Stimulating week at Analytics 2013 in London

[jwexler]

It’s been a great week here in London at the Analytics 2013 Conference.  As a Product Manager, spending time with customers is especially rewarding.  I follow a Pragmatic Marketing approach to requirements gathering.   I enjoyed hearing about customer work with Decision Systems, Recommendation Engines, Utility Optimization, and Model Factories.

One topic that is gathering a lot of steam is Operationalizing Analytics.  I presented to 2 packed sessions, and covered how to Operationalize your analytics using existing SAS tools, and where SAS is headed in the future.  No matter how sophisticated and powerful your models are, if it takes you 6 months to deploy them, then you are already behind.  In most presentations and customer interactions, the prevailing question was ‘How can I operationalize my models’? 

Even if you don’t have these challenges now, you may face these big data challenges in the future.  Setting up the proper environment to not only build models, but to also share and deploy will create an integrated modeling framework.  Companies that take advantage of their Big Data environments will have an analytically competitive edge.

So long from London, see you in Orlando.

[AnnaBrown]

Thanks for sharing your takeaways from Analytics 2013, jwexler.

I came across a good blog post - http://blogs.sas.com/content/sastraining/2013/06/26/innovation-and-communication-in-analytics/ - that nicely sums up the event. SAS Statistical Training Specialist Catherine Truxillo discusses topics like how to implement an analytics lab in an organization and taking an analytical approach to team training. It sounds like it was a great conference!