We all know that when customers are interested in a new product or service that you offer, digital channels are most often their first, and probably unique, point of interaction. What if every time customers interacted with you, they got exactly what they needed, with minimal effort? Marketers should use
Anyone know what's the number two form of economic crime, in terms of losses? Believe it or not, it's procurement fraud. I grew up in a small town south of “Big D” and in my neck of the woods having two first names is, well, normal. So, when Will Farrell’s character,
With fall comes cooler weather and, of course, football. Lots of football. Often times there will be two NFL games on that my husband wants to watch at the same time. Instead of flipping back and forth between two television stations, he can watch both games simultaneously, thanks to the
Cooperation and information sharing between tax authorities around the world can help ensure that taxpayers pay the right amount of tax to the right jurisdictions. The Common Reporting Standard (CRS) is an agreement between countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development to collect and share data from their financial institutions annually. This remarkable achievement
There are several ways to buy data, and even more companies who are willing to sell it. By annual subscription or by the drink, third-party data vendors promise they can solve your identity theft and non-compliance problems. It’s as simple as signing a contract, and letting the data tap begin
Recently, my fellow SAS blogger Rick Wicklin wrote a post showing how to graph the ages of all the US presidents. And Chris Hemedinger showed how to create a bar chart showing the number of presidents having each of the 12 zodiac signs. Both are interesting graphs, but I wanted to
At SAS, we've worked hard to transform ourselves into an analytical marketing organization. And it's an ongoing journey. As new tools and data sources appear, we'll continue to grow, change and improve. As the leader of this effort, I wish there had been a how-to guide available when we started
A hot button issue this election season was the need to determine the eligibility of people for various government programs like the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Medicare and Medicaid, or entry into the United States as a migrant refugee. “Look, we’re facing the worst refugee crisis since the end of
There are no limitations for what you can accomplish. That’s the message Keith Poston from the Friends of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences imparted to 300 middle and high school students, teachers and parents assembled this week at the museum for the fourth STEM Career Showcase for Students
It's that time of year again where almost 50 million Americans travel home for Thanksgiving. We'll share a smorgasbord of turkey, stuffing and vegetables and discuss fun political topics, all to celebrate the ironic friendship between colonists and Native Americans. Being part Italian, my family augments the 20-pound turkey with pasta –
At a conference last week, a presenter showed SAS statements that compute the logarithm of a probability density function (PDF). The log-PDF is a a common computation because it occurs when maximizing the log-likelihood function. The presenter computed the expression in SAS by using an expression that looked like y
Are you the lone-wolf SAS programmer in your company - managing the data, performing the analyses, and graphing the output for everyone else? And what's the only format they all know how to work with, and wish they had your output in? Let's face it ... that's probably an Excel
If your SAS Visual Analytics report requirements include linking out to separate reports without the need to pass values, you may want to consider using images to enhance the appearance of your base report. Here are three style examples using images that you can use depending on your report design
Rick Wicklin showed us how to visualize the ages of US Presidents at the time of their inaugurations. That's a pretty relevant thing to do, as the age of the incoming president can indirectly influence aspects of the president's term, thanks to health and generational factors. As part of his
International Fraud Awareness Week is here! I know, I know… Fraud Week is not quite as exciting as Shark Week. It doesn’t appeal to your taste buds like Restaurant Week. Nor does it have the quirky feel of Brain Awareness Week (nope… I’m not making that one up!!). Nevertheless, Fraud Week is
Criminal enterprises are tapping into the lucrative opioid business through creative schemes that are less likely to be identified as opioid abuse, misuse or diversion. One of the latest schemes? Auto insurance fraud. First, some background… While extensive progress has been made in establishing, improving, and mandating prescription drug monitoring
On June 22nd, the U.S. Department of Justice announced the largest Medicaid fraud bust in history. The National Health Care Fraud Takedown included 301 defendants charged, $900 million in false billings, 61 medical professionals and 29 doctors, across 36 states. In another case, investigators in New York uncovered more than
Currently, most fraud detection solutions for financial crime and tax fraud are focused on risk assessing entities. That is to say, they evaluate the risk of each individual or businesses separately. While this helps prioritize risk-based investigations by alerting investigators to the likelihood of fraud, it does not necessarily maximize deterrence.
I've supplied dozens of custom tasks for SAS Enterprise Guide, but the Copy Files task is easily the most popular. The Copy Files task allows you to capture "file transfer" steps inside your process flow, so that you can automate any file upload and download operations between your PC and
.@philsimon says don't treat data self-service as a binary.
Who was the oldest person elected president of the United States? How about the youngest? Who was the oldest when he left office? Let's look at some data. Wikipedia has a page that presents a table of the presidents of the US by age. It lists the dates for which
Meetings, emails, budgets, phone calls, more emails, a meeting that could be an email, an email that should be a meeting – sound familiar? This is a typical work week for most of us. It is easy to get caught up in the next thing on the calendar and lose
Does it seem like there just aren't enough daylight hours to get things done these days? It might not be that you've got more to do - it might be that we actually have fewer daylight hours in the winter (here in the northern hemisphere). And since "seeing is believing,"
If you obtain data from web sites, social media, or other unstandardized data sources, you might not know the form of dates in the data. For example, the US Independence Day might be represented as "04JUL1776", "07/04/1776", "Jul 4, 1776", or "July 4, 1776." Fortunately, the ANYDTDTE informat makes it
Brings relief to feet, legs and spine. Relaxes the nervous system and cultivates sleep. Legs Up the Wall (Sanskrit: Viparita Karani)
Retail isn't an easy place to be these days. The environment is omnichannel and ever-changing. Competition is rising and retailers are struggling to understand how to best meet customers’ merchandise preferences. Fortunately, analytics are driving profitability and market share for smart retailers. Let’s take a look at the four hottest
One of the most frequent questions I’m asked by my students is which business analytics books to read to support their professional self-development. It is always hard to pick out the best books, especially because I like to mix classics and domain-specific references. I particularly like those that influence business
The 2016 INFORMS Annual Meeting will be held at the Music City Center and Omni Nashville Hotel in downtown Nashville, TN on November 13-16, with pre-conference events starting on Saturday, November 12. SAS will be a major participant in this conference. Over two dozen people from SAS will attend, with
We often talk about full customer data visibility and the need for a “golden record” that provides a 360-degree view of the customer to enhance our customer-facing processes. The rationale is that by accumulating all the data about a customer (or, for that matter, any entity of interest) from multiple sources, you
The Data For Good initiative is all about using data and analytics to improve the lives of citizens around the world – however most people wouldn’t immediately think about tax collection as a humanitarian effort. But that’s exactly how Courtney Kay-Decker, Executive Director of the Iowa Department of Revenue sees
