Once you’ve quantified the risk surrounding your business decision (see my previous two posts on this topic) there comes the matter of presenting it in a manner that actually facilitates the decision making process, rather than bogging it down in irrelevant details. It’s not, of course, that executives are innumerate,
Wubbo Ockels was the first Dutch astronaut in 1984. His flight aboard space shuttle Challenger motivated him in propagating a sustainable futuristic view. He spreads this idea as professor at the Aerospace Engineering faculty of the Technical University (TU) Delft and via innovative transport and energy concepts. Well-known examples are
It’s no secret that SAS enjoys a high degree of customer loyalty and it’s also well known that part of what drives that loyalty is driven by how much we pay attention to our customers. This devotion to our customers is helping to ensure that we deliver on our promise
I received this offer in the post the other day: "University apparel just for you, featuring the name HEMEDINGER!" Yes, the offer has it correct. This would be just for me, because I can't think of anyone else who might order it. I regret that I didn't receive the offer
Last week, I got a chance to meet up with authors and San Francisco JMP colleagues Curt Hinrichs and Chuck Boiler while they were in Cary, NC, on business. Despite their super hectic schedules, they kindly agreed to get together at 8 a.m. in the lobby of the swanky Umstead
What if you need someplace to store static files for web consumption. Things that might come to mind: Images HTML Static Title Pages JavaScript PDF Documentation (such as how-to instructions) An ideal place would be a HTML server, since these aren't active files. However in a standard 9.2 installation, there
I recently met with five people who have been in state and local government for a combined total of over 100 years. It was a group that covered multiple areas of government including Health and Human Services, Courts and Corrections, Finance and Emergency Management. Everyone came to the table with
Improving campaign close rates is just one of many benefits quoted by Verizon in this quarter’s sascom magazine. But a 250 percent improvement is pretty significant. • How did they do it? • What were the other benefits? • How will they continue to deliver improvement over time? The short
There is a long running debate among forecasting professionals, on whether to use Forecast or Actual in the denominator of your percentage error calculations. The Winter 2009 issue of Foresight had an article by Kesten Green and Len Tashman, reporting on a survey (of the International Institute of Forecasters discussion
During the week of August 1 - 7, 2010, SAS Customer Intelligence will be making a big splash in the New York area and there are several ways you can catch up with us in person: CRM Evolution Conference & Exhibition This event begins on Monday, August 2 and ends
As a marketer I spend all day, every day thinking about expressing how my company's products meet market/customer needs. I work hard on the prose, simplify the diagrams and especially focus on the underlying issues. That said, I have a sneaking suspicion that I could be doing better and here's
Contributed by Gert H. N. Laursen and Jesper Thorlund In Business Analytics for Managers, we emphasize that analytics and BI initiatives are complex processes that involve parties all across an organization. And those processes are only as strong as the weakest link. What good will it do for a company
When viewing OLAP cubes in Web Report Studio, there comes a time when the user might want to view all the levels within the hierarchy, without the cumbersome process of selecting and expanding each individual item. In 9.2, there is a quick solution. When you right click on the level-heading
Art Carpenter offers tremendous advice to SAS programmers who want to maximize their job security: make your programs impossible for others to read and understand. In his published papers, Art (in his tongue-in-cheek manner) presents practical examples for how to accomplish this. I'm afraid that with our new code formatter
The Summer 2010 issue of Foresight is now available. Here is Editor Len Tashman’s preview: For so many years, we forecasters have developed and refined models for demand forecasts – forecasts for product and item sales, orders, shipments – without paying adequate attention to the details of how these forecasts
What is Risk Management? Risk Management can be found in many forms. This was emphasized to me while I was Googling “risk management in financial firms.” What I found were hits covering risk management across a wide spectrum of activities, from risk assessment for projects large and small to mathematical
Cisco just released one of those big reports that is bound to get everybody all aflutter. The Cisco 2010 Midyear Security Report is subtitled, "The impact of global security threats and trends on the enterprise." No points for guessing that I jumped straight to the social media section, after seeing
My introduction to the issue of risk in business decision making came rather abruptly and rudely during what I thought was going to be another routine quarterly business review with the executive committee. My particular agenda item was to present the business case for a “lite” version of one of
Contributed by Gert H. N. Laursen and Jesper Thorlund Our book, Business Analytics for Managers: Taking Business Intelligence Beyond Reporting, was published last month. The book is the latest in the Wiley and SAS Business Series. When people ask us why we wrote the book, we usually give them one
Our “Nuts & Bolts of Social Media” video series carries on with a new interview between SAS’ Deb Orton and Gary King, CIO of national clothing retailer Chico’s. Gary begins with a brief story of how Chico’s started as a small store selling folk art (Really? Yes, really.), before transforming
The %STPBegin and %STPEnd macros are pretty powerful pieces of code for SAS Stored Processes. They embed all sorts of information on devices, where content is located, and just make everything work. However for creating those fancy custom HTML forms or layouts, ods html is needed instead. I've written about
Contributed by Christine Kjellberg and Stacey Hamilton “It's weird...you know the end of something great is coming, but you want to hold on, just for one more second...just so it can hurt a little more.” --author unknown As interesting as this journey toward the certification exam has been, it—like all
Ingrid Zeegers is responsible at Philips’ development and design of sustainable business. Zeegers is one of the exponents of the principles of cradle-to-cradle in The Netherlands, and under her supervision the Electronics division now has a different view on the use of materials, energy efficiency and product propositions. A view
Better forecasting can, of course, help address many business problems. We want to believe that more accurate forecasts are always possible. “If only,” management bemoans, “if only we had bigger computers, more sophisticated software, more skilled forecast analysts – or if the analysts we have just worked harder!” Unfortunately, there
Last night The Mrs looked over my shoulder at Tweetdeck and said, “Everybody’s talking about Old Spice.” It’s the hottest topic in social media, marketing and advertising right now. Built on the success of the video embedded above, which now has more than 13 million views on YouTube, the
Mashable.com is a great place to keep up-to-date on the happenings in social media, and their @Mashable Twitter account is my personal social media canary-in-the-coal mine. Today they're warning us about a new Facebook scam centered around a video that promises to reveal the "truth" about Coca-Cola. If you click
Rewind to the summer of 2009. Kings of Leon’s Use Somebody was burning up the charts, Pixar’s Up was collecting a fistful of Academy Award nominations, and SAS’ marketing organization was committing to take our digital marketing efforts to another level. SAS, deeply interested with the challenge of nurturing sas.com
Using ActiveX in SAS graphics provides users with more functionality, options, and pretty colors than Jpeg, gif, etc (check out these examples). The issue is that ActiveX requires a device driver installed on the viewing machine, similar to Flash. In SAS 9.2, the sasgraph.exe is available within the SASWEB component deployed
Have you ever inherited a SAS program from a "gifted" SAS programmer? By "gifted", I mean a person who regards line feeds and white space as a waste of precious bytes, who knows that his program is worth the tremendous effort it might take to read and understand it, as
Thanks for your feedback on this topic. As promised, I am circling back on the Advertising: To Gate or Not to Gate post I wrote in late April. As you'll recall, I initiated a little experiment to offer one of our assets via an online ad without registration. For a
