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Data explosion
As professionals in the business intelligence (BI) field,
many of you are well aware of the forces that have spawned
the creation of your job and/or the expansion of your duties.
The arrival of the mainframe in the 1960s, the minicomputer
in the '70s, and the PC in the '80s all provided the infrastructure
for the digitization of corporate data. The growth of networking
technologies in the 1990s made it much easier to share data,
and the Internet revolution has sparked an explosion of
data that took most everyone by surprise. The good news
for those of us in BI is that, for the most part, we've
got access to plenty of digitized data to crunch.
So much to do, so little time
These days, the bad news seems to be piling up fast. The
data we're using to help ourselves and others make better
decisions is often dirty, in multiple formats, sitting in
multiple databases/locations, etc. The recent recession,
globalization, increasing energy costs, and other economic
forces have many executives and managers looking for more
answers (usually ASAP) from the data in which they invested
so heavily to digitize; as a result, the queue of user requests
for reports and analyses is exceeding the capacity of many
BI professionals to produce. In some organizations, the
obvious answers - the proverbial "low hanging fruit" - have
already been harvested, and demand for more complex analytic
tools and skills is increasing. To top it all off, often
the best analysis isn't enough; even the best managers realize
that it takes more than the right data and IT tools to make
quality decisions.
Even when I was a full-time statistician in the early- to
mid-1990s, I just didn't have the time to keep up with developments
in the BI field, so I sometimes felt like I was working
on an island and falling behind the times. The Internet
and the search engines hadn't yet taken off, so keeping
my skills current meant taking a course, reading a book,
and attending industry conferences - all good sources, yet
none were very current. I always wanted to have an "agent"
of sorts who was tracking the BI industry on my behalf.
I would have loved to check out the latest SAS technologies,
but had to wait for the annual conferences (e.g., SUGI,
MWSUG), and even at those events there was too much to see
and do and not enough time to really check it all out.
So what we have is an environment in which everyone is busy,
and most don't have time to thoroughly explore new SAS technologies,
monitor other parts of the BI field, or locate the information
required to constantly improve our ability, and the abilities
of our customers, to make better decisions.
The Portal
Datagister.com was
launched in March as a portal for sharing articles, SAS
software demos, and general information useful to BI professionals
and decision makers alike. As a SAS consultancy, we must
keep current on all things BI, so we're tracking the latest
industry articles and constantly communicating with SAS
Institute, BI industry thought leaders, SAS users, and decision
makers. When weblogs (or "blogs") took off late last year,
we thought, why not record some of our experiences, new
ideas, and "word on the street" findings on a blog and share
it with the BI crowd? So we built the datagister.com site,
structured the home page as a blog, and started posting.
Now we're looking for other SAS users to join the site and
periodically post their ideas so that the entire BI community
can benefit.
Our president, D.J. Penix, then came up with the idea of
providing access to SAS software demonstrations. So now
anyone can "kick the tires" on three analytic software solutions:
SAS Web Report Studio, SAS Information Delivery Portal,
and an interesting OLAP solution called Futrix (built using
SAS by Futrix Ltd).
What's really great is that access to the demos is free,
and you can register some of your own custom data (scrambled
of course to protect confidentiality!) in the metadata to
review with your peers and management (visit datagister.com
for more information). We're preparing to roll out a few
more SAS solution demos, including Enterprise Guide and
Enterprise Miner, later this summer.
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