Knoware Blog/News

The SAS Global Forum was held in San Francisco on 28 April to 1st May 2013. This is the annual international conference for SAS software and it is big… with over 4,000 people from 30 countries, and multiple special interest streams.

Knoware attended and presented at this amazing event to keep at the forefront of the latest developments. Find out more about the SAS Global Forum.

Listen to and view Colin Harris’s PowerPoint presentation of insights from this important conference addressing:

• Conference overview
• SAS version 9.4 enhancements
• Updates on analytics capability, including Visual Analytics
• New approaches for high-performance processing, e.g. Hadoop
• New Enterprise Guide version, which works with 9.2, 9.3 and 9.4
• New SAS Information Management offerings

Knoware’s Brian Bee was a guest presenter at the conference on the subject of “A Day in the Life of Data”. Brian will be well known to many of you as our very experienced SAS training consultant.

Due to popular demand we re-ran last months seminar presented by Colin Harris. If you would like to arrange for an special in-house briefing for your organisation, then please contact Colin Harris or Clare Somerville on info@knoware.co.nz or phone 04 499 9246.

It’s a very common need to get information from SAS into Excel, and vice-versa. There are a number of ways to do this, each with its advantages and disadvantages. This session gave an overview of 10 different techniques, and the pros and cons of each. It ranged from simply creating a basic Excel spreadsheet through to updating a pre-formatted spreadsheet, including pivot tables and charts. A number of techniques require “base SAS” only, and others need additional products. The techniques include:

• Import and Export wizards
• ODS CSV, XML and HTML methods
• ODS ExcelXP tagset
• Proc Export and Import
• SAS Excel libname engine
• Add-in to Microsoft Office (AMO)
• OLEDB
• ODBC
• DDE (and why it should be replaced)

Listen to and view a series of videos of Colin Harris’s PowerPoint presentations describing each technique

Or you can review the full Powerpoint presentation without the commentary (PowerPoint 116 pages, PDF format, 6.29MB)

Knoware consultant’s Trish O’Kane and Selena Smeaton have presented at significant international conferences in 2012, and this was an opportunity for them to share their insights, talks and thoughts with our clients. The two conferences are;

• Enterprise Data World (run by Dama) the business worlds most comprehensive educational event covering data and information management. Selena presented on “Data Lifecycle Management”.
• Below are links to her presentation in 4 parts (for ease of downloading):
  a) Part 1 of Selena’s presentation / PDF 3.4mb 
  b) Part 2 of Selena’s presentation / PDF 2.4 mb 
  c) Part 3 of Selena’s presentation / PDF 2.7 mb 
  d) Part 4 of Selena’s presentation / PDF 0.5 mb
• The International Council of Archives Congress. A joint paper was presented on “High value public sector information” https://www.ica2012.com/

Trish’s presentation / PDF 2mb

https://www.ica2012.com

Knoware’s Trish O’Kane and Selena Smeaton, together with Lisa Austin of NZ Archives, Department of Internal Affairs presented on the topic “High Value Public Sector information – A model to prioritise sustainability programmes”.

View the presentation PDF version of Powerpoint 2.2 MB

The congress is held every 4 years and showcases leadership in archives and records management.

https://www.conferenz.co.nz/content/brochures/2012/CF019.pdf

Robert Noe represented Knoware as an attendee at this conference. The conference had an interesting range of marketing practioners who talked about their approaches, solutions and challenges in target marketing using analytics.

As part of the Declaration on open and transparent government the New Zealand Government has recently approved the “Principles for Managing Data and Information held by NZ Government”. These principles are all about making data open and accessible to the public, and commit agencies to actively release high value public data. The concept is to share government data and information, so that new uses can be made of them. Examples include large data sets held by GNS, LINZ and MED that could be combined to open up use of mineral assets.

Trish O’Kane and Clare Somerville jointly presented on aspects of the “Open Data” initiative including:

• Scope – where could Open Data begin and end?
• Does this initiative include documents and other information objects that are not normally in the public domain until transferred to Archives New Zealand?
• Is the data ready for sharing? Is it trustworthy and in the public domain?
• Does this conflict with only using data in accordance with the purpose for which it was captured?
• What about the risks of sharing information that could identify individuals?
• What do you have to do to get ready for Open Data?

Trish O’Kane and Clare Somerville jointly addressed key concepts for record keepers relating to data, databases and data warehouses. They also talked about good practice in data management and how to connect it up to recordkeeping metadata.

Recordkeepers, used to a document-centric view of records, may struggle to think of how to apply recordkeeping concepts to data.

Talk of “preserving databases” and even “transferring databases” just doesn’t cut it in the data world. The picture is often much bigger than individual databases.

Knoware is a principal sponsor for the SAS Users Conference held again in Wellington this year, and Knoware’s Dave Shea, Todd Nicholson and Clare Somerville delivered presentations. “Attendance numbers at this year’s event was fantastic, and all the people I talked with found it very worthwhile” said Clare Somerville.

Please contact us if you would like copies of any of Knoware’s papers.

Clare Somerville – Managing Director attended the Gartner Conference held in Sydney in February 2012. A regular attendee, Clare said the subject areas covered by this year’s conference are very relevant to the challenges being faced by NZ organisations working to effectively manage their enterprise information systems. Hot topics included: Agile BI, Predictive Analytics Collaborative Decision Making, Master Data Management, Consumerisation and the Future of BI. Having briefed Knoware’s team of consultants, Clare is available to provide briefing and can be contacted by emailclare.somerville@knoware.co.nz see the Contact Us page for more options.