Voice of an analytics practitioner...

Having worked with SAS way back on IBM S/360 Mainframes to modern PC’s and mid-range UNIX servers, both as individual contributor and lead of an advanced analytics team, this topic is deeply personal and impactful as it profoundly affects my ability to deliver value to the organization.

Your assessment of the situation is absolutely spot on, I like the suggestions, I think they are great. Sourcing and placing a SAS Administrator can be difficult though. They don’t sit well in IT as SAS administration is not a full time job typically, it is a specialty skill, and more importantly, SAS is not a tool that IT is familiar with because they don’t use it. Most of the time, IT have no idea of the types of problems we solve, how we use SAS to solve it, and many of them they think of analytics as “just code”. This makes them ill-qualified to administer and support us. In field, it is far more likely that we who use SAS everyday would know SAS and the required environment far better than IT. Yet, business leaders instinctively think of Administration as an IT job, and won’t fund such a position. It is so easy for us to get caught in this no-man's land.

Current SAS Administration is shifting to cater to IT and their typical desire for control and lock down. To this, I would say I like SAS to enable us to help ourselves as much as possible, and not make us dependent on someone else. Reduce and minimize the need for Administration by design in the first place, and where it’s required, find the right balance between letting us control the environment versus needing someone else to administer my environment for me.

Above all else, please engineer SAS Administration so that it is simple, flexible and effortless so that advanced analytics professionals can just focus on getting the job done, this is all that matters. We are your biggest supporters and fans, not IT. To IT, you are just a cost line item and support headache; to us, you are our lifeblood.