Following the Value Chain

by Don Hatcher

The SAS Intelligence Value Chain provides a framework for creating
enterprise intelligence by unifying a company's technology landscape
and its business operations.

Increasing shareholder value is the goal of almost every organization today. As corporations scrutinize individual business units to determine where to cut costs and increase profitability, IT departments are striving to redefine themselves as strategic contributors rather than expensive cost centers.

IT executives are reassessing their organization's current technology environment, identifying duplicated efforts, overlapping applications between business units and suboptimized investments. They no longer want lone departments making technology decisions independently of a corporate IT plan. They want to add value by creating a strategic business infrastructure that delivers intelligence throughout the enterprise.

With this in mind, IT managers are striving to:

• Reduce costs by eliminating waste and redundancy.
• Increase revenues by identifying and expanding an organization's most valuable customer segments.
• Help executives balance risk and return – and make smarter capital investment decisions.

Unfortunately, IT organizations remain hampered by significant budget constraints due to a soft economy and expenses from existing technology implementations that have yet to prove themselves. They need a solution that can use these technology investments to deliver measurable returns – quickly.

SAS has developed a strategic framework for delivering high-value enterprise intelligence. Using the SAS Intelligence Value Chain, any organization can extend its existing technology infrastructure to give executives access to the information they need to make decisions that drive shareholder value.

The SAS Intelligence Value Chain provides a framework for creating enterprise intelligence by unifying a company's technology landscape and its business operations. True business insight requires more than making smart technology investments in individual applications. It requires those individual solutions to work together. By enriching and cleansing operational data collected throughout the enterprise, IT organizations can glean trustworthy information that delivers new insights, provides answers and drives corporate strategies.

The five key components:

1. Plan is a set of proven, best-practice roadmaps, supported by integrated, industry data models, project methodologies and the consulting expertise needed to reliably create and deploy customized, high-benefit solutions.
   
   
2. ETL^Q raises the typical function of extraction, transformation and loading with the power of data quality. SAS ETL^Q is an integrated ETL platform that synthesizes corporate data from operational information silos on any platform and in any format.
   
   
3. Intelligent Storage is a dedicated platform designed from the outset to collect and disseminate information efficiently for both business intelligence and analytic requirements.
   
   
4. Business Intelligence is a set of out-of-the-box, ad hoc query and reporting capabilities that draw information from across the enterprise. This component focuses on usability, mass distribution and information consumption to maximize the access, exploration and presentation of data for information insight.
   
   
5. Analytic Intelligence is an integrated platform for exploring and leveraging enterprise data to create descriptive and predictive information. It provides insight, guidance and support for better decision making.

The SAS Intelligence Value Chain enables optimal configuration of technology components – from SAS and other vendors – within an existing intelligence architecture. Each element of the Intelligence Value Chain provides incremental business value. And the benefits multiply when all the elements are combined in a single, cohesive process. With SAS, IT organizations can consistently and efficiently create the high-value intelligence required to reduce costs, grow revenue and manage risk.