SAS Global Forum: Chillin' with the Numerati

From my hotel room at the Gaylord National, I could just make out the tip of the Washington Monument. That was about as close as I got to the center of government power, where momentous decisions are being made these days about nearly everything. The Gaylord is in National Harbor, a self-contained new development down on the Maryland side of the Potomac, and therefore at some distance from the heart of D.C. My purpose was to attend the SAS Global Forum, formerly called SUGI, which annually attracts several thousand BI, data mining and statistical analysis experts -- people we may now call "the Numerati" thanks to Stephen Baker's book by that name (he spoke at the conference). Jim Davis, SAS senior vice and chief marketing officer called it "dumb luck" that the Forum happened to be scheduled for inside the Beltway this year, but it sure seemed propitious. There are a lot of big numbers being crunched in and around Washington, D.C., and no doubt some of those in charge could use the "stimulus" that analytics might provide.Expectations are sky high for analytics to be the information wizardry that guides us out of our current economic mess. Analytics are the 21st Century tool for catching terrorists, enticing customers, interdicting fraud and tackling a long wish list of tasks that organizations would like to use information intelligence to accomplish.

What are "analytics" and how do they relate to BI, OLAP and data warehousing? As Neil Raden noted rather acerbically in his blog, SAS believes that BI has become merely a component in a bigger framework called "business analytics," for which it aims to bring together a variety of tools to deliver business value that is directly understood by businesspeople, not just IT and information management experts.

There's room for healthy debate about the BI/analytics relationship, although it may be significant primarily at the marketing level. I liked the simple definition given by Eric Webster, vice president of Marketing at State Farm Insurance, during a conference panel session: "Analytics are about how we can do things better." The Wisconsin Department of Revenue, a winner of one of the 2009 SAS Enterprise Excellence Awards, offered a good example of how taking this straightforward analytics objective can result in more effective government operations, alas to the regret of tax dodgers.

Although the company is talking up business analytics, SAS has been focused on building industry-specific solutions for some time now. At the Forum, the company introduced SAS Fraud Framework, which employs social network analysis to uncover and alert managers in banking, insurance, healthcare and government to likely instances of fraud. The Framework makes it easier to tap a wider range of data sources, which can be analyzed together to reveal correlations and other relationships based on activity. In a demo that crime fiction readers and RICO investigators would like, I could see how relationships between different pieces of information started to form a "network" that when completed could implicate who is committing fraudulent behavior. Frankly, it would be a good idea to turn this software loose on the billions of dollars circulating in stimulus packages to see if it is being put to good or fraudulent use.

Unlike BI tools, business analytics are not necessarily welcome. Politics and egos must be handled carefully. "People don't always want to hear that what they are doing now isn't right," said Stephan Chase, Marriott International's vice president of Customer Knowledge, during the panel session. But then he said that analysts must also be humble: "Analysts don't have a monopoly on truth. The analyst's job is to translate data insight into something that is useful to the organization." One way of doing this is to reduce the time it takes to amass and crunch through the data; then, analytics can compete more effectively in a race against "the gut" for decision-making speed.

Along with the Fraud Framework, the other news that caught my eye at the conference was the announcement of a new level of technology integration between SAS and Teradata for in-database analytics. Enhancements in Teradata 13 contributed greatly by allowing SAS to perform its own dynamic binding and use memory more effectively for a wider range of analytics. The two companies also announced the availability of a joint Analytic Advantage package, which supplies in-database analytics and pre-packaged hardware, software and services, according to the companies. The package could become an interesting competitor in the appliance and configuration wars; this one is optimized for analytics, not BI and data warehousing.

Gazing up the Potomac, one could only hope that decision-makers in the U.S. Department of the Treasury, the Federal Reserve System and elsewhere are listening to their numerati. If not already, increased use of analytics will indeed be a change agent in many industries as the recession begins to clear.What are "analytics" and how do they relate to BI, OLAP and data warehousing?... Unlike BI tools, analytics are not necessarily welcome. "People don't always want to hear that what they are doing now isn't right," said Stephan Chase, Marriott International's vice president of Customer Knowledge...