During SAS Global Forum 2018, SAS instructor Charu Shankar sat down with four SAS users to get their take on what makes a SAS user. Read through to find valuable tips they shared and up your SAS game. I’m sure you will come away inspired, as you discover some universal commonalities in being a SAS user.
The post What makes a SAS user? SAS thinks like me: Dede Schreiber-Gregory appeared first on SAS Learning Post.
During SAS Global Forum 2018, SAS instructor Charu Shankar sat down with four SAS users to get their take on what makes them a SAS user. Read through to find valuable tips they shared and up your SAS game. I’m sure you will come away inspired, as you discover some universal commonalities in being a SAS user.
The post What makes a SAS user? Introverts find their tribe: Richann Watson appeared first on SAS Learning Post.
“Customer experiences are defined by peak moments”, said Dan Heath, in his typical charismatic fashion during the keynote on the Executive Track of the SAS Global Forum 2018. Customer experiences is not an alien term by any means but "peak moments?" What was that?
The best way to get a detailed understanding is to simply get your copy of The Power of Moments authored by the Heath Brothers. Heath went on to use examples from a bank in Canada where the ATM would have a human dialog with the surprised consumer just walking up to withdraw a few dollars and would pop up a free ticket to Disney for a mother of two or a round trip ticket for a grandmother to be with her beautiful grandchildren. Peak Moments. OK, now I get it.
Heath also challenged everyone in the audience – including yours truly – to submit our own interpretation of peak moments within the next 24 hours to get a free copy of his book. But, as luck would have it, I did not get around to submitting it because the peak moment I experienced was a few hours later during the SAS Grid Dinner. And it was no surprise that this conference was in Denver with a beautiful view of the glorious mountain peaks -- the perfect backdrop for customers to experience their peak moments!
Fast forward to the SAS Grid Dinner. A panel of customers using SAS Grid Manager with years of experienced insight had a great conversation with the audience with the discussion eloquently moderated by Cheryl Doninger, VP, Business Intelligence, Research & Development, SAS. It was clear that this was a panel that had done many things right from the get go and taken up the challenges of technology, culture, change management different ways. It was really nice to see them openly share their experiences and findings for the benefit of the hundreds of members in the audience listening with rapt attention.
And, then it hit me! We were looking at SAS customers on the panel. Going back to Heath’s assertion, I started wondering what could have been the peak moment for every one of these customers as they continued to evangelize the enterprise-wide adoption of SAS Grid Manager. Here is a synopsis of various peak moments shared by the customers in response to my question. Heath! Are you reading this?
Peak Moment One
SAS Grid Manager users are happy with the uptime and availability of Grid Manager. One customer called it a Layer of Happiness.
Peak Moment Two
Users who had initially issued a stern warning – “You ain’t taking my PC SAS away” – were happy to see 25 percent to 50 percent performance and throughput improvements with SAS Grid Manager.
Peak Moment Three
The loudest and most aggressive naysayer who was opposed to the migration to SAS Grid Manager became an advocate after experiencing tangible proof points and measurable outcomes.
Peak Moment Four
200 users were seamlessly migrated without any glitch. Worked like a charm! Nodes were decommissioned unbeknownst to the user.
Peak Moment Five
Taking a moment to reflect on the overall experience – what could have been and how smooth the overall experience was.
Peak Moment Six
Certify models when moving from previous platform to the SAS Grid but no code changes were needed to move the models.
Peak Moment Seven.
SAS Grid Manager being fully utilized at 80 percent to 90 percent capacity just like the mainframes. Maximizing the utilization is always a strong indicator of systemic adoption across the enterprise.
There you have it. These were peak moments that the customers shared in response to my question.
But, here is what I was pleasantly surprised by! It took them seconds to come out with their respective peak moments. They did not have to reflect. They did not have to think hard. It came to them naturally. And that is what made it a peak moment for me! Just seeing these real-life customers share openly what worked for them and their users and why. These seven peak moments took me to seventh heaven!
So, Dan Heath, I could not meet your deadline of submitting my peak moment because I was waiting to experience one myself – albeit a tad bit late! Guess what could be another peak moment for me? You reading this blog and sending me a copy of your book!
What are your peak moments as a customer? What are peak moments your customers have experienced? Please share them here. And we will wait for the Heath brothers to synthesize that into another wonderful book for the rest of us to read!
