Three CIO challenges you can solve today

Overcome your biggest issues with a framework for business analytics

CIOs and IT managers are under tremendous pressure to choose the right products, services and technologies that can transform data into a competitive advantage – enabling strategic deci­sions that optimize performance. They want to enhance operations and achieve success by increasing data consistency, streamlining administration and providing easy-to-use reporting tools backed by powerful analytics. To empower the organization now and meet future needs in a timely fashion, CIOs and IT managers should address these three issues.

Issue 1: Support sustainable growth while managing risk through the innovative use of technology and information
Change in business is inevitable – especially with the collapse and bailout of global banking systems and the sudden instability of stock markets. These circumstances and more have created a radically different context for economic growth. While the dust settles, governance, risk and compliance will play major roles in transforming organizations to reduce the possibility of further collapses. Technology and process strategies will focus on rebuilding sustainable growth levels but within the constructs of increased regulations, performance and risk management coordination, and evolving expectations of corporate responsibility.

Organizations are continually searching for innovative ways to improve performance, achieve greater top-line growth and maintain a competitive edge. To do so requires decision makers be­ing able to assess the impact of market dynamics more quickly, explore different options, learn from experimentation and validate best approaches. SAS^® can help IT organizations by providing a flexible environment that allows the organization to change or evolve as the need arises, while enabling centralized control and management of data and information processes.

Issue 2: Provide an infrastructure to manage the growing appetite for intelligence
More data, more users. These are the two primary demands facing most IT organizations. And unfortunately, many CIOs admit they have the sense that managing the flow of information into and throughout the business is not be­ing done effectively. By integrating your organization's technology components (whether it's an ERP system, call center data, point-of-sale systems, etc.) within your IT infrastructure, SAS can help you create a single environment that overcomes departmental information silos and diverse computing platforms to deliver integrated intelligence that can make a difference to your organization.

SAS provides an integrated suite of software that leverages domain expertise, best practices and state-of-the-art business analytics that enable your organization not only to understand the past and monitor the present, but optimize oppor­tunities for the future.

Decision makers demand fast answers, and it is the job of IT to make sure information is accessible at the right level of detail when it is needed.

Issue 3: Derive more value from existing technology and information assets
Make the most of what you have, and do more with less. Particularly in this time of economic strife, this is a mantra everyone hears. IT departments are no different. Organizations expect IT to deliver more value while staying at or under budget. At the same time, IT must mitigate the risks associated with managing information and security of the systems. This can be a difficult challenge when every department and business unit is collecting, managing and analyzing data in silos with a heavy dependence on spreadsheets for analysis.

Decision makers demand fast answers, and it is the job of IT to make sure information is accessible at the right level of detail when it is needed. To make the most of what you have, you must aggregate and cleanse your data, and ensure security processes are in place. You need a data integration environment that is easily managed. You need the ability to apply analytics to gain predictive insights and push appropriate infor­mation to decision makers so they can make the most of it, whether they want to drill down and ask further questions or have presentation-quality results at their fingertips. By improving data quality and security processes, integrating informa­tion with business processes and providing data that is easily understood at the right level of detail, SAS helps IT executives cost-effectively achieve a strategic framework for business analytics.

Data integration, analytics and reporting
The platform for SAS Business Analytics provides the foundation needed to solve your top issues. It integrates individual technology components within your existing IT infrastructure into a single, unified system. The result is an infor­mation flow that crosses organizational boundaries and delivers new insights that drive value. SAS Business Analytics extends the value of your existing systems, while setting the stage for new levels of intelligence. It includes the following components:

• Data integration. SAS offers prebuilt, high-performance capabilities for data connectivity, data quality, ETL (extract, transform and load), data migration, data synchronization and data federation
• Analytics. SAS provides an integrated environment for predictive and descriptive modeling, forecasting, optimization, simulation, experimental design and more
• Reporting. Rolebased interfaces enable different types of users to surface and visualize meaningful intelligence from consistent, companywide data.

Using the platform for SAS Business Analytics as a foundation, SAS offers targeted business solutions that support key areas of your business, such as cus­tomers, finance, risk and supply chain – plus turnkey solutions for various vertical markets, including financial services, life sciences, health care, insurance, retail, manufacturing and more. These solu­tions incorporate our domain expertise as well as data structures and analytic models tuned to specific business and industry needs.