Many of the chapters in my new book Building Business Intelligence Using SAS: Content Development Examples were straightforward to write but one in particular was the beast. Neither Tricia nor I wanted to tackle the SAS BI Dashboard chapter. Just chalk it up to no major work experience with this
Recently I've made several online purchases buying eBooks for the new Amazon Kindle my daughter received as a holiday gift. The online checkout process is very straight-forward, especially with the 'Continue' buttons that change to a 'Place your order' button on the final step. Did you know that the same
That there is a growing shortage of analytical talent in most of the economies of the world is clear. In a May 2011 report, the McKinsey Global Institute put some numbers on the demand: “By 2018, the United States alone could face a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with
When developing content in SAS BI Dashboard, such as indicators, ranges, and dashboards, knowing how to name them is pretty important. If changes are required later (for instance to improve the administrators capability of partial promoting content) much more work is required to ensure the links between the objects isn't
As many of you have already noticed, my LinkedIn profile and the blog profile blurb have changed. I took on an exciting new job in the SAS Solutions OnDemand team. The official title is Software Development Manager, but what I really do is lead a team of fraud solution architects.
The single most costly employee benefit for any organization is health insurance, and the price is going up. From 2003-2009, the costs per hour worked for employee health insurance increased from $1.03 to $2.00. These costs continue to increase from 5%-7% per year. The reality is that employee health insurance costs will continue
In one minute (and 10 seconds, but are you measuring that?) you can add a custom measure (also known as calculated members) to your OLAP cube. Watch this video to create a simple calculation multiplying units * price. Remember that this mechanism is not just used for multiplications, you can
OLAP cube developers might have noticed that the amount of time required to generate any aggregation (including the NWAY) can negatively impact their productivity. Developers remove the NWAY aggregation (following the sample screens in a prior post) to significantly reduce build time and allow quick modifications to the cube definition.
I my past blog posts I have written mostly about K-12 education. This is mainly because I think K-12 is over-ripe for reform in so many ways. School districts could learn a great deal from other industries and higher education in terms of data usage, reporting and analysis of students, programs and
Drill-through to detail is the ability to right click within a cell of a web report or OLAP viewer and request the detail source records that make up that specific cell's measure. The maximum number of records, by default, is set to 300,000. Feasibly the report user could download all
Not long ago, one of my colleagues wrote a blog post entitled, How to wake up dormant customers, which discusses the challenges in being customer centric – where you want to treat all customers well, and your best customers better. It made me think about the key tenet of Six Sigma
As I mentioned when creating a user-defined format for Information Maps in a prior post custom or user-defined formats can be created and stored quickly in the default format catalog for all Business Intelligence products within "Lev1SASAppSASEnvironmentSASFormats". This is useful for custom sorting, reclassifying or grouping data as well as
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
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
Since I started getting more involved in process improvement, I’ve started to look differently at how we work and interact with each other, information, knowledge and technologies. In analytics, I typically see processes represented in two ways: From a systems perspective and from a functional perspective. The problem with the
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
Functionality to upload files onto the SAS server (from 9.2 on) is available using stored processes and an html input type="file". I introduced this topic last year in my blog post using the SAS Stored Process Developer Guide sample. Of course, it is never as easy as the sample is
Business Problem: The traffic lighting (red/green/yellow) range is different for one group/category than the others but the indicator needs to include all group values. Recommendation: It's all in the data. Here is an example. For the Candy_Sales_Summary data (located in the EG Sample Data folder) there are three groups of
Every six months or so I try to find a recent picture that captures who I am and what I am feeling. Loading this into my various social/online profiles in Twitter, SAS Community, Forums, LinkedIn, corporate internal, Facebook etc then take me a bit of time to implement. Wouldn't it
Tomorrow I was going to go visit one of our insurance clients. I was really looking forward to the meeting – a chance to share experiences with a strategic analytic team. Unfortunately, I got an e-mail from the team’s administrative assistant: “I’m sorry, but so-and-so needs to cancel. An important
Over my 32 year career in local government as a city and county manager I was faced with many difficult decisions during budget deliberations. Setting tax and utility rates, adding head count, determining compensation and benefits, calculating the appropriate mix of debt and cash for funding capital projects…these were all
If you would like to link users to a specific section within a Web Report Studio report, there is a quick way to generate the URL. Just send yourself an email from Web Report Studio. A parameter &rsTS is included in the link which corresponds to the specific section selected.
Sometimes when you change a couple of words around, you can end up with an entirely new concept. In a conversation with a co-worker around analytic roles and responsibilities, she noted that we shouldn’t be talking about “business intelligence analysts,” but discussing ways to create “intelligent business analysts.” Brilliant!! One
I’ve been hanging out in Canada again, eh? Just last week, I snuck over the border to meet with some of our insurance customers in the Greater Toronto Area (affectionately known as “GTA”). This was my fifth trip this year and I’m pleased to say that not only have I
Summer has almost come to a close – and thank goodness! Up here in the Northeast, we’ve been subjected to tornadoes, hurricanes, floods and earthquakes. I’ve been waiting for the locusts to descend! And outside of dodging hail and charging my laptop with my car’s cigarette lighter when we lost
Agility. I've been giving a lot of thought to the term while here in San Diego for the TDWI World Conference. "Evolving Your Agile BI Environment" is the theme of this year's event and "agility" has definitely been embedded in the conversations I have had with customers the past few
In preparation for TDWI San Diego, I was finalizing my schedule and checking out what some of my favorite TDWI instructors are up to for San Diego. I'll be blogging about my fave classes from these instructors all next week. This evening I caught up on Cindi Howson 's blog
I was presented with a design approach yesterday that included one web report duplicated multiple times for each group in the organization. Each web report then used essentially an identical information map with the difference of only a filter. Instead of using a single web report with a prompted filter (or copying the web
I am one of those rare people that enjoys process; not rigid process and military-like discipline, but order. Wasted effort drives me insane. I’ve been on projects all through my career where I feel like the project teams are constantly reinventing the wheel, because nobody bothered to capture any documentation
When looking to add the Stored Process Alert Process (useful to see whether processes run in the BACKGROUND were completed successfully) the specific portlet type is not on the list. No worries, it's actually a personal portlet that is defined to present only YOUR stored process execution results. Therefore to locate
