Davis:  Yeah that worked out well.  That was our first shot at the mix and we are experimenting to see if we should push this thing hard throughout the rest of North America.  

What’s nice about that environment is that you can really focus the energy and get people connecting around transformative themes that motivate sales. 

It completely does.  I know what you cover and it is spot on with some of the things that you cover.  We really changed our executive events in the last 3 or 4 years.  We used to do numerous executive conferences on campus here where we would give them a message and tell them about our software.   Our approach today is how we create a thought leadership environment, a cutting edge environment, where we don’t talk a lot about our software but there is brand association with a good experience. 

If we put a program together with a reputable partner with a Harvard Business Review or a Forbes we can draw at the executive level because they want to learn.  They are not going to come here to hear a software vendor talk.  There are more bad experiences associated with software-driven conferences than good experiences.  So if you can put something on and just associate your brand with thought leadership and be able to stand-up and give some thought leadership style presentation it will pay off in droves.

That seems to be Intel’s brand strategy.  Shift the brand association from flavorless technology to specific strategies that mark various industries. 

Yup.

Meyer:  This seems to be a great model for SAS to leverage the core Industry Focus.

Davis:  We track it too.   I don’t have the figures but I can tell you all these executive events, like we do with Forbes, we take his yacht up the Hudson River.  We did a series where I act as moderator and do interviews on stage with Jim Goodnight and Steve Forbes.   They don’t talk about software.  They talk about education, politics, taxes and we follow through.  We track the correspondence and contact with these people and their companies and it absolutely pays.

In the Symposium we began to see BI emerging from the IT back room, how do you think this helps articulate the BI message from the analytics message?

I am not sure.  I think the definition of Business Intelligence is so broad.  You throw everything in it including the kitchen sink.  What is it?  There is an identity crisis around it.  The definition that we all knew and loved in the last 5-10 years does not apply today.  The old definition was how we get software with an end-user department so that they can create some freedom and independence from the IT organization so that they can run their own reports.  Some people are still selling it that way.  It is bad news for an organization to implement that because you get silos as to what departments’ implements what and that leads to inconsistent decision making across the organization.

What I do think is happening with this whole discussion of business intelligence is that is creating an awareness around the importance of data and information within an organization and how it contribute to the advancement of an organization and more importantly how it can contribute and feed innovation.

The BI revolution is making executives – executives couldn’t care less about BI it was departmental years ago – look at how data can support their agenda and their directors. 

I do not believe, what we are saying, the analytics is coming out of the backroom into the boardroom.  I don’t believe analytics is being perceived as something that is as necessarily technical as it used to be.  Our experience is we used to sell to the guys in the back room.  That’s all we cared about.  What we saw in New York is that analytics is on the forefront of everybody’s thinking.

Meyer:  Even if they don’t understand it.   

Davis:  Even if you don’t know what it is.  If we had this meeting 5 years ago we would have had 10 people there and they would have been the wrong people.  People recognize the competitive advantage the analytics can bring them in the form of proactive decision-making as opposed to reactive decision-making.

The struggle is how we package analytics in a business way that doesn’t appear to be an overly complex that you have to hire specialized people for.  That’s the challenge that business faces today: where are the applications of this technology that are business based?  Sell based on solving business problems; don’t sell me I got Neuro Networks and Decision Trees – who cares!?Somebody does but the management of an organization should not care about that. 

Meyer: We also saw two distinct schools of thought on Tuesday’s panel. One school, represented by the guy from Barclays Bank and Bubba Tyler from Quaker Chemical, they're saying that BI should be pushed out to everyone. The other school, represented by the guy from Schneider and the guy from P&G, seemed to be saying that BI is a subset of IT -- kind of an esoteric, highly specialized pursuit mostly for experts. I guess each side has its points, but which side you think best represents the future of BI -- the democratizers or the hardcore quants?

Davis: I think it is how do you get information out to the greatest number of users in an organization; how do you create a culture so that you are basing your strategy on fact-based decisioning.   Let’s tie the two together.  I am thinking about adding this to the agenda in future conferences.  How do you bridge it?  There is a real strong push out there to define BICC, Business Intelligence Competency Centers.  I don’t know whether they exist in IT or other areas of the organization. Some people call them Analytic Competency Centers – depending on your focus. 

The point is you have a group of people….let’s say I am in marketing and I really want to understand telecommunications better, what have we been selling them what can we do better.  I know we have this somewhere in the organization.  I am going to call up the BICC.  I am going to say: do we have this data? Can you look in your metadata log for me?  Or tell me where to look in my metadata log to find this information?

Meyer:  Is this an inhouse function?

Davis:  Yes, I would say so.  It is resident as it is a knowledge function within the organization.  While we just had the Information Revolution book come out January 9th; we have a Business Intelligence Competency Center book coming out in the next 60 days. 

Meyer:  Will the BICC be guarded with Uzis?

Davis:  Yeah, well that’s what we have to be careful of.  We don’t want to create an environment where we see people saying we have the information and you don’t.

Isn’t secrecy the nature of the beast given that Mars and Wal-Mart, for example, don’t tell us anything about their application of BI?

When you get down to analytic modeling and it creates a competitive advantage – yes.  There are some real tight-lipped folks out there.  We see it all the time in Financial Services.  We do a lot of work for American Express, but we cannot talk about it.

Meyer:  Where does all this fit into your Information Evolution Model?

Davis:  This is exactly what we are talking about.  How does this work in an organization?  Level 1 is the individual.  Level 2 is standardization based on department.  Level 3 is integrating information across departmental divisions – the political one.   And once you do that Level 4 is about how do I now use that information to optimize the bottom-line looking at better and current practices.  If I have information readily available via BICC or other means can I get to Level 5 by using information in support of innovation, expanding top-line opportunities, new sources of revenue generation?  So this is where Business Intelligence and Analytics support the advancement of the organization and integral to the movement forward.  

In my presentation at the symposium, I didn’t have time to do it justice, but next time we will move it to the core of the morning…maybe before Tom Davenport talks we will have an industry analyst stand up and say: this is the state of the industry. Davenport would say, great this is what I found in my study. Then I would stand up and say great, this is the state of the industry, this is what the study found, before you can do anything how committed is your organization to fact-based decisoning?  Do you know how well you are situated to move forward? And then introduce the Information Evolution Model; and then based on that go to the panel.  The panel can be more interesting.  As opposed to just talking about the application we have now introduced the Information Evolution Model and we can say, what do you guys think?  What level do you think you are and why? 

In that way you situate the prospect in the process, encouraging them along.

Then the moderator would be able to say: what aren’t you able to accomplish?  That was my take-way as to how to refine the symposium.  The other thing I noticed was if we do this again I would shut this thing down after Gary Loveman.  He was tremendous, entertaining, and we can probably do this whole thing in a half day. 

Meyer:  He is the poster child of BI.

Davis:  I talked with him offline and he said we are hiring more and more senior people from Carnegie Mellon and MIT.   Think about that: could you ever imagine a guy in the gaming business to say anything like that?  He is my poster child, the CEO of the future of what analytics can do for business.  He has gone ahead and committed to fact-based decisioning; he expects it of his people; he is not a classic CEO; but perhaps the classic CEO of the future.

He is a powerful marking tool for SAS.  The challenge we will have is getting him to more of our events.