Our Global Village

This is globalization. Goods and services traded across boundaries by companies with offices on every continent. To compete in this marketplace, companies need accurate information quickly.

As economist and Nobel Laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz, Ph.D., writes in this issue (see story), even a small amount of imperfection can have significant consequences for companies in today’s world. This includes, he says, how people extract information and compile it into useable business intelligence. The difficulty in drawing reliable information from large sets of data is often a stumbling block to making accurate business decisions.

SAS International President Art Cooke knows this issue well. As he says in an October interview with Computerworld, any company that works at a global level needs to be looking everywhere and anywhere for the best business practices. He and SAS CEO Jim Goodnight are discussing these issues with their peers on panels and at forums across the globe.

SAS joined the World Economic Forum in 2003, adding its name to a list of more than 125 member companies. "In collaboration with leading business and government leaders, we are helping to shape technology decisions that affect the lives of people around the world," Goodnight says.

That’s a real responsibility, and one we take seriously at SAS. We’ve come so far in so little time. To continue moving forward, we’ll need business and government leaders who’ll champion technology and science education. As this issue of sascom shows, we are all members of this new global village. It’s up to us to determine how it works.

Diana M. Levey
sascom Editor-in-Chief

Matthew Barnason
sascom International Editor