Is social media too risky for banks? Can banks make a social media connection with customers that will shake off the negative impressions developed during the past few years? SunTrust Bank and “Biz” Stone (@biz to Twitter users) say yes. Still - many organizations are not using social media as
Coming off a week of U.S. West Coast conferences, I have finally caught my breath and readjusted to my home time zone here in North Carolina. The week started in San Diego at the Teradata Partners conference, where the mood was upbeat and the sessions abuzz with the success that
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
During Thursday’s BAI Retail Delivery Conference General Session, more than 200 banking industry leaders learned about Twitter from Isaac “Biz” Stone, co-founder of Twitter and @biz to Twitter users. Titled “Tapping into a New Generation of Consumers,” the session was led by Rich Karlgaard, Forbes magazine publisher and Digital Rules
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
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
Banks and bankers took a beating as a result of the recent financial crisis and recession. That beating wasn’t reserved for large Manhattan banks. Smaller community banks and regionals were painted with the same brush as the one used for those who nearly broke our global financial system – customers
And speaking of Chris Brogan, Chris writes a daily blog about, well (among other things), daily blogging. As a new media consultant and author on the topic, he practices what he preaches when it comes to understanding and exploiting the tools at hand. If he's going to tell you to
Monster.com was the pioneer in the online recruitment industry. To maintain its competitive advantage more than a decade later, the company has taken the data-driven road using research, business intelligence and predictive analytics. Jean-Paul Isson, Vice President of Global BI and Predictive Analytics at Monster Worldwide spoke today about how
At the Premier Business Leadership Series today, Paul Arsego of Northeast Utilities offered up these ten steps to advancing business analytics adoption – to a packed house of attendees. Given the standing room only for his presentation – and the attendance at this conference -- it seems that people are
Balancing the short term with the long term has never been easy, and during a time marked by significant uncertainty in global financial markets, it just got harder. Organizations worldwide are searching for signs of stability, while weighing the risks of pursuing new opportunities against cautious steps that recognize continued
Are you up to date on your hotfixes for SAS Enterprise Guide 4.1? If you're not certain of the answer, you'll find out next week when you might see this message appear: This version of SAS Enterprise Guide will expire on December 1st, 2010. If you've applied any SAS Enterprise
The SAS/IML language provides the QUAD function for evaluating one-dimensional integrals. You can also use the QUAD function to compute a double integral as an iterated integral. A One-Dimensional Integration Suppose you want to evaluate the following integral: To evaluate this integral in the SAS/IML language: Define a function module
I recommend the book Business Analytics for Managers: Taking Business Intelligence Beyond Reporting for managers who want a strategic view on what it takes to create ongoing value from data. To tap into more of the strategic thinking in this book, I asked authors Gert Laursen and Jesper Thorlund a
As mentioned in my previous post, there is the need to move OLAP cubes around. Switching to one schema to another via SAS OLAP Cube Studio is straightforward enough, but what if you need to move it from one Business Intelligence Environment to another (a Development BI Server to a
With the advent of social media, there has been a lot of chatter about its usefulness as well as many raised eyebrows regarding its benefits. A lot of people are still left wondering, how and why social media is even important and relevant to what they do. Most people who
One of the primary goals of this blog is to establish our contributors and by extension, SAS, as thought leaders in a variety of state & local government areas. It’s also a goal of the upcoming SAS Government Insights publication, which includes a thoughtful opinion piece about what it means
Chris Brogan. Charlene Li. David Meerman Scott. All on one panel. Streaming live from Vegas Thursday Oct 28 at 11:15 PST. Read the panel summary, From Engagement to Results, and add it to your calendar too. For a short teaser, here's Chris talking to SAS Marketing Director Deb Orton last
As mentioned in a previous post, SAS was again a sponsor of the Masters of Marketing Conference, the annual executive conference held by the Association of National Advertisers (“ANA”). I had the pleasure to attend the sessions of this extraordinary event, which brings together the marketing leadership teams of the
Contributed by the PROC CERTIFY duo: Christine Kjellberg & Stacey Hamilton As the days draw closer to our certification exam, we’ve put together our top-ten list of things (PROC Certify–related) that we are very thankful for (drum roll please!): SAS Global Forum afforded us the opportunity to take a much
SAS recommends building OLAP Cubes on a separate 'non-production schemas' because cube building can be resource intensive and time consuming. Each OLAP Server can be defined to one & only schema at a given time, therefore you will need to setup the architecture to include another OLAP Server & Schema
We've just pushed out the localized versions of the Getting Started with SAS Enterprise Guide 4.3 tutorial. This is the tutorial that you'll see when you select Help->Getting Started Tutorial from within SAS Enterprise Guide. Here is a list of the supported languages, and links to the tutorial content: English
I was recently asked how to create a tridiagonal matrix in SAS/IML software. For example, how can you easily specify the following symmetric tridiagonal matrix without typing all of the zeros? proc iml; m = {1 6 0 0 0, 6 2 7 0 0, 0 7 3 8 0,
The question came up on the SAS Enterprise Guide discussion forum: which do you prefer, List Report Wizard (PROC REPORT) or Summary Tables (PROC TABULATE)? And as with most SAS-related questions, the proper response is: "it depends." If you put these two PROCs in the ring with a Google Fight,
