SAS Data Management in 2017

[RonAgresta]

As 2016 winds down, many of us at SAS are already well into planning software releases for next year. 2017 promises to be a busy one for data management R&D teams working to expand capabilities of existing products and introduce new products too. More details about our plans will be shared in coming weeks but I can give you an idea of the things that are important to us as we forge ahead into the new year.

• Look for deeper integration of data-centric tasks across SAS data management, reporting/visualization, and advanced analytics applications.
• Governance is critical to the organizations we support. Expect to see enhanced features for end-to-end lineage, personal data protection, and data auditing.
• Usage of Hadoop as a general purpose data management environment is becoming more commonplace. SAS will continue to support Hadoop and advances made there for metadata integration, in-memory processing, and security.
• Robust data management and advanced analytics is a potent combination. SAS is combining these domains in new ways to deliver innovation in the areas of data profiling and analysis, semantic tagging, search, and data relationship visualization.
• Collaboration is often the key to unlocking productivity gains. At SAS we are working towards a single data management platform that supports business users, ETL developers, coders, data stewards, and data scientists. All have different needs but all should be able to build their projects upon the knowledge of the others. 

Our R&D teams are working hard to deliver on this vision for data management to the benefit of all our great partners like yourselves. Keep the conversations going here on SAS Communities--your input makes a difference.

Ron

[rogerjdeangelis]

Just a suggestion

SOAPBOX ON

Definition of governance?

"Corporate governance is the way a corporation polices programmmers.
In short, it is a method of governing the programmers like a sovereign state,
instating its own customs, policies and laws to its programmers
from the highest to the lowest levels."

When the police installed speeding and red light cameras revenue went up along with safety. I don't have a problem with this. However the police did not aggressively market the cameras. They did not go door to door telling drivers what a potential life saving development cameras were.

I don't think it will help SAS in the long run  to aggresively market  auditing and policing especially where it is not needed, ie when a programmer only has access to public data or works solely on a local workstation. Make this clear when promoting governance.

Don't make auditing and policing the primary SAS products.

SOAPBOX OFF

[RonAgresta]

I used the word "governance" as shorthand for a wide range of features that provide organizations with the capabilities they need to address demands for accountability in data usage. Here are some example of what I had in mind:

• The ability for companies to find and remove personally identifiable information from internal databases to comply with various laws and regulations
• The means to protect sensitive data when it's used for clinical trials or other healthcare related activities
• A way to perform impact analysis on data integration processes for reporting and analytics when an underlying data source changes in content or structure
• The ability to provide regulators the data and analytic models used to generate things like credit scoring algorithms to show they are being applied fairly to all clients

The decision of whether or not to use governance-related features is up to each organization using SAS software. Businesses in highly regulated industries are those asking the loudest for these tools. Many are subject to severe financial penalties for failure to implement adequate governance policies. You may not be working in an organization where these are pressing concerns but many are.

Ron