Peak moments define SAS Global Forum 2018 was published on SAS Users.
The SAS Jedi Mark Jordan presents his SAS Global Forum 2018 paper "Working with Big Data in SAS"
The post Jedi @ SASGF: Working with Big Data in SAS appeared first on SAS Learning Post.
SAS has never been able to sit idle and watch from the sidelines as crises ensue. Why? Because we know that good can be made possible if data is put to work. SAS Global Forum opening session spotlighted four real-life examples of how SAS is showing up and improving the [...]
What can be achieved when passion, curiosity and analytics come together? was published on SAS Voices by Anjelica Cummings
Bright lights, a packed house, loud music and high energy – these are the elements that come to life every year in the SAS Global Forum opening session. But it’s not just about the entertainment and energy. Each year, the Sunday night opening session sets the stage for conference attendees. [...]
Ask the question, and watch new discoveries unfold was published on SAS Voices by Anjelica Cummings
When we breathe, we breathe in and breathe out. If we choose only one or the other, the results are disastrous.
The same principle applies to professional growth and development. Whether we are programmers, statisticians, teachers, students, or writers, we benefit from taking in and giving back. We "take in" when we learn something new: a new fact, a new skill, or a new technique. We "give back" when we share one of our talents with someone else, such as when we teach, mentor, or coach. Taking in and giving back reinforce each other and lead to a virtuous cycle of learning and sharing.
The COO at SAS, Oliver Schabenberger, often speaks about "lifelong learning" and encourages employees to grow and learn. Learning prevents stagnation, fosters creativity, and benefits the company as well as the individual. SAS also encourages giving back by promoting the Data For Good movement, STEM education, community outreach, and more.
In my own career, writing this blog promotes my professional growth, as does my involvement in the SAS Support Communities. These activities require me to take in and give back. I take in when I research a blog topic, when I read a journal article, and when I search the SAS documentation. I give back when I share a programming trick, a statistical method, or an interesting mathematical tidbit.
Conferences provide a unique opportunity for taking in and giving back. This week I am at SAS Global Forum, where I will give several presentations and talk with SAS customers about their data and business problems. But I will also take in information from the other attendees. I expect to learn as much as I teach. I expect to return home full of energy and excitement from days of give and take.
Breathing in and breathing out is easy. Taking in and giving back can be harder when you face the day-to-day demands of a job and family. How do you make time in your day to learn new things? How do you share your knowledge? Are these activities valued at your company? Leave a comment.
The post Taking in. Giving back. appeared first on The DO Loop.
I’m excited because in a couple days I will fly to Denver for SAS Global Forum 2018, the biggest SAS conference of the year, attended by thousands.
If you are coming, I hope you will attend the presentation that Lora Delwiche and I have. It is “SAS Studio: A New Way to Program in SAS” on Wednesday April 11, 10:00-11:30am in Meeting Room506.
It’s a Hands On Workshop so it’s best if you can be there in person. If you can’t, you can still read the paper.
In fact, you can access the proceedings for the entire conference.
And better still, you can attend the conference online. Selected events can be viewed live including the Opening Session Sunday, April 8, 7:00-8:30pm (MT).
And if you miss that, there is always a library of interesting videos available on demand.
SAS Global Forum 2018 is just days away, and if you're one of the 6,000 SAS users heading to Denver for the event, get ready for four days of learning from SAS peers, exchanging ideas, discovering new techniques for using SAS, and a bit of fun as well.
But what if you can't make the trip to Denver this year? Is there another way to experience some of the great content that will be shared there? I'm happy to say the answer is yes!
Once again, SAS will provide dozens of hours of live video streaming from the event. Register for an All-Access Pass and watch select sessions including Opening Session, keynote talks, select breakouts, Tech Talks, updates from The Quad, interviews with SAS executives and developers, and more. You can find livestream presentations and add them to your calendar here. Coverage will be available for on-demand viewing on SAS Global Forum Video Portal after the conference as well.
Video not your thing? No worries. SAS will provide several other ways to stay up to date. For starters, you can read any of a number of blog posts from the event. Posts will come from many different SAS blogs, but all posts from SAS Global Forum will be aggregated here.
