SAS Crafts Knowledge Management Plan
ACTION ITEMS
The SAS Institute in early February will introduce extensions to its decision-support software for finer-grained knowledge management.
Called the SAS Collaborative Business Intelligence Solution, the SAS knowledge management initiative is based on an "enablement layer" capable of culling and disseminating information from data warehouses across an enterprise.
"With this, users have a collaborative business intelligence repository where now they can have a live report in their hands with live [online analytical processing] capabilities instead of one that is fixed and static. They can slice and dice it on the fly," said one source close to the company.
The product essentially provides more detail about the origin and context of the information stored in the SAS System, according to another source close to the company, although the source emphasized that what the product extracts is not meta data.
The new component provides footnote-type information including who wrote the report and why. This makes it possible for managers to make informed decisions based on decision-support data.
The new product will detail what was meant in specific analyses, so it will not be necessary to contact the person who actually wrote the report. Given turnover in some companies or the travel and vacation schedules of people producing the report, this should prove advantageous, according to one company insider.
The functions of the upcoming product are natural extensions of what the company's existing core products now do: Collect data enterprisewide and analyze it through a layer of business intelligence, thereby turning it into useful information.
"This is a good first step, but the next step is putting that information into context and that is where the knowledge management part comes in," said one source close to the company.
As part of the product rollout, which is expected to happen on Feb. 4, SAS will announce a partnership with a supplier of knowledge management tools.
In general, the Web is sparking renewed interest in knowledge management tools as corporate IT organizations move to develop Enterprise Information Portals.
At Lotusphere last week, for example, Lotus did its part to increase the buzz, spelling out its definition of knowledge management.
"We are defining knowledge management by starting with the notion that you clearly have a process within a company of creating, organizing, and distributing knowledge," said Mike Zisman, who was appointed last November as IBM's lead executive for knowledge management, in Cambridge, Mass.
The SAS Institute, in Cary, N.C., is at http://www.sas.com.