Blogging about all things SAS

We have been doing a bit of research on whether we should develop some easy to use !sasInct dashboarding capability to sit on top of SAS.

We are thinking along the lines of:

- Access any SAS data (i.e Infomaps, Datasets, SAS Access/blah, Stored Processes, Web Services)

- Display in mulitple delivery frameworks (i.e SAS Portal/Portlets, Desktop widgets, external widgets to integrate with third party intranets etc)

- Sexy graphs (i.e somehting that will knock your sox off)

So we have been researching OEM graphing engines vs build our own, and we have been researching what other vendors do for dashboards.

Found these interesting examples from Corda:

US Dept of Health and Human Services
Bank Call Center
CenterView How To
Corda Call Center
Financial Services
Healthcare Dashboards
Help Desk Call Center
Project Tracking
Quickbooks Reporting
Shipping and Transportation
Financial Reporting
National Gas Prices
Financial Scoreboard
Marketing Dashboard
Retail Sales
Supply Chain Management
Project Management
Sales Dashboard – based on a design from Information Dashboard Design by Stephen Few
Salesforce Demo
Services & Support
Human Capital Management

(and of course if you are in the market for dashboards on top of SAS and have some unique requirements let us know! – Contact Us )

I have started doing some work looking at integrating Graphical Information Systems (GIS) with SAS environments (more on that later).When looking at the benefits of doing this integration 3 come to mind:

1. Using the spatial dimension within analysis (i.e show me all customer within a 100k radius of our Auckland office)
2. Displaying spatial attributes (i.e show me the boundaries of the property at 100 Queen St, Auckland)
3. Visualisation of data/information on geographic maps (i.e show me the ethnicity of people in Auckland as a pie graph, by city)

When thinking about advanced visualistion of data I have always found that GIS tools seem to deliver this better than most other tools (hence point 3). An example can be seen in the middle of the “Business Intelligence Visualizing Your DatabaseVisualizing Your Database” pdf presentation from ESRI.

Now SAS has some advanced graphing capabilities, just checkout the examples at
“Robert Allison’s SAS/Graph Examples!” to see some in action.

But these are fairly static and still require manual code, if you are using the GUI front ends (i.e Web Report Studio, OLAP Viewer) the options are still fairly limited (not that any other of the large BI vendors tools that I know of are any better).

You could try the SAS BI Dashboard Framework, but it is in my experience fairly difficult to use and maintain (some would say it is still a beta product, but 9.2 will bring a more robust version)

It is one of the reasons we are working on building our Flash Graph Portlet.

But if you look around the web while you start seeing some pretty sexy , not to mention useful ways to visualise data. An example:

• Boston Redsox Home runs

Is sexy visualisation the way to go? Well whenever I stumble across any kind of award for dashboards or visulaisation, they are always fairly plain, with lots of text and a few bar graphs.

Checkout the winners of the MicroChartsCompetition No speedo’s or heat maps there.

So whats your thought. Is it that visualisation is sexy and dashboards are not?

Do people expect to see sex and sizzle in a demo before they buy a product, but the users just really want easy access to lots of information?

While you mull that over checkout the SAS/GRAPH Dashboard Samples over at the SAS support site. Lots of good examples of both award winning dashboard styles, and speedo’s plus downloadable code examples.