For a service organization like SAS Education, there are few things more valuable than feedback from our users. Sunday, in advance of our 15^th annual Analytics conference, we were fortunate enough to spend three hours meeting with some of SAS Education’s largest customers at the First Annual Analytics Customer Summit.

The Summit provided us a forum to hear about how customers are using analytics in their organizations and to learn more about existing and future needs. We have hosted a similar focus group prior to SAS Global Forum and have implemented a number of ideas that came from these discussions, including the creation of Fast Track courses (several courses combined into one 5-day course) and our Guaranteed to Run Policy, a program which provided assurances that our customers would receive the training they needed, when they need it.
As the first feedback session we’ve ever done for our analytics customers, we received a number of interesting ideas that will help drive our work for the rest of the year and into 2013. In this blog I thought I’d share some of the valuable feedback we received and invite you to share your comments as well.

Big data, a hot topic in the world of analytics, came up early and often. While some customers hadn’t heard of our High Performance Analytics (HPA) solution, one large bank gave us great feedback about the product’s significance for her organization saying, “We’re solving things now that we haven’t been able to even consider before.” But the value she’s experiencing with HPA isn’t limited to new analysis. This customer said they’ve been able to significantly reduce modeling cycle time, analysis that used to take days can now be handled in minutes. Our takeaway was to accelerate plans to develop courses in HPA, so more customers could realize positive results like these.

Another valuable part of the focus group was an exercise where we asked our users to brainstorm courses they’d like to see Education create in the near future. There were a number of great suggestions, but the most intriguing might have been a request for more robust training in support of the use of multiple SAS products. Specifically mentioned were courses on how to bridge the two products most used by their analysts: SAS Enterprise Guide and SAS Enterprise Miner. The next two most popular topics we discussed were ones that would help their analysts become more efficient in their roles – specifically courses teaching SAS performance tuning and advanced programming and efficiencies.

A final insight worth mentioning is the response we received when we asked about their preferred method of learning technical topics. Many mentioned that networking and informal learning within their organization, via internal social media sites, centers of excellence, brown bag knowledge transfers, were important, but all agreed it couldn’t replace the formal learning they received from SAS or other technical vendors. Since much of our curriculum in analytics is presented in real time over the Internet, it was reassuring to hear our customers like our Live Web courses and felt they were very engaging, and very good. They also liked our blended learning options, which combine Live Web sessions with instructors with conversations, discussion boards, after-class readings and other out-of-class networking opportunities.

So that’s a quick review of the Analytics Customer Summit. It was great to get this valuable feedback from our biggest customers. And now it’s your turn. We’d love to hear your thoughts on some of the topics mentioned here.

Are you using HPA? Would you benefit from training in this area? What other areas in the analytics area would you appreciate us developing? And finally, what is your preferred way to learn?

If you have comments or thoughts, I’d love to hear them. Please post them in the comments section below.

Warm wishes from Las Vegas,
Larry Stewart