In nearly 30 years as an instructor, systems engineer and technical architect, I’ve heard from many SAS users that it can be a challenge to explain to the IT organization what SAS is and why it’s important. Why is this lack of communication a problem?
It often means that your requests never seem to get to the top of IT’s to-do list. Even worse, you can feel like IT is preventing you from getting your work done. “What do you mean I can’t have twenty years of claims data?” “So what if my job takes ten hours to run!” “My job is important – why can’t it go to the top of the queue?” If you’ve ever said these things and were met with a blank stare or gales of laughter, you have experienced this problem firsthand.
Regrettably, it can feel as if you and IT are speaking two completely different languages, and the lack of a good cross-language dictionary can leave you feeling dissatisfied, angry, and frustrated.
The biggest source of confusion and miscommunication stems from the difference in your roles. IT keeps the data center humming – the servers serving, the transactional data flowing, the databases growing, the applications running. The day-to-day operations of your company would come to a halt without IT’s diligence and attentiveness. “Mission Critical” to IT means recovering from a power outage or the failure of the infrastructure that runs the ATM machines or the call center.
As SAS users, you keep the business humming by producing necessary reports, detecting fraud, ensuring that those who get a credit card offer are a good risk, confirming the safety of a new drug, identifying sales trends, predicting parts failures, and much more. “Mission Critical” to a SAS shop means that the CEO expects his dashboard to be current and the CFO is expecting that new forecast or risk model ASAP.
Which role is more important to the business? We can debate this all day, but the reality is that both roles are essential. Better communication between the organizations will make everyone’s life better by helping to forge a relationship and develop an environment of mutual cooperation. Now, attaining a common language is going to take some work on both sides.
For the SAS folks, learning that “salt” isn’t just the white crystalline stuff you sprinkle on your food, but also an important means of increasing data and password security through encryption, is amusing. For the IT folks, learning that the SAS folks don’t know that, and that they probably aren’t too concerned about it as long as they can get to their data, is alarming. But the effort to find a common language will be worthwhile, if for no other reason than to reduce stress in the workplace!
This blog series will provide some interdisciplinary assistance in communicating with the IT organization and revealing the mysteries of SAS to them. Please let me hear from you about particularly difficult conversations you’ve had with IT and messages you’d like help conveying. In addition, let me know what’s worked well at your organization to form a bridge between the SAS users and IT, and I’ll highlight those successes here.
26 Comments
This is a very well-written initial offering. I will be attentive. Brevity is the sould of wit. (Hamlet).
Thanks for your comment, John! I will try to follow Hamlet's advice and be brief to stay witty!
It was Polonius.
Adrian, the line was indeed spoken by Polonius:
"Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit,
And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, ... "
Thanks for reminding me of that, and for inspiring me to look up the next line!
This topic resonates so very hard with me. IT has no idea what SAS can do (and routinely does) for the institution, and yet we business analysts have beg to get it supported for our own use, archive our own datasets, and watch as wave after wave of steering committees 'investigates' the 'possibility' of grand 'data solutions' from half-baked companies. Grrrrr.
Evan, I hope this blog series will give you some ideas about how to get your message heard. Thanks for your post.
IT often thinks obtaining SAS software is like obtaining Microsoft software. How do we teach IT SAS-lingo and process so that we, as SAS users, aren't translating after IT recieves 'the wrong thing'? Or is that trying to solve the wrong problem?
Kristin, You raise good questions and considerations; there's certainly as much SAS lingo as there is IT lingo, isn't there? We'll touch on some of it in this blog series. Anyone have examples to share of how you've successfully bridged the language gap with IT?
I have an on-going struggle with my University IT where every quarter they add a new level of complication in installing SAS on student machines. I have confirmed with SAS many times that our license allows for student installs so that they can learn SAS in the classroom, but IT insists that the license is vague on this issue. Therefore they do not want copies of the software floating around for student installation (understandable), but they also complain about students coming to them for an install and they no longer want to do that. They suggest over and over that we switch to other software that is easier to deal with. I have also heard of other Universities charging for installing SAS and this also makes it a burden for students to access the software as they would rather learn the free software package.
Is there any way to make this more transparent, smooth and realistic for Academia? If we are unable to teach students real-life data analysis with SAS at the Universities just because of IT opinion and installation issues, then all of our graduates will be entering the workforce with other computing skills. Help…
Rebecca, I've reached out to you privately. Thanks for your post.
