Personal

Leaving SAS: A new start after 18.5 magnificent years

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Leaving SAS

Leaving SASAll good things must come to an end and so it is with my time at SAS.

I wanted to share that I will be moving on from SAS at the end of this month.

I have absolutely loved my 18.5 years at SAS. Those years have seen me grow professionally and personally. SAS is a good company filled with many amazing people who I will miss working with day to day.

During my time at SAS I have been able to work in many different areas (Technical Support, Pre-Sales, Sales Enablement, Sales, Product Marketing, Product Management, Analyst Relations, Alliances, Business Development, Strategy and more), on/with many different products and with people across the world. Professionally it has been a very rewarding experience which easily has surpassed the expectations I had when I joined back in 1997 as a technical support consultant.

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Internet Of Things, IoT

IoT – Enabler Of New Levels Of Personalization

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The rise of IoT

There is now a rampant rise in predictions about the future of the Internet of Things (IoT). It is almost impossible to read a cutting edge IT article without some mention of IoT. It is now a fact that most organizations are trying to work out the role IoT will play in their future. IoT has almost taken over Big Data as the next topic companies have to crack.

Device GrowthTo that end industry analysts are lining up to share their views on the impending growth. Recently IDC predicted that “By 2018, there will be 22 Billion IoT devices installed, driving the development of over 200,000 new IoT apps and services” and that “By 2018, IoT spending will grow 1.5X”.  Gartner also shared their view that “6.4 Billion Connected ‘Things’ Will Be in Use in 2016, Up 30 Percent From 2015, and will reach 25 billion by 2020″.

IoT_2016At the same time the World Economic Forum (wef) put out an excellent article “5 predictions for the Internet of Things in 2016“. The article nicely brings together many predictions ending with this comment which I fully agree with. “Thousands of businesses worldwide are already reaping IoT’s rewards, and 2016 will be the year that more companies join the IoT revolution.”

In my opinion the IoT revolution is not on its way – it is already underway! To that end I agree with many of the industry analysts that 2016 could be a big year for IoT.  In an earlier post I covered my thoughts on “Why the Internet of Things will change how you interact with your customers”. That post focused on the styles of “interactions” and services I expect to see organizations having to carry out with their customers because of the advent of IoT.

In this post I want to share a few thoughts on why I believe a different type of personalization is going to be driven via the growth of IoT. This personalization I believe will be welcome, if seen at all, and not seen as creepy.

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Hadoop, Market Watch

The Hadoop juggernaut keeps on rolling

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Hadoop on the march

Hadoop JuggernautBack at the end of August I put together a post where I stated that “Hadoop adoption seems to be accelerating“. Now, just a few months later, it is clear that the Hadoop juggernaut just keeps on rolling and that many organizations are adding it to their IT architectures.

NewsLets take a look at what has been going on (this is in addition to my September post which summarized the latest Hadoop news across Hortonworks, Cloudera and MapR) out there in the busy world of Hadoop.

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Leadership, Social

10 tips for first time corporate bloggers

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stamp-895385_1920Social Media. It can be a daunting world to the newbie.  Fear abounds as people consider if they should engage or not. This fear is significantly intensified if the engagement is in a corporate context where people worry a mistyped line can result in the elimination of their job.

The fact is that today most people should be engaged in Social Media with guidelines helping them understand the rules of engagements to avoid getting themselves into a tough situation. Most organizations have now established social media guidelines/policies but that is where the help often stops. It feels like the aim is to control rather than encourage.

Different Social Engagement ZonesThis is why, back in August, I wrote this post focused on “How to get your most valuable resources engaged in social media“.  That post shared a framework through which a person can move as they go on their social media journey. It can be adopted by an organization and used by individuals to determine where they are comfortable on the platform.

The framework covers being a content sharer via Twitter and LinkedIn. As a result I shared a post containing “15 points for the twitter beginner” which reflects the advice I gave to people stepping out into the world of Twitter for the first time as a content sharer.

In this post I move beyond being a content sharer to the broader content creator space. I focus on the 10 tips for first time bloggers which I shared with people as they went on their journey towards being socially engaged. Nowadays this applies to the LinkedIn publishing platform, corporate blogs and personal blogs.

All of these posts have been part of a series that shared my experience as I tried to get people to be socially engaged in this modern world of social media and social selling. Getting people socially engaged in your organization will drive great benefits and great knowledge sharing.

I am very interested to know if you have other hints and tips so please feel free to share them in the comments.

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Leadership

Enterprise Feedback Management – Your Next Competitive Edge?

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I come from a world of Analytics and Business Intelligence. A world where we mostly take transactional information generated by various operational systems, and more recently sensors, such that we can try to understand the past, predict the future and then take actions where necessary to affect the future outcome.

What etcIn that world we try to understand and predict, through analytics, things such as which employees are likely to leave next, understand which customers are likely to churn as they undertake their journey with the company and understand which customers are likely to abandon their shopping cart. In all these cases we are trying to spot things early such that we can take proactive action to prevent the predicted outcome occurring, where it makes sense to intervene, through the use of analytics.

There is no doubt that Analytics can help you understand what is likely to happen next, and who it might affect, such that you can take proactive action. One question often still remains and that is WHY? The Why is important as it lets you attack issues at the source not just be focused on dealing with the symptom.

  1. Why is it that a customer is thinking to churn or has churned?
  2. Why is it that an employee is thinking to leave or has left?
  3. Why is it that a customer decides to abandon their shopping cart or abandoned it?
  4. Why is it that one part of a process seems to run slowly no matter how you optimize it?

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Passionate about changing the world. This site shares my views on Big Data, Analytics, Leadership, Internet of Things and all things Social Media