Data-Driven Decision Making

Replace hunches with solid evidence to drive decisions

School and district administrators are under increasing pressure to take a holistic view of their organizations. In order to make a difference in education, educators and administrators need to gain useful knowledge and draw insightful conclusions by letting data drive decision practices. Using a single accurate picture of district information drives reliable answers to serious questions and demonstrates success and effectiveness of programs – not just at the end of the year, but throughout the entire school year.

" Over five years, we reduced our discipline incidents by 60 percent by working with SAS to uncover the problem and executing a plan of action."

—Larry Price, EdD

Superintendent

Wilson County School District

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How SAS^® Can Help

SAS understands the critical role of accurate, timely data and how integrating and analyzing that information results in increased benefits for education. SAS helps you understand longitudinal trends to inform overall planning and intervene where trends are undesirable, as well as determine probable future outcomes. With SAS^®, you can:

Integrate data across the district. Gain access to consistent and trustworthy information in an accurate and timely manner from a wide variety of sources, such as information on students, grades, programs, personnel, facilities, finance, etc.
Equip decision makers with self-service reporting. SAS gives users secure self-service access to the information they need, in the format they need, at the time they need it to allocate the proper resources to affect student outcomes in a timely manner.
Identify trends for better decision making. Evolve from a manual process to a data-driven decision making process by analyzing student data quickly, predicting outcomes and intervening to help students reach their potential.
Gain flexibility with an on-premise or hosted offering. Choose the SAS hosted or on-premise data management and reporting offering that best suits your environment.

How SAS^® Is Different

SAS enables you to overcome information barriers quickly, so you can consolidate, store, analyze and share high-quality information to make critical decisions affecting your school or district:

Seamless data integration and leading advanced analytics. Based on decades of education customer feedback, SAS can consolidate data regardless of its native database or platform, setting it apart from other solutions.
Unmatched metadata management. Gain the benefits of an open metadata structure that retains and tracks metadata across data sources to speed integration projects, simplify design and reduce maintenance costs.
A customizable, end-to-end solution. Using SAS, education customers have an iterative, customized approach to meet their institution's growing needs for data, reporting and analytics.
Stability. In business since 1976, SAS has a solid track record as a reliable partner with steady profit growth that will provide ongoing support no matter how your needs grow and change.
R&D investment and a commitment to education. SAS is committed to partnering with education to deliver software and services for academics and administration. SAS R&D is consistently developing new products and services to meet the specific needs of current and future education customers.

Related Products and Solutions

The SAS^® Enterprise Intelligence Suite for Education

Provides a bundle of solutions for data management, reporting and analytics priced and packaged specifically for education.

SAS^® OnDemand for K-12

In consultation with superintendents, SAS OnDemand for K-12 was created to help administrators take a proactive data-driven approach to understanding what's happening within the district - without needing to hire additional staff, purchase costly hardware or wait for a lengthy technology project to be implemented. The SAS OnDemand for K-12 hosted solution model is optimal for school districts with limited resources and budgets for administrative technology, allowing district administrators to quickly get the district information they need.

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Data Integration

SAS Data Integration forms the solid foundation needed to support your enterprise information management needs. It provides capabilities for enterprise data access and processing across systems and platforms; integrated data quality, which is critical to producing accurate, consistent information; and an interactive, visual data integration development environment that enables collaboration and easy reusability, all with a single point of IT administration.

SAS^® Analytics

SAS Analytics provides an integrated environment for predictive and descriptive modeling, data mining, text analytics, forecasting, optimization, simulation, experimental design and more. From dynamic visualization to predictive modeling, model deployment and process optimization, SAS provides a range of techniques and processes for the collection, classification, analysis and interpretation of data to reveal patterns, anomalies, key variables and relationships, leading ultimately to new insights and better answers faster.

SAS^® Business Intelligence

SAS Business Intelligence gives you the information you need, when you need it, in the right format. By integrating data from across your enterprise and delivering self-service reporting and analysis, IT spends less time responding to requests and business users spend less time looking for information. SAS Business Intelligence also offers an integrated, robust and flexible presentation layer for the full breadth of SAS Analytics capabilities, including statistics, predictive analytics, data and text mining, forecasting, and optimization – all integrated within the business context for better, faster decision making.

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