We have a similar issue. Our university does not have a site license and each faculty/student member has to purchase their own license (albeit at a highly discounted price). However, while this is fine for most faculty members, not many undergraduate nor graduate students have the disposable income to purchase the individual license (~$200). I had to fight to get our IT department to allow graduate students in our economics program to get a complimentary license for their tenure in the program (I consider this a great success!), primarily because I repeatedly kept telling them that the students would not be able to complete my course without having a copy. Although their argument was not to get a cheaper software, they did try to tell me to encourage students to go to student labs, which do have SAS installed but are open from 8 a.m. - 5 p.m.
I've also noticed that students are also less enthusiastic about learning SAS. From my observations (and I caution that this is based on a low observation count of my students), many don't have a grasp of how much more valuable SAS knowledge will be when they try to find jobs than knowing, say, R or Stata or Matlab. I would venture guessing that the IT departments also don't know this. Actually, I would bet that the university administration doesn't know this; otherwise, SAS would be in every statistics and economics classroom!
I am not sure exactly of what kind of promotional material exists from SAS, but I would love to see a short video that can be shown to students and administrators indicating facts such as: number of companies using SAS; what industries those companies are in; average starting salaries of individuals who know SAS; how SAS presence has grown; et cetera. There is a huge push in academia to teach skills that will get graduates jobs quickly after graduation---I would think that SAS knowledge would be a great sell! A 3 minute powerful video could have a really big impact.
Anton, thank you for your post. Your post, and the one by Rebecca, have generated a great deal of discussion at SAS. Some ideas and suggestions are forthcoming - please stay tuned for another response to follow.
Anton & Rebecca,
We share your concerns about students and IT understanding the value of SAS. To remove cost and difficulty of access as obstacles, we launched SAS OnDemand for Academics, a no-cost online option for professors and students. Users register and access SAS software via the Web and perform processing by connecting to the cloud. Professors and students can access some of our most common advanced analytics technologies, such as SAS Enterprise Guide, SAS Enterprise Miner and SAS Forecast Server. To make it easier to program in SAS, last year we introduced SAS Web Editor, a Web-based tool for writing and running SAS code. Also available at no cost, SAS Web Editor requires no software installation. Users simply connect to a website to access code, files, projects and libraries, anytime and anywhere. It also runs on Macs.
Learn more about SAS OnDemand for Academics here: http://www.sas.com/govedu/edu/programs/od_academics.html
I hope that will help you make your financial case. To help spread the good word about the value of SAS in today’s workforce, we have numerous education success stories on our website. http://www.sas.com/success/indexByIndustry.html#0200.0000.0000
Here are three that might be helpful.
• Kennesaw Grads Garner Success with SAS Skills (contains text and videos): http://www.sas.com/success/kennesaw.html
• National University brings SAS® to the classroom, helping students across academic programs master sophisticated analytics and research: http://www.sas.com/success/nationaluniversity.html
• Oklahoma State University arms graduate students with real-world skills: http://www.sas.com/success/osu.html
Thank you again for your comments and support. I will share your video idea with the appropriate folks here. I look forward to continuing the conversation
- Nancy Call, SAS Education Practice
Thank you, Lisa and Nancy. We have been exploring OnDemand as a solution and we are very grateful that it is available to Academics. We have found that it works well for basic SAS training, but when it comes to real-life analysis with large and unruly data sets, we really need traditional SAS in order to process large amounts of data. Our University has a big data initiative, as do many these days, so our focus has been to give students as much experience as possible with huge amounts of data. The fact that we 'should' be able to use traditional SAS, but have to fight for it, is discouraging.
This hits the mark - and is a perfect, much overdue, forum!! Thank you Lisa - you are the right person to serve as the author of this blog series, and I know the benefits to both IT and business users and leaders will be huge!!! Keep the great dialog going!!!
Thank you, Renee! Much appreciated!
Hey all,
make SAS a core management tool for IT (they have big data) and the sun wil rise, your statisical insight is needed to help IT perform.
@SAS make a cloud/ondemand version for IT management and perhaps IT will join us.
Thanks for writing, and great suggestion, Bas! I'm sharing it with others here at SAS.
