In the beginning there was just raw data... rows and columns of numbers in strict, structured, disciplined formats generated by a variety of transactional and operational business systems. The volume - while quite large - was still manageable. And it was good. Well, good enough at least. Then, the “content
Predictive Analytics World is a little over a week away. I hope you’re planning to be in San Francisco for this exciting conference. This is the first time that SAS Publishing will participate in the event, and I am really looking forward to it. We’re teaming up with the Analytics
The American Association of State Highway Transportation Officials recently released a top 10 list of transportation issues that will be “talked, written or tweeted and legislated about” in 2012. As expected, funding constraints and Congressional action on reauthorization appear on the list but the group also notes that natural disaster
My colleague, Steve Serrao, just published a blog post on the proliferation of varied law enforcement approaches and their related phraseologies. After reading, I concur – hence, this blog’s title. I am not a huge fan of the term “predictive policing”. While others may love it and live it, and
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
Many cities and counties are taking the lead of private industry and developing 311 call centers to consolidate incoming calls for service and information requests from citizens. The business advantages are clear: Citizens have one number to call for service and information rather than having to waste time searching for
Cities and counties are responsible for building and maintaining the infrastructure to support a broad range of services. Local governments must develop and implement multiyear capital projects plans that provide infrastructure for things such as jails, courts, public office buildings, streets, bridges, parks, athletic complexes and community centers, water treatment
Here at SAS Publishing, we’ve started the new year off with a bang, particularly when it comes to conferences. We’re attending a number of new shows in addition to the usual lineup this year. Visit our booth, meet our authors, check out our new and forthcoming titles, and talk with
A’s in the front, Z’s in the back. How many of us grew up sitting in alphabetical order next to the same few classmates throughout school? While this is a quick and efficient way to learn student names, which is no easy task, it is not the most effective way
During one week in December, two separate transportation agencies within the federal government made two major announcements. First, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) – the government agency responsible for guiding traffic safety initiatives on the nation’s highways announced that crash fatalities had declined to record low rates. Just
Local governments are not immune to the rising demand for more accountability in government run services and programs, and the expenditure of public funds. Elected officials and citizens alike want to know what these programs accomplish for the public investment made. To date, the response to these questions and demands has been
2011 saw incredible change in the states as more than half of the governorships changed hands. As expected, that caused significant turnover at the State CIO level, as well. So while executive and technology policies changed in many ways, the dismal budget situation reinforced the need to allocate tax pay
Hear directly from an organization that is firing on all cylinders with analytics and achieving true data-driven insight in all its business areas. On Dec. 14, SAS customer Kelley Blue Book (KBB) and SAS Alliance partner Modern Analytics will share firsthand learnings during a live webinar, "Analytics – An Inside Perspective,”
This week's SAS author's tip comes from Gerhard Svolba, author of Data Preparation for Analytics Using SAS and the upcoming book Data Quality for Analytics Using SAS. Gerhard is a product manager and pre-sales consultant at SAS in Austria. Gerhard wrote his first book on analytics about five years ago and
When I moved last year from Denver to the Washington, DC area people told me to prepare myself for the long hours I would spend in my car. I had no idea. It takes forever to get anywhere. Once, during a snowstorm it took me 9 hours to drive 10
Are you always looking for that inside perspective? Most of us are! As we all know, customers are the primary – perhaps exclusive – source of cash flow for many organizations. Knowing which ones are most profitable is critical to maximizing future economic value. To help today's marketing and business leaders learn
I started working with a large financial services customer recently that’s implementing an enterprise-level strategic analytic application. If they’re successful, these analytics will be a game changer for this organization. Unfortunately, I can’t discuss what they’re implementing, but the analytics enable a key business strategy, and this initiative has the
JSM, Miami Beach, FL, July 31–August 3 Miami Beach in August is hot. Ridiculously hot. Almost as hot as our preview copies at this show. Conference goers were extremely excited about a number of our upcoming statistics titles, including Customer Segmentation and Clustering Using SAS® Enterprise Miner™, Second Edition, by
This is a question I am often asked: What skills do I need to become a good analyst or data miner? In order to become good data mining practitioner one needs to understand statistical concepts and basic principles of knowledge induction. Knowing inferential stats, t-tests, analysis of variance, regressions, and
Imagine you are standing on the corner of a very busy intersection in the middle of downtown New York City. It's the peak of rush hour and you need to get across the street in a hurry. And, oh yeah, you're blindfolded. This was one of the various scenarios discussed
The average executive at the average company has probably never seen the words “imagination” and “analytics” juxtaposed in the same sentence. There was nothing average about the thirty plus high-impact and high-intellect executives who convened for the Atlanta Power Series. This group demonstrated that there is nothing average about the
In the last year, SAS CEO Jim Goodnight and a group of R&D, Education, Sales and Marketing executives visited several universities that are in the early stages of adopting analytics within their business programs. To that effort, Goodnight addressed faculty and students at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business on
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
“Wise Enterprise: Best Practices for Managing Predictive Analytics” was the title, and the assignment to the panel at the recent Predictive Analytics World conference in New York was to share “poignant moments of failure.” Wayne Thompson from SAS began, going back ten years to describe a network intrusion project. He
For the past year, I’ve had the pleasure of serving on the communications team of the National Collaborative for Bio-Preparedness (NCB-P), of which SAS is a partner and the analytics provider. That experience was heavy on my mind as I recently watched the film Contagion. I may drop some minor
There’s no shortage at SAS’ analytics conference A2011 of discussions around statistical modeling and optimization techniques. Kevin Norwood from Procter & Gamble, for example, discussed his company’s use of clustering, optimization and data visualization to answer questions like, “How do we reformulate our detergents when faced with an ingredient shortage?
Big data problems are not new, says Vijitha Kaduwela, founder and CEO of Kavi Associates, an analytic consulting firm. The first case in point that Vijitha referenced in his talk yesterday at Analytics 2011 is a revenue generation model that he developed for United Airlines when he worked there 15 years ago.
Jack Valenti, longtime president and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America, once said “No one, absolutely no one, can tell you what a movie is going to do in the marketplace… Not until that film opens in a darkened theater, and sparks fly up between the screen and
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
"Unless you understand the data aspects of the problem, you're not going to be able to solve it." ~ Thornton May, IT futurist and author of The New Know. In this brief video interview excerpt, Thornton suggests four tips for solving problems analytically: Focus on the pressing issues of
