One of the primary goals of this blog is to establish our contributors and by extension, SAS, as thought leaders in a variety of state & local government areas. It’s also a goal of the upcoming SAS Government Insights publication, which includes a thoughtful opinion piece about what it means to be a thought leader. I’d like to think the blog is contributing to that goal, and certainly Government Insights is full of great perspectives. However, I was thrilled to read another take on thought leadership, this one from Forrester analyst, Tom Grant.

Tom recently spent time with some folks from the SAS government team. His resulting post, titled “SAS Shows How Thought Leadership Is The Art Of The Possible”, has inspired me to think of our customers in a new way.

He looks at our customer successes as the pathway to thought leadership. It’s important for us to know, from a sales perspective, how what a customer in one industry is doing might be transferable to another industry. However, I hadn’t thought about that as “thought leadership.” But he has me convinced.

He highlights Los Angeles County, one of the most bold and innovative local government customers we have. Tom writes, “The general contours of LA County's project might fit cybersecurity projects, in which social network analysis might help identify cybercriminals and trigger a response. It's not too hard, therefore, for SAS to position itself as a potential thought leader in cybersecurity, despite the fact that the levels and types of cybersecurity threats are unprecedented.” He’s right! Much the same way those same analyses are done by financial institutions to uncover fraud and identity theft.

I’m inspired to highlight a few more of our customers…not only the successes they’ve had but some thoughts on how they could be applied to other government challenges. Please stay tuned for a special series of posts on the subject.