SAS

Answering the real questions in data analysis

December 15, 2010

A guy walks into your cube and asks you to whip up an econometric model. You’re a statistician, after all, and you’ve got a Ph.D. in something or other. You do this for lunch, he figures. He “over-thought,” says the one whose cube such a guy walked into. Theresa Doyon has been routinely navigating datasets [...]

Read the full article →

Migrating mindsets is the real challenge in ETL

September 23, 2009

I was intrigued by Donald Farmer’s recent tweet about ETL: “Migrating technologies is just work. Migrating people and mindsets is the real challenge.” I asked him to elaborate. Donald is principal program manager of SQL Server Analysis Services at Microsoft. He sees “numerous” examples of migrating users who reject perfectly good methods in favor of [...]

Read the full article →

Less than meets the ear

April 8, 2009

Last week, SAS Institute did what few other rearrangers of jargon have done: They got attention — in the way fashion hounds do. They’d like to replace “business intelligence” with “business analytics.” Why? Because “business intelligence is not “where the future is.” Last year’s styles are never next year’s. Sooner or later, all clothes, cars [...]

Read the full article →

Green on the BI horizon

October 2, 2008

Oracle OpenWorld’s strong theme of sustainability made me wonder if I might find something green on the exhibit floor. I went to the usual BI vendors and asked about aiming BI tools at carbon footprints.

Read the full article →

SAS finance architect is out to overhaul credit-scoring metrics

September 15, 2008

Some loan officers used to go by rules of thumb. There were “The Three B’s: never lend to beauticians, bartenders or barbers” and “The Three P’s: never lend to preachers, plumbers or prostitutes.” Now we have an automated system, but it can’t tell an upstanding banker from a down-on-his-luck bartender. Imagine a high-level banker who [...]

Read the full article →