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Business Analytics
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business decisions within your existing technology environment
SAS® Architecture for Business Analytics
Table of Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................1
SAS® Technical Reference Model for Business Analytics .............................2
Data Management........................................................................................4
Analytics ......................................................................................................4
Reporting......................................................................................................5
Compute Services...........................................................................................6
Metadata Services...........................................................................................7
Security Services.............................................................................................8
Integration Services..........................................................................................8
Management Services.....................................................................................9
Workflow Services...........................................................................................9
Five Styles of Business Analytics, One SAS® Architecture...........................10
1) Classic Business Analytics.....................................................................10
2) Classic Business Analytics with Data Quality.........................................10
3) Business Analytics with Feedback Loops...............................................11
4) Real-Time Business Analytics................................................................11
5) Business Activity Monitoring..................................................................12
One SAS® Architecture................................................................................12
Conclusion .....................................................................................................13
i
SAS® Architecture for Business Analytics
Content for this paper, SAS® Architecture for Business Analytics, was
provided by Diane Hatcher, Solutions Architect in the SAS Technology
Practice, Cary, NC.
ii
SAS® Architecture for Business Analytics
Introduction
SAS has developed a business analytics architecture that can support many
different architectural styles and business uses. At the core of the business
analytics architecture are sourcing, discovery and sharing activities. Along with
proper data collection and verifiable data quality this leads to better analysis,
which means more compelling information can be shared in a variety of ways
with stakeholders, depending on the situational context.
The details of what these activities involve vary across organizations, within
organizations and even from day to day. Only SAS provides an architecture
flexible enough to support organization-specific requirements without sacrificing
performance while providing a platform that can evolve.
Architecture Planning
Business Analytics Source Discover Share
Activity
• Data capture • Query • Publishing
• Data cleansing • Statistical models • Interaction
WHAT Functionality • Data manipulations • Scoring • Integration
• Master data management • Visualization • Reusability
Provide consistent data Uncover opportunities Distribute actionable
WHY Value across the enterprise intelligence
• IT data management • Business decision makers • Business interfaces
WHERE Stakeholders • Operational systems • Decision support systems • Business processes
• Data access tools • SQL support • Content management
• Data quality algorithms • Analytical modeling • Web-based access
HOW Technology • Customer transformations • Custom development • “Push” techniques
• Job flow management • Interactivity • Services orientation
and scheduling
The diagram above (Figure 1) shows various attributes to consider when planning
business analytics architecture. All elements and capabilities may not be required
within each element, but the relevant ones should be linked and work together to
provide a seamless solution. As the usage of business analytics grows over time,
additional capabilities can be added.
SAS provides a single framework to meet all of your business analytics requirements,
without the need to continually install new components. The SAS architecture
provides a core set of capabilities that work together out of the box and can be
easily extended to add more functionality or integrated with other parts of your
IT infrastructure.
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SAS® Architecture for Business Analytics
There are four key qualities that underlie and drive the SAS®9 architecture for
business analytics:
• Interoperability – the ability to use SAS capabilities from outside the SAS
environment. SAS provides an open architecture built to work with your existing
IT infrastructure (Figure 2).
ENTERPRISE CLIENTS
SAS®
OPERATING SYSTEMS
z/OS AIX HP-UX Solaris Windows Linux
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SAS® Architecture for Business Analytics