If you're on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook, you can stay connected with what's happening and engage with attendees on SAS’ social media channels. Join the conversation, comment on some of the cool presentations you attended or viewed, discuss the exciting news coming out of the event, or simply follow along. The channels sure to have the most activity are the SAS Users LinkedIn group, the SAS Twitter account, the SAS Users Group Facebook page; and Instagram. The hashtag for SAS Global Forum is #SASGF; be sure to use the hashtag in all your posts.
If you want a deeper dive into a particular talk, or if you're interested in presentations that may not be part of the Live Stream, the proceedings for SAS Global Forum 2018 are already available. Here you'll find abstracts, PDF of papers, e-posters, slides, data files, and more.
With all the opportunities to follow along, connect and contribute, you can be a part of SAS Global Forum 2018, whether you're attending in person or not.
Enjoy the event...whether you're going or not!
Participate in SAS Global Forum 2018...even if you're not going was published on SAS Users.
SAS Global Forum 2018
takes place April 8-11 in Denver. The following post is from Sebastian Dziadkowiec and Piotr Czetwertynski, presenters at the event. You can join Sebastian and Piotr for their talk: “An Agile Approach to Building an Omni-Channel Customer Experience” on April 9 at 2 p.m. in Meeting Room 302. We'll also post their presentation here after the event has concluded.
Most organizations acknowledge that building a seamless and consistent customer experience is critical to long-term success. The big question is: Now what? With all of the channels to stitch together – from brick and mortar experiences to online clicks – how do you track and make sense of all that customer data? And, more importantly, how do you use that data to create the very best customer experience?
Over many years of implementing SAS Customer Intelligence and helping our clients give their customers exactly what they want and when they want it, our team has identified some characteristics that make for successful projects. Here are some of the key components that most often make or break a Customer Intelligence project.
Time to market
Everyone likes to see value generated quickly and reaching the break-even point for project within weeks of project launch is critical. In case of campaign management, it is possible. Instead of following the traditional waterfall path, with all the IT-heavy components like requirements gathering and analysis, solution design, many streams of implementation and testing, it is worth considering releasing a minimum viable product as soon as possible. Such approach allows us to focus on delivering business value and field-testing all the creative ideas, rather than building an IT system in perfect accordance to requirements, and one that may no longer be relevant at the day of release.
Applying analytics in the decisioning process
Go beyond traditional, rule-based approach to get the most out of the data you have. Nowadays, everyone speaks about machine learning, big data, NBA, artificial intelligence and so on. It is up to each organization and CI project to forge those fancy buzz words into real value, by embedding advanced analytics techniques in the decisioning process. There are many ways to boost various use cases by the advanced methods; make sure you will be able to use all you need and integrate their results seamlessly, regardless of when and how you engage with your customers.
While working on a CI project you should also keep in mind other areas: project organization, building a future-proof solution that will stay relevant for years, and constant search for additional opportunities to use available data and solutions to generate incremental value beyond the core scope of customer intelligence project.
There isn’t a one-size fits all approach to implementing a CI project, but these lessons learned can greatly increase your chances for project success – successful delivery generating a high ROI in a short timeframe while staying relevant in the long run - through the very best possible customer experience.
Find out more at the SAS Global User Forum 2018
Join Sebastian and Piotr for their “An Agile Approach to Building an Omni-Channel Customer Experience” Breakout Session at SAS Global Forum April 9 at 2 p.m. in Meeting Room 302.
Piotr Czetwertyński
Piotr is Customer Analytics Manager in Accenture. He has 11 years of experience in Campaign Management and Analytics. Currently he is one of the people responsible for launching of Accenture Center of Excellence for SAS CI in Warsaw, Poland.
Piotr recently focuses on solutioning & strategy in the areas of campaign management, BI & Analytics.
Sebastian Dziadkowiec
Sebastian has 8 years of experience in technology and management consulting, mostly in communications industry. He went through the entire project lifecycle on numerous engagements, starting from programmer, through business and technical analyst, up to solution architect and team manager on large-scale analytics projects.
Sebastian specializes in analytics solutions technology architecture, particularly focusing on customer intelligence and big data. He serves as technology lead in Accenture Center of Excellence for SAS CI in Warsaw, Poland.
Keys to building a successful and future-proof omni-channel customer experience was published on SAS Users.