution for the
We’re celebrating the student in all of us and you’re invited. Email us a photo of yourself or your fav SAS user learning SAS. Send it to sastraining@sas.com. You can also Tweet us your best shot using #SASworldclass Our planet-friendly training is available worldwide, wherever you may be. Show us
With the recent introduction of the Protecting American Talent and Entrepreneurship (PATENT Act), the US Senate set aside partisan politics to take on a problem that plagues all industries, but especially high-tech. In front of Congress, in the media and in a previous blog post, I have decried the current
It’s an incredibly exciting time for data science. Just ask Jake Porway, former New York Times Data Scientist and now CEO of DataKind, who opened his April 28 SAS Global Forum keynote by asking busy conference goers to pause and reflect on the revolutionary times we are living in. “Cell phones
Data governance and data virtualization can become powerful allies. The word governance is not be understood here as a law but more as a support and vision for business analytics application. Our governance processes must become agile the same way our business is transforming. Data virtualization, being a very versatile
As the age old idiom goes, the early bird gets the worm and the early adopter gets the break. New technologies give clear advantages to those organisations that figure out before their early-adopting competitors how to use them effectively, an advantage that recedes as others catch up, and the technology
In the last post, we talked about creating the requirements for the data analytics, and profiling the data prior to load. Now, let’s consider how to filter, format and deliver that data to the analytics application. Filter – the act of selecting the data of interest to be used in the
Suppose that you compute the correlation matrix (call it R1) for a set of variables x1, x2, ..., x8. For some reason, you later want to compute the correlation matrix for the variables in a different order, maybe x2, x1, x7,..., x6. Do you need to go back to the
We’ve all heard the old saw, “If you torture data long enough, eventually it will confess to something.” But when it comes to spurring real change, how about ditching the dungeon-master act and thinking like a venture capitalist instead? Wouldn’t that pay bigger dividends? That was the tip from Ravi
“What we do to our children they will do to society.” Greek philosopher Pliny the Elder said that more than 2,000 years ago, and it’s just as true today. In 2013, more than 600,000 children in the US were confirmed victims of maltreatment in the home, according to U.S. Department
In the era of big data, we collect, prepare, manage, and analyze a lot of data that is supposed to provide us with a better picture of our customers, partners, products, and services. These vast data murals are impressive to behold, but in painting such a broad canvas, these pictures
The SAS Business Knowledge Series now offers an online version of the "Forecast Value Added Analysis" course, taught via live web in two afternoon sessions, May 7-8. The instructor is my colleague Chip Wells, who expanded our original 1/2 day FVA workshop with new material, examples, and exercises based on his
The Institute of Business Forecasting's FVA blog series continued on March 2, with my interview of Steve Morlidge of CatchBull. Steve's research (and his articles in Foresight) have been a frequent subject of BFD blog posts over the last couple of years (e.g. The "Avoidability of Forecast Error (4 parts),
I've seen a lot of recent news articles purporting income inequality in the U.S. ("the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer") ... and I wondered if the graphs were a true/unbiased representation of the data. For example, I recently saw a couple of graphs in an article on the
One area that often gets overlooked when building out a new data analytics solution is the importance of ensuring accurate and robust data definitions. This is one of those issues that is difficult to detect because unlike a data quality defect, there are no alarms or reports to indicate a
A colleague and I were looking for a good example of how analysts used to use graphics to report data, a data visualization before and after, so to speak. We needed a good "before" screenshot for a “before and after” comparison for our SAS Global Forum 2015 paper, Visualizing Clinical Trial Data.
Sometimes different communities use the same name for different objects. To a soldier, "boots" are rugged, heavy, high-top foot coverings. To a soccer (football) player, "boots" are lightweight cleats. So it is with the term "waterfall plot." To researchers in the medical field, a "waterfall plot" is a sorted bar
I remember the first time I was faced with the challenge of parallelizing a DATA step process. It was 2001 and SAS V8.1 was shiny and new. We were processing very large data sets, and the computations performed on each record were quite complex. The processing was crawling along on
I'm not just talking about all the energy put in planning, scheduling, and supporting this great event, which is in Dallas, TX next week, April 26-29. I'm talking about all the presentations about using analytics in energy related industries, particularly in Utilities and in Oil and Gas. There is a
I recently spoke with John Cassara, a former U.S. Intelligence Officer and Treasury Special Agent, about the growing concern over trade-based money laundering (TBML) and how we can combat it. John retired after a 26-year career in the federal government intelligence and law enforcement communities. He's an expert in anti-money
Editor Len Tashman's Preview of the Spring issue of Foresight The Special Feature article of this 37th issue of Foresight – From Sales and Operations Planning to Business Integration – comes about through a rare but effective collaboration between an academic and a practitioner. The coauthors are Mark Moon, head
The SAS Training and Certification groups are excited to participate in SAS Global Forum 2015! We’ll have a booth in the Quad where you can stop by to ask questions, talk to your favorite instructor and register to win an iPad! We offer courses on almost every SAS product so to
When I visit with customers or potential clients, they often ask, "Where should I start in order to get a handle on my supply chain?" There is no clear and concise answer, but I usually say "Follow the inventory!" Inventory is a result of decisions made, not the cause. When you
Well, folks, I think it’s time to hang up my harness. Since 2008, I’ve navigated the pathways of SAS, visited some great places throughout North America, and taken the best care I could of my friend Ed. But 7 years is a long time (especially in dog-years). So I’m graciously
