Writing is usually very easy for me - I close the door and concentrate on the task at hand. But today, my mind is wandering. Maybe it's the changing season (it's fall in the US) that makes me think of all of the SAS users who might be reading my posts:
"I think that my data are exponentially distributed, but how can I check?" I get asked that question a lot. Well, not specifically that question. Sometimes the question is about the normal, lognormal, or gamma distribution. A related question is "Which distribution does my data have," which was recently discussed
My friend and colleague Amartya Bhattacharjy led a roundtable discussion today titled, Merging Art and Science in Marketing at #PBLS11, which I've tried to distill for you here. He began with the traditional view of marketing in terms of two types of activities that had their own mindsets: Brand marketing (mass
My colleague and friend Colleen Cruz led a roundtable discussion at #PBLS11, titled How to Boost Effectiveness with Marketing Operations Management (MOM). There was a robust discussion that brought out some of the main advantages of a marketing operations management solution, and I captured three main ones to provide a summary: Boost efficiency with
Before a group of reporters representing countries from as far away as Mexico, Brazil and Japan, SAS CEO Jim Goodnight touted the company’s continued growth, innovation and unmatched culture during its annual Media Day event at SAS world headquarters in Cary, Tuesday. “In 2011, SAS has continued to grow as
I’ve discovered that bestselling author Jim Collins is both a great writer and a great speaker because his keynote address at #PBLS11 has been absolutely riveting. And his lessons on greatness can certainly apply to marketing, so I’ve summarized it for us here: He started by stating that greatness is
Years ago and a seemingly far galaxy away, I wrote about how to modify 9.1.3 to start Enterprise Guide users in a different location for the File folder. By default, the user only can access their personal SAS Temporary File. Why change this? I would prefer to use a central
Andy Swenson, VP of Database and Revenue Management at Pinnacle Entertainment outlined their approach to customer loyalty, which included some great takeaways for companies in any industry. The gaming resorts leader partnered with Teradata to provide the database and with SAS to handle the marketing solution that enabled them to differentiate
When you Google “big data,” you get big data about big data. We are living in the age of information overload, which creates many challenges, including big data, information silos and integration issues. It was my great pleasure to introduce a panel of experts at The Premier Business Leadership Series
Scott Hudgins, VP of Customer Managed Relationships at The Walt Disney Company shared details about how Disney has approached CRM and the guiding principles and key learnings that have driven their success. They began their CRM process in 2001 knowing that most of their customers were somewhere in one of their
Jim Bampos presented in a session today at PBLS11 titled, Driving the Total Customer Experience with Data. He described the extraordinary journey he’s led his company on to manage customer experience and how it literally transformed EMC to be centered on the customer. Prior to embarking on that journey, EMC saw itself as a data
The Premier Business Leadership Series in Orlando was the backdrop for a number of news announcements from SAS. Here's a rundown: 1. Big Data research A new survey has found that organizations with formal data management strategies derive more value from data assets and outperform competitors. The survey, Big Data:
As a marketer, I couldn’t be more excited about the CMO panel on the main stage at PBLS11 . As previously mentioned, the CMO panel moderated by Professor Tom Davenport, included SAS CMO Jim Davis and his peers, Paula Puleo at Michaels Stores and Scott Hudgins from The Walt Disney
I have thoroughly enjoyed hearing General Colin Powell share his viewpoints about leadership as the keynote speaker for PBLS11. I have found that so much of what he’s shared is relevant for marketers, because great marketing happens by teams of people, all working for the same purpose. It’s an environment
I was contacted by SAS Technical Support regarding a customer who was trying to use SAS/IML to compute quantiles of the folded normal distribution. I had heard of the distribution, but it is not built into SAS and I had never worked with it. Nevertheless, I set out to understand
I am thrilled to be at SAS’ flagship annual thought leadership event, the 2011 Premier Business Leadership Series. The theme is “Innovate, Optimize, Transform” and we have world leaders, best-selling authors and thought-provoking professors with great wisdom to share in one exciting event. It’s truly inspiring. Yet as compelling as all
For the past year, I’ve had the pleasure of serving on the communications team of the National Collaborative for Bio-Preparedness (NCB-P), of which SAS is a partner and the analytics provider. That experience was heavy on my mind as I recently watched the film Contagion. I may drop some minor
“I really wish someone had shown me this function in SAS sooner, because it’s saved me a ton of time and effort,” said Brandi Rhoads as she opened her presentation at the Western Users of SAS Software (WUSS) conference in San Francisco.
If you are unable to export BI Dashboard Content the BI Dashboard Logical types was not installed on the system running SAS Management Console. Update this by following these steps Run the software install from the SAS Depot (mine is located at C:SAS Software Depotsetup.exe) Select ‘Install Additional Software’ Then
ANA Masters of Marketing kicked off its general session with blockbuster brands, and equally interesting Marketing executives. I knew I would hear from some executive firepower, but I did not expect to walk away with this level of inspiration. Steven Quinn of Walmart communicated the sobering news of a shrinking
Which new channel is winning with the customer? Given the current hype about social media as a marketing channel I thought it might be nice to see how our respondents in the Pleased to Meet You survey responded to this channel. In particular we will compare it to the mobile
I've been very fortunate to meet a lot of SAS users during my scant 3 year tour at SAS. I've met them while attending SAS Global Forum 2009, 2010, and 2011; NESUG 2009, 2010 and 2011; and SESUG 2010. Of course, like you, I want to go to all of the
In SAS/IML 9.22 and beyond, you can call any SAS procedure, DATA step, or macro from within a SAS/IML program. The syntax is simple: place a SUBMIT statement prior to the SAS statements and place an ENDSUBMIT statement after the SAS statements. This enables you to call any SAS procedure
Within the SAS documentation there must be thousands of unique words. But ten words occur more than any others within the SAS documentation corpus: SAS, data, statement, option, set, value, variable, PROC, model, table. This is according to one of our staff terminologists, Vicki Leary, who helps to keep our use of these words consistent and
This week brought big news of one of the most cruel and heartless tyrants of the 21st century. This man is known for narcissistic behavior, surrounding himself with a cadre of beautiful women, sleeping in a different place every night, picking new favorites each week, and bringing tears and untold suffering
In my Friday series about innovation, I've decided to include some personal stories of unusual and unique uses of SAS. Once a month or so, I'll swap out the Post-it Notes for a profile of someone who has used SAS in an innovative way to solve a problem or, like
Which would you rather do? Click stop (or start) over and over, while waiting in between the services to make sure everything is up and running ... OR ... click one button and go have lunch? Honestly I prefer the lunch option. (And for administrators, the quickest option is always
When I learn a new statistical technique, one of first things I do is to understand the limitations of the technique. This blog post shares some thoughts on modeling finite mixture models with the FMM procedure. What is a reasonable task for FMM? When are you asking too much? I
Halloween is around the corner and children everywhere will wear masks throughout their neighborhoods for a night of trick-or-treating fun and, likely, too much candy. A masking has also occurred in education policy with the No Child Left Behind Act, sans the candy at the end of the night. That
Two weeks ago I had the pleasure of reading Tom Wallace's new book, Sales & Operations Planning: Beyond the Basics. This is not an introductory "how to" book -- Tom and Bob Stahl have already written those -- but instead covers nine major companies that have implemented (and extended!) S&OP
