NOTE: Successes and Tools

My previous post was our 100th and marks quite a milestone. Since starting in July last year, Google Feedburner tells us:

• yesterday we achieved our highest ever number of subscribers: 156
• we've clocked-up 36,000 views
• our most popular post of all time is Dashboards & Scorecards: What To Measure with 1,055 views (note that the widget in our right-margin shows popularity over the last 7 days)

And Site Meter tells us that the average visit length is over 2 minutes, so we know that you're reading the articles as well as just looking at them ;)

NOTE: Success Demonstrates BI Scope (the BI evolution)

Business Intelligence (BI) spans simple historic reporting to embedded real-time analytics. This is our 100th post and we're sharing our (minor) celebration with a SAS success.

BI is a commonly used term with a raft of different interpretations. Wikipedia begins to define it thus:

BI technologies provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of Business Intelligence technologies are reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining, and predictive analytics.

There's a BI evolutionary path that starts with simple, static reporting on historic data (often delivered with spreadsheets) through to real-time predictive analytics embedded into front-office transactional systems. Many suppliers who claim to offer BI systems barely get off the ground on the BI flight to delivering real value to the enterprise.

All those products that offer sexy, shiny, slick graphics with animated 2.5D fuel gauges that make your historic data look exciting but don't begin to tell you about where you're headed are flattering to deceive. If you're considering implementing a BI solution, make sure your chosen software will give you the headroom to grow the value that the solution delivers. Don't box yourself in with a sexy solution that ultimately offers no real intelligence.

NOTE: Issue 49 of VIEWS News is Available

Phil Holland has published issue 49 of VIEWS News, the quarterly journal of the VIEWS International SAS Programming Community. This quarter's issue includes graphical impact, encryption algorithms & format merges, and Excel functions available in SAS 9.2, plus a prize draw especially for VIEWS News readers.

You can view the 48 back-issues in the archive.

NOTE: PROC MEANS Gives You All It's Got (and More!)

An oft overlooked parameter for PROC MEANS (and PROC SUMMARY) is COMPLETETYPES. It tells MEANS to create all possible combinations of the values of the classification variables, even if some of those combinations don't exist in the data. And PRELOADFMT will create combinations from values that don't even exist in your input data. This can be very useful in presenting what appears to be a more complete picture of the input data and can be equally useful in presenting a consistent layout amongst a group of reports (or regularly produced reports).

Here's a simple code example:

data sales;
  region = 'North'; product = 'Widget'; sales = 500; OUTPUT;
  region = 'North'; product = 'Foobar'; sales = 300; OUTPUT;
  region = 'South'; product = 'Widget'; sales = 100; OUTPUT;
run;

proc means data=sales /*completetypes*/ sum;
  class region product;
run;


If we run it without COMPLETETYPES we get:

       Analysis Variable : sales

region    product    Obs             Sum
----------------------------------------
North     Foobar       1     300.0000000
          Widget       1     500.0000000
South     Widget       1     100.0000000
----------------------------------------


And if we run it with COMPLETETYPES, we get (with the new information highlighted in red):

       Analysis Variable : sales

region    product    Obs             Sum
----------------------------------------
North     Foobar       1     300.0000000
          Widget       1     500.0000000
South     Foobar       0               .
          Widget       1     100.0000000
----------------------------------------

NOTE: More Online Training

Having mentioned Sunil's online training and featured his mooted courses in India yesterday, I have to mention Andrew Karp's ever growing catalog of online and face-to-face courses at Sierra Information Services. And the Virtual SAS Users Group who offer yet more online courses. Sitting alongside the online courses that SAS offer,  there's a wealth of material waiting for you to sign-up and learn more about the technology and your industry.

What is a Project?

Alongside our series of posts on creating Gantt charts in Excel for the purpose of managing small to medium sized projects, a discussion on "what is a project?" might be useful. Most of us feel we understand the general usage of the term "project", but what does it mean in the context of Project Management?

The Cambridge Advanced Leaner's Dictionary defines the noun project as "a piece of planned work or an activity which is finished over a period of time and intended to achieve a particular aim". The key attributes are a) having an aim or purpose, and b) being able to define a start and end date/time. These attributes make projects distinct from ongoing operational, live, production or business as usual (BAU) activities.

The existence of the end date is an important element of the project, and a lot of work goes into agreeing the end date and then making sure the project is delivered/completed by the end date. Plans are drawn-up, often including Gantt charts.