SAS Global Forum Conference
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[edit] Opening Session
It just attended my first “SAS Global Forum” conference. Since the change of name from SUGI, I still catch myself from referring to it as SUGI. The Opening session started on Monday night, April 16 at 7pm. The conference had record breaking attendance with over 400 registrants from other parts of the world. This included Latin America, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. There were plenty of fan faire as Dr. Goodnight gave out many awards. Jim Davis had his flow diagrams describing the information value chain. I particularly liked the key note speaker Guy Kawasaki’s speech on innovation which was the theme of the conference. Guy wrote a book entitled “Art of Innovation”. He had an interesting analogy of technology innovation as he described three distinct innovations: 1. Ice Harvesting 2. Ice Factory 3. House Refrigerator Guy described the early days when a group of men traveled far north and applied techniques of cutting ice and finding ways of maintaining the ice as they travel south to sell the ice in India. Much of the ice melted but they were able to retain some to make a profit. Their technologies were based on making knives to cut the ice or ways of keeping the ice from melting. Guy describes this as one “curve” of innovation. There was then a jump in innovation when a company figured out a technology to freeze water into ice. They built a factory to then make ice and then delivered this within the region where the ice factory was located. A third leap in the “curve” of innovation was when the refrigerator was created for home use so ice can be made at home which no longer rely on a factory. This PC or “personal chill” machine was a jump in innovation from the previous two innovations. Guy noted that each group of people or company that worked within one curve of innovation never made the leap and was part of the next innovation. They were more “evolutionary” in that they sharpen their knives or increase their factory productivity by tens of percentages. The key to true innovation is when a company can make the “revolutionary” leap from one innovation curve to the next. This was how Guy sees SAS as it is innovating in this dynamic analytical computing environment.
There was also the announcement of the SAS community website: sascommunity.org. This website leveraged the most popular Internet community technologies such as Wiki since it has the look and feel of wikipedia while it also features articles written about SAS in the form of blogs. This website is just now being released and SAS hopes that it will grow to become a repository of knowledge among the SAS community which is becoming more international. The main theme of the conference is “innovation”. Another underlying theme is how SUGI is now renamed to SAS Global Forum, which is more international and perhaps more mature and global in its reach as compared to the home grown community of users that existed in the past.
[edit] Technology Connection
Tuesday morning started out with more technology focused presentations as there were talks highlighting some of SAS’s latest new software. SAS continues to develop new software which is intended to fulfill specific niches within particular industries. An example of this is when Wayne Thompson and Paul Kent talked about the new SAS Model Manager 2.1. I was surprised to learn about how it is already version 2.1 and I have never heard of it. I guess I have been out of touch. This software was very visual as it tracks model performance with lift charts. It performed characteristic reports, model predictions; classification and splitting models were graphically displayed for better “model governance”. It was all fascinating and totally propeller head. I thought that the whole BI architecture brought along a new set of acronyms and vocabulary but now, I felt like I have to learn whole new set new words.
In addition to new tools, there were demonstrations of new features of Enterprise Guide which had improved process manager, with life cycle templates, event logging which had the capabilities to track detailed information for audit capabilities.
SAS Drug Development I attended a presentation by David Handelsman who was the product manager for clinical R&D. He gave good high level view on SAS Drug Development software from SAS. He gave a historical perspective on how the biopharmaceutical industry had a dip on the drug development pipeline as identified back in March of 2004. There were several reasons which caused this including Genomics and related technologies not fulfilling potential, mergers between companies decrease “candidates” for new drug developments. Companies were pursuing chronic diseases but these prove to be more difficult to study. There were also increasing cost and complexity which decrease development. In March of 2006, the FDA announced the critical path initiative which listed 76 points of “opportunities” in which companies can address to increase their performance. From this list, David pointed out some key points including: • EDC – Electronic data capture which moves away from paper into capturing and managing information electronically. • Standards – the adoption of standards such as CDISC • ESUB – Electronic submission to EMEA and FDA • ASP – Adoption of Application Service Providers There were 76 points so David pointed out a few items that more directly relates to SDD (SAS Drug Development) and SAS software. David describes the traditional role of how SAS played in clinical research with the following diagram.
This is now being augmented by some of the newer software solutions that are being developed such as SDD. SDD is now providing capabilities such as:
• Compliant Platform – Validated development environment to facilitate research and development.
• Applications – There are solutions in SDD which can perform: loading, exploring, analyzing and reporting.
• Web Based ASP – The solution is a thin client implementation that can be accessed through the internet and is hosted on SAS Institute servers.
David demonstrates how SDD is an integrated solution that sits on top of SAS 9.
Some approaches that delivers a compliance development environment includes: audit trials, versioning, electronic signature, traceability and security. SDD is able to accomplish some of these tasks were accomplished by providing a single common repository for all the SAS programs and related data. The access is of this information was through a controlled view on a browser.
The current release of SDD is 3.3. Some of the enhancements for this release have been designed to optimized performance. In release 3.4, which will soon be released, has global language support. The next big release after that in 4.1 will have new capabilities win work flow and automation.
There were plenty of high level information on SDD which David provided. It was not a presentation with hands on demonstrations but rather it provided a good overview and historic perspective as to where SDD came from and explained some of the driving forces in its development.
[edit] XML and CDISC
I was able to catch up with Tony Friebel to see what is new in his world of XML Strategy and Platform R&D Division. Tony was updating me on the latest release of PROC CDISC which he was trying to keep up among all the changes between the various XML models from CDISC. Part of the challenge is that there are many different vendors with their own interpretation of the XML schematic which makes it more difficult to find stability. Tony refereed to this as “vendor’s creativity”. One development that is going to be placed into the next release of PROC CDISC along with version 9.2 of SAS is more support for foreign languages. There will be a new parameter in PROC CDISC named LANG. It will handle all the code lists for different languages. I wanted to follow up with Tony on PROC CDISC capabilities on producing DEFINE.XML since that was one of the wish list items. Tony said that the development and release for this feature has been placed on hold. The resources have been placed in other areas such as creating support for SDTM data model 3.1.1. Currently, it is only supporting 3.1. This has been challenging since ODM is currently moving from version 1.2 to 1.3 and SDTM is also moving towards 3.1.2. Some of the other priorities is to perform validation of the new data structures. Tony therefore predicts that once PROC CDISC has been updated to support ODM 1.3 and the specification of DEFINE.XML settles, then PROC CDISC will continue on its development of DEFINE.XML.
On a brighter note, Tony is very excited about the new XML Maper. Once available, this will include an auto mapper that will save a lot of time. This will automatically create surrogate keys during the mapping of the XML from varying data structures. This new version of the XML Mapper will be available as part of 9.1.3 which is target for September.
[edit] Conclusion
SAS Global Forum has grown to become a larger conference as compared to the monster conference that SUGI has become in recent years. There are special industry specific tracks which you can attend and a myriad of presentations. It is easy to get lost since I had heard that friends of mine attended but I did not even see them. The theme is innovation and I do see that as being the key for SAS’s success. The space of analytics is continuing to prove to be critical in many businesses and SAS is expanding its tools into many industries such as retail and manufacturing among many others. The introduction of new technologies to meet these vertically niche industries is one of SAS’s focus but there is also continued development on some of its general purpose technologies such as BI tools such as Enterprise Guide (EG). If I were to have gone back in time and attend the conference all over again starting on Monday, I would probably witness an entirely different experience. The conference is analogous to the many new developments in the software technologies of SAS. There are so many new paths that you can take, each view reveals something new.
For more information, please visit http://sgf2007.blogspot.com/
