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| Managers think about SAS value particularly when it is renewal time! |
In my many years as a SAS consultant, I have received this
question several many times. I remember
one time in Michigan
at a healthcare organization. The
executive mentioned he had a number of people across the organization approach
him about issues related to the inefficient deployment and use of SAS. There
was also a perception that the organization could or should be using SAS more
effectively as a strategic advantage in certain situations.
This is a very common concern since organizations pay good
money for their SAS software and wonder if they are squeezing the most value of
those dollars. Managers think about SAS
value particularly when it is renewal time!
They want to know: what is SAS, how it is used across their organization
as well as what are the challenges for them in fully leveraging SAS in their environment.
Managers don’t even know what they have in terms of SAS
software very often. Does it sound
weird? It is. Especially considering the
amount of money they are paying. But if
you are in this category don’t feel bad.
SAS licensing is so confusing and there are so many products and bundles
that I have encountered this situation many times worldwide!
Would you agree the value of SAS for your organization comes
from transforming data into actionable information using well prepared human
resources? If so, let’s look at seven
areas where this potential value can be lost: inefficient data access, limited
reporting and visualization, poor data cleansing, obsolete predictive
analytics, incomplete SAS solutions, limited hardware use, and lack of
governance.
INEFFICIENT DATA ACCESS
SAS has great capabilities as a 4GL to extract, transform,
integrate and load data in both structured and unstructured data repositories
(EDWs, Marts, RDBMs, data lakes). I have
found that SAS installations are poorly
tuned and therefore subject to delays and contentions with other
applications. SAS installations can also be incomplete because managers don’t understand
or have the perception that SAS does not operate on relatively new technologies
such as Hadoop clusters. It is also
common that organizations have stopped at the SAS Base level use and have not
moved into SAS Enterprise Guide, a newer interface. Another possibility, they may have been using
SAS EG but are not using SAS Data Integration suite of products. This makes the overall SAS data management operation
obsolete and clumsy.
LIMITED REPORTING AND VISUALIZATION
SAS BI has the capability to produce reports, dashboards, and
mobile reports. Many times, nobody knows how to use SAS BI software. I believe, one reason is the traditional SAS BI
products (SAS Business Intelligence components
including Web Report Studio, Information Map Studio, SAS Information Delivery
Portal and the SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office) were developed as
modules and therefore managers have a hard time trying to figure out how these
modules come together or what they do. The new generation of SAS BI products,
like SAS Visual Analytics, are bundled a bit better but they still have technical
requirements like the SAS LASR that makes these products harder to implement
when compared with competitive products like Tableau, BO and Microsoft Power BI.
POOR DATA CLEANSING
If your data sources are not reliable then it is virtually
impossible to get the value of your SAS installation. When I met with the board
of directors of a large mobile operator in Africa ,
they told me they would regularly have different version of the “truth”
depending on who was reporting. This had
created a lack of trust in the data and in
the mechanisms to bring the data from source to consumption. This is critical. Your SAS Data Management software
(Dataflux) should have good matching, survivorship and cleansing rules to
deliver quality data downstream.
Otherwise, data consistency and value are compromised. This situation
hinders fact-based decision making – a significant value generator!
OBSOLETE PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS
Predictive analytics is the area where typically more value
is created in the SAS installation.
However, I have found that scientists without training or exposure to
best practices become stagnant in SAS STAT and never evolve into using more
automated tools like SAS Enterprise Miner or solutions like SAS Model Manager that
deliver additional capabilities to
produce more and better models. I am not even mentioning SAS Viya, the new,
high performance analytics architecture unveiled recently by SAS at its user
group conference in Las Vegas. A Spanish bank can leverage efficient modeling
to run more than one hundred marketing campaigns per month using SAS Customer Intelligence. Can your team do the same? That’s one typical way to leverage SAS
software to generate exponential value.
What about my SAS
solution? Most SAS solutions are a
collection of base modules plus specialized modules like SAS EM as well as some
customized modules according to the application domain i.e. healthcare fraud
framework, gaming patron value optimization, service part optimization, retail
merchandizing, etc. These solutions have
been created organically. Some times they
perform poorly because they are either being used partially in a modular fashion
or the solution has not been integrated properly.
POOR HARDWARE PERFORMANCE
Many organizations operate in silos supported by
departmental computers. It could be
government vs. commercial. Or finance,
marketing, customer support, etc. These
SAS computing silos provide little strategic advantage for licensing economies
of scale and make it difficult to improve hardware performance. Look beyond departmental computing to unleash
the value of your existing hardware using new technologies like SAS GRID that bring
the promise to provide additional performance and throughput. The SAS Grid Manager components make grid-enabled SAS
applications available to a variety of SAS customers. SAS DI Studio and SAS
Enterprise Miner have enhanced their integrated development environments (IDE)
to provide grid automation by automatically generating SAS code for applications
that are enabled to execute in a grid.
LACK OF GOVERNANCE
Look around and beyond SAS.
Perhaps best practices sharing do not exist and there is a lack of governance. Develop processes and procedures to unleash
the power of the SAS team. Otherwise, the information delivery process comes to
a screeching halt. For instance, is
there an internal data dictionary or business glossary? Do you have data
stewards? Do you have too many data
stewards? You may find that there are some
issues in transforming information which are "too difficult to
correct". This situation handicaps
the ability to derive value from SAS.
WHAT CAN YOU DO?
- Review
your SAS license and figure out what you have and what you should use.
- Conduct
and assessment to break down business requirements and determine how best
to leverage the existing SAS tools within your environment to meet project
objectives. Eliminate tools not
needed.
- Create
a SAS toolset. Design and develop
SAS standard macros, small applications, and other utilities to expedite
SAS programming activities and data analysis/review
- Perform
SAS programming quality control checks against source data and document
all data issues
- Evaluate
and improve existing SAS analytic models
- Evaluate
cost of using SAS GRID
- If
appropriate, build and operationalize analytical models within the SAS
Grid environment, leveraging tools and data from various sources
(Teradata, Hadoop, Excel files, MySQL, Oracle etc.)
- Review
your SAS solution for completeness and integration
- Ensure
all SAS programming activities and processes performed are conducted
according to standard operating procedures and good programming practices
- Create a SAS group to provide guidance to team members on SAS solutions, best practices, and standards
If you need help evaluating your
situation, please reach out. We have in-depth knowledge of SAS software as we were once SAS
employees. We know various best practices for configuring the software to best
suit needs, have experience in SAS solutions, and can lead re-engineering
sessions. We provide SAS technical expertise in building, integrations, testing
and training of SAS applications.
Hope these ideas help.
Best regards. Al
al.cordoba@qlx.com
954-980-5992
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