Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard about the budget problems running rampant across all levels of government. Federal, State and Local Governments are all facing historic budget shortfalls due to the economic crisis and decreased tax receipts. This has led to a much closer examination of services
I've blogged before about how to leave comments, why to leave comments and when to leave comments. I've challenged readers to leave one comment a day, to contribute substantively to online conversations and to answer questions or solve problems when commenting on blogs and discussion forums. But there's a different
Just to set the record straight, I’m a programmer who loves to write code. While SAS Enterprise Guide (EG) does make reporting easier, this time it’s not the displays that caught my eye. EG won this round hands down for ease of use to summarize data. This blog post will
On March 28 I had the pleasure of moving to our new office building on the scenic SAS campus in Cary, NC. This aesthetic and functional structure houses the sales, marketing, and SAS executive management offices, as well as a generously appointed Executive Briefing Center for hosting our visiting customers.
In a previous blog post, I showed how you can use simulation to construct confidence intervals for ranks. This idea (from a paper by E. Marshall and D. Spiegelhalter), enables you to display a graph that compares the performance of several institutions, where "institutions" can mean schools, companies, airlines, or
The popular SAS user networking site sasCommunity.org has announced a new contest called Points for Prizes that you don’t want to miss. Visit their Website for details on how you can earn points by contributing content or code. Three lucky winners will win SAS Press books! Contest rules can be
Back on East Coast time and away from the allure of Vegas’ nightlife, it’s time for a bit of Retail therapy. No … I am not breaking out the credit card for online shopping (yet), but rather a review of my copious notes taken from more than 15 Retail sessions
In today’s changing environment the hype seems to focus on new, updated, latest release, newly developed, cutting edge and so on. With so many new SAS books to choose from, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at our most popular backlist titles (books that were published
By analyzing and organizing taxonomies and tones within social media channels, organizations can better know how to directly market to online customers, says SAS Media Intelligence Director Mark Chaves at SAS Global Forum. Mark said the influence of social media on the consumer-buying process is stronger than ever. More than
I recently returned from a five-day conference in Las Vegas. On the way there, I finally had time to read a classic statistical paper: Bayer and Diaconis (1992) describes how many shuffles are needed to randomize a deck of cards. Their famous result that it takes seven shuffles to randomize
Where can you find an entire school full of students engaged in learning and creativity, and administrators and staff using technology and data to provide a quality education for students? Sound too good to be true? It’s not! It’s happening in Mooresville, North Carolina. Recently a colleague, Becky de Tenley,
Just flew back from Vegas, and boy, are my arms tired! (ba-dump) If you attended SAS Global Forum, you probably learned a lot of things you didn't know. But if you were a SAS employee, you also learned a lot of things you didn't know. One of the perks of
This morning I delivered a talk to visiting high school students at the SAS campus. The topic: using SAS to analyze Twitter content. Being teenagers, high school students are well familiar with Twitter. But this batch of students was also very familiar with SAS, as they all have taken SAS
Besides experiencing a few Elvis sightings, hanging out with Venus poolside, and temporarily joining a Cirque group--I got a chance to meet some really grounded SAS superstars at SAS Global Forum 2011. And since today is my first day back in the office post-conference, I’m revealing a few marquee moments:
Unlike any other software vendor, SAS has one of the most vibrant and engaged user communities in the world. SAS User Groups (SUG), communities formed and managed by SAS users, are in place all over the world. In the US alone we have regional and local SUGs as well as
Social media was an undeniable common theme at this year's SAS Global Forum, infiltrating general sessions, paper presentations, posters and conference attendee engagement. Former editor of this blog, David Thomas, spoke at SAS Global Forum and told attendees that social media may be a phenomenon, but it’s not a fad.
Linking business analytics to economic value is a hard problem. Despite all the smarts that get poured into models, it's hard to tie them to financial measures such as profitability. And, because of that, it's hard to justify investment in analytics. Need headcount? Sorry, try again. Need tools? Sorry, can't
While the first day of the SAS Global Forum Executive Conference focused on the business application of analytics, the second day was dedicated to analytics and IT management. One of the keynote presenters was Erik Brynjolfsson, the Schussel Family Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Erik’s research and
"Convergence after 23 iterations to (1.23, 4.56)." That's the message that I want to print at the end of a program. The problem, of course, is that when I write the program, I don't know how many iterations an algorithm requires nor the value to which an algorithm converges. How
In this panel discussion, a diverse group of companies from different industries are finding profitable growth opportunities through analytics. We’re joined by: Jim Foreman, Director of Circulation Analytic, Staples Halina Karachuk, VP Innovation, AXA Equitable Life Barb Buettin, Director, CRM – Enterprise Information Management, Chico’s Nelle Schantz, Sr. Marketing Director,
At the beginning of 2011, I heard about the Dow Piano, which was created by CNNMoney.com. The Dow Piano visualizes the performance of the Dow Jones industrial average in 2010 with a line plot, but also adds an auditory component. As Bård Edlund, Art Director at CNNMoney.com, said, The daily
In getting ready for the INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operation Research next week in Chicago, I caught up with Jodi Blomberg, a Technical Architect at SAS, to hear more about the paper she's presenting on April 11th. Here's a little preview of what Jodi has to share. For
The SAS Global Forum Executive Conference is a three-day conference held April 4-6 at Caesars Palace Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, NV. The conference is international and invitation-only, designed to spark discussions about business problems and how to best solve them. On Tuesday, April 5, there were two breakout
In a previous blog post about computing confidence intervals for rankings, I inadvertently used the VAR function in SAS/IML 9.22, without providing equivalent functionality for those readers who are running an earlier version of SAS/IML software. (Thanks to Eric for pointing this out.) If you are using a version of
How can you find and act on information hidden in customer interactions? How can you use this information to create profitable results and create a consistent customer experience? It’s not just about sales and marketing teams interacting with the customers anymore. The entire organization must align drive a good, consistent
“It is the dawning of the age of the digital, age of the digital!” I couldn’t help humming the 1969 tune after attending Erik Brynjolfsson’s presentation at the SAS Global Forum Executive Conference 2011 in Las Vegas. As Director for the MIT Center for Digital Business, Erik lives and breathes
The SAS Global Forum Executive Conference is a three-day conference held April 4-6 at Caesars Palace Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, NV. The conference is international and invitation-only, designed to spark discussions about business problems and how to best solve them. On Tuesday, April 5, there were two breakout
At the SAS Global Forum Executive Conference, SAS’ very own Jim Davis, Chief Marketing Officer, gave a great presentation entitled “Analytics – See Business Possibilities You Never Imagined.” He started off by asking the audience a couple of questions: How do we take analytics and make a difference in our
Yesterday at the SAS Global Forum Executive Conference, SAS Senior Director of Product Marketing Nelle Schantz moderated a panel discussion featuring Thomas Davenport, best-selling author and Director of the International Institute for Analytics; Charlene Li, founder of Altimeter Group and co-author of Groundswell; and Rom Hendler, Senior Vice President and
When comparing scores from different subjects, it is often useful to rank the subjects. A rank is the order of a subject when the associated score is listed in ascending order. I've written a few articles about the importance of including confidence intervals when you display rankings, but I haven't
