What I’ve Learned from Fellow CTOs

Customer advisory board influences SAS product development

By Keith Collins

I’m always impressed by how willing SAS customers are to help us make our products better. Recently, I’ve discovered this again through my work with the CTO Customer Advisory Board (CAB). In every call and meeting with members of the board, we have learned something that has affected the development work going on at SAS.

The CTO CAB is a select group of CTOs, chief architects and CIOs who represent some of our largest customers. Only a few of them have direct experience with SAS, but they all provide a broad view of their organizations’ IT requirements. Board members share feedback, discuss top-of-mind issues and help determine how to improve our software.

Working with strategists to establish this customer advisory board for SAS has proved to be very rewarding. Over the past year, I’ve been honored to discuss IT technologies with some of the brightest and most-respected IT executives in the world.

Essentially, the CTO CAB is another way for SAS to work directly with our customers to deliver the best-possible technologies, solutions and services. For example, the initial board meeting covered service-oriented architectures, lifecycle analytics and SAS product development road maps.

That first board meeting took place in October 2006 with representatives from a dozen customer organizations. Since then, we’ve conducted a number of conference calls with CTO CAB members, and we welcomed the board to Cary for a second successful meeting in June 2007.
 
The key theme of the second meeting was understanding and meeting customers’ corporate IT needs for implementing and administering SAS in an enterprise environment. Specifically, we talked about software auditing and monitoring, management and change control, enterprise IT roles, task affinity, analytic deployment, integration to systems and processes, and the analytic ecosystem.

So far, the CTO CAB has influenced product features in the new SAS Model Manager, helping to make it flexible enough to support different model development practices. CAB feedback also led us to review how we can consume or synchronize with standard IT Systems Development Life Cycle processes.

The consensus among CAB members is that SAS has great technology and provides wonderful value to business users – but that we need to continue to help with IT integration and management, and we need to beef up our audit and monitoring features in our solutions to help them become a part of IT architecture as a whole. Our plans for SAS 9.2 continue a positive move in this direction.

CTO CAB members benefit from the direct link to SAS experts, and they gain an inside scoop on product development. But most importantly, every SAS customer benefits indirectly from the representation of CTOs on the customer advisory board.