I am a hybrid from a consulting background. I do understand SAS and IT. I gave a joint paper at SGF 2013 on this very subject, The REAL issues associated with SAS is that SAS relies heavily on either third party or open source solutions. The latter creates licensing issues and indemnification issues for the consumer. Many legal departments are looking for indemnification not unlike Redhat does for Linux. In addition, if you are using the power of Unix, then relying on PAM as an option is ill founded. SAS needs to consider Pooled resources first and a tight integratation with mapping AD groups to metadata groups so that User adminsitration is easier.
It is not that IT does not want to assist, but the IT costs associate with maintainance are high and when you are a financial instituition, ITG always operates ini the red as businesses want services, but are loth to pay for them. As you stated earlier, the IT depts must insure that customer facing solutions are kept at optimum and available.
Another note is that SAS still does not lend itself to "stable" processes that fit into SDLC methodologies. Consider how this complicates a standard IT operation. I have over 30+ years in Computers/electronics/IT. I work hard to enable users and take a lot of heat in IT for the way i do business. You are free to contact me for further discussion.
Euwell, thank you for your thoughtful and very specific observations about some of the reasons for the difficulties IT organizations have in supporting SAS. Your SGF paper (http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/proceedings13/485-2013.pdf) offers great suggestions for "bridging the gap" surrounding putting business-developed programs and applications into production with sound IT practices to support them. Your continued feedback on forging bonds between SAS and IT would be much appreciated!
I agree that the Business and IT often speak different languages. However, there is another issue with SAS that has nothing to do with communication. Many IT deparments think the business area should not write any code, including SAS, SQL and other languages. Many IT deparments think the business should write requirements and PROD tools and reports should be built by IT for the business to run reports and perform analysis. Everything should be PROD, no End User Computing (EUC) solutions (IT's thought, not mine). SAS is disliked (sometimes strongly) because it enables the business to do too much without IT help.
Brian, thanks for your post. I agree that in many places, there's a struggle between autonomy within the business vs. being dependent on IT. Have you found any way to work through this situation? Any suggestions to share?
Wow I hear everyone's pain ... I wrote a blog article ( Lessons Learned) for All Analytics last year about how IT unseated a very successful, working BI tool for one that they had already spent several million (you read that right) and could not get any value from. They had an IBM whisperer.
They decided they needed business experts to make the tool work but they did it with a bat instead of a carrot. The IT staff ended up fired and everyone lost basically.
Ouch. This is a very graphic depiction of what happens when the business and IT are working at cross purposes. With 20-20 hindsight, it's interesting to think about what could have been done to cause a different outcome ...
Getting "an IT person" to manage an analytical unit is the kiss of death.
Two years ago our business unit (part of a large financial company with that industry's typical heavy SAS involvement) started up an analytical group by poaching half a dozen of us from the rest of the business; all sharp guys, all with a track record of forecasting, modeling, etc. etc., not necessarily to FDA specifications, but Good Enough For Business. We scored quite a few initial home runs. This of course led to the guiding force behind forming this unit (who had no experience with SAS, only a vision and the wisdom to scrape HR for people with the track record of fulfilling this vision, whatever the software they may be using) being moved upwards and onwards.
His replacement was somebody the department head knew from his previous employer as a "good IT database manager"; i.e., SQL Server guy. So it's now 6 months down the road, and we're all spending our days writing DB2 sql passthroughs, with the state of the analytic art being "group by" clauses, while Mr. "good IT database manager" laboriously constructs a
SQL Server data repository (inaccessible to SAS) with a staff of SQL Server folks from his old department. Presumably at some point, he will demonstrate that these folks can do the group bys quite a bit more cheaply than that weird SAS setup, and our group will be obsolete. The department will show a terrific savings in costs by getting rid of us and the SAS licenses we use up, and everybody involved will part themselves on the back for the great job and all the progress made. All the projects as to forecasting, modeling etc.? On indefinite hold, until people eventually forget they ever got started.
WOW - this is a really unfortunate turn of events - and what a waste of the great talent in your SAS-focused analytics group. Is there any way to demonstrate the value of the forecasting and modeling to some other decision maker at your company - without excluding the "good IT database manager" so that it doesn't look like you're going behind his back - to reinvigorate the interest in those capabilities? Perhaps there's an opportunity for the creation of a Center of Excellence to emphasize how the full array of data analysis is beneficial to your company? It really does sound like things have taken a step backward - if possible, be in touch with your SAS sales team and Customer Loyalty representative to continue the dialogue. Good luck and think you for writing.