By now you have seen dozens of articles with trends and predictions for what the hospitality industry should expect in 2015. I’m not going to add to those, or rehash them exhaustively here. You’ve all probably read them yourself and gathered the highlights: optimism, more acquisitions, transaction volumes will stay
I cannot speak from experience, but predominately an Insurance CEO has three primary objectives: Grow the business Reduce expenses Ensure compliance. Let’s individually consider each of these objectives in more detail. Grow the Business How does an insurance company grow from a $2bn to a $3bn organization? Essentially, insurance has
With the growing use of SAS on commodity hardware, many organizations are running lots of SAS servers on separate instances of operating system in a SAS infrastructure. This configuration is great for optimizing resources, but when these SAS servers have to share data, then SAS recommends the use of a clustered
A SAS programmer recently posted a question to the SAS/IML Support Community about how to compute the kth smallest value in a vector of numbers. In the DATA step, you can use the SMALLEST function to find the smallest value in an array, but there is no equivalent built-in function
Most of us have volunteered in some capacity -- as a guinea pig in a magic show, as a helping hand with a charity, or perhaps as a coach for a child’s sports team. Why do we do it? I think the cliché holds true. We get as much, or
Can you guess the 5 most common New Year's resolutions? Compare your guesses to the survey results!... Being a data meister, I'm always on the lookout for seasonal data. I recently did a Web search for "new year's resolutions" and found an interesting article on the You Gov UK website.
Over the Christmas Holidays I saw an graph of agricultural exports to Russia in 2013. The part that caught my eye was the upper part of the graph, showing the breakdown of the trade with Russia as a horizontal stacked bar with custom labels. The value for each region / country
It is January. In the United States, this means NFL playoff time! A perfect time (if you are a geeky SAS/OR guy) to use PROC OPTGRAPH to rank the best teams in the NFL. Ranking Sports Teams Ranking of sports teams is a popular (and controversial) topic, especially in the
I published 118 blog posts in 2014. This article presents my most popular posts from 2014 and late 2013. 2014 will always be a special year for me because it was the year that the SAS University Edition was launched. The University Edition means that SAS/IML is available to all
Since now is the time when we reflect on the past year and make resolutions for next year, in this post I reflect on my Data Roundtable posts from the past year and use them to offer a few New Year’s data resolutions for you and your organization to consider in
I have participated in many discussions about master data management (MDM) being “just” about improving the quality of master data. Although master data management includes the discipline of data quality, it has a much broader scope. MDM introduces a new approach for managing data that isn't in scope of traditional data quality
The last three parts of our conversion blog (see all of the posts here) go hand-in-hand and require the most time on the project plan. Development - During development of the conversion routines, you may want to consider using error handling standards based on corporate standards. This is where data
Last week a user expressed the need to create a graph like the one shown on the right using SAS. This seems eminently doable using GTL and I thought I would undertake making this graph using SAS 9.3. The source data required to create this graph is only the
In Part 1 of this blog series, I touched on the problems created by the underground economy, and framed the size and scope. But important questions remain about the types of businesses that are part of the underground economy, how they do it, and what the driving forces behind this
.@philsimon on the relationship between metadata and unstructured data.
As this is the week of Christmas, many, myself included, have Christmas songs stuck in their head. One of these jolly jingles is Santa Claus Is Coming To Town, which includes the line: “He knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake!” The lyric is a
In researching material for an upcoming project, I investigated the SAS Deployment Backup and Recovery Tool available in SAS 9.4. Here are some of my findings on identifying what directories are included in a Backup and Recovery session and how to add custom directories to a backup configuration. The SAS
The physical and social costs of untreated mental illness are significant and have been discussed in detail in previous posts. Now let’s talk about the immense financial costs, then I’ll wrap up the series with a conclusion. The financial costs cover a broad cross-section of society, including government services and
There are some things every company should know about the nature of its business. Yet many organizations don't know these fundamentals -- either because they are short on resources, or their resources don't have the analytical skills to do the work. The summer research projects offered by the Lancaster Centre for Forecasting,
The BACtrack mobile breathalyzer company recently published a report purporting that "most alcohol consumed during winter months." I wondered if the data would tell the same story, after a slightly different interrogation ... Here's a portion of BACtrack's calendar chart of BAC levels (click it to see the full-size version). They
With our recent client engagements in which the organization is implementing one or more master data management (MDM) projects, I have been advocating that a task to design a demonstration application be added to the early part of the project plan. Many early MDM implementers seem to have taken the
When we talk about digital customer services, it’s all about creating online self-service capabilities for our customers. This is great for everyone! We’ve made it easy for the customer to get what they need; it’s cheaper and faster for organizations to deliver the service to the customer. Need a copy
The underground economy is driving a hole in the collection of income taxes, social security, unemployment and Medicare to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars annually within the United States. Yet significant questions remain about how big the problem is, as well as what should be done about it.
The Lancaster Centre for Forecasting is seeking Master Student Projects in Forecasting, Data Mining, or Analytics for summer of 2015. Projects normally run from mid-May to mid-August, with reports issued a few weeks after. These projects are a cost efficient way for a company to carry out analytical work by
In an era long gone by (actually not so long ago) we all interacted with computers via terminals to a mainframe or minicomputer systems. Sometimes, you had to book a slot for when you could access and exploit computer resources. The user was subject to interrupted connections or very poor
Life is a gift, and it offers us the privilege, opportunity, and responsibility to give something back by becoming more. - Anthony Robbins Every year at SAS Global Forum, SAS professionals from all over the globe gather, reconnect and learn from each other. And wherever they gather, SAS Global Forum
It’s that time of year again, and I have retail on my mind. Not only because we’re reaching the peak of the holiday buying season, but because we at SAS are getting ready for one the biggest events on our calendar, the National Retail Federation tradeshow in January. As I’m
How does Santa keep track of everything on his big night? I can't confirm or deny that he uses SAS software -- but if he does, it would look a lot like this! ... A couple of years ago, I blogged about a prototype dashboard that I wrote for Santa. This
I have a rule – any conversion or upgrade will require the creation of a decommission plan. A decommission plan should include the following: A list and definition of each database, table and column (source and target). A list and definition of each of the current programs in use (you
The physical data model should represent exactly the way the tables and columns are designed in the in the database management system. I recommend keeping storage, partitioning, indexing and other physical characteristics in the data model if at all possible. This will make upkeep and comparison with the development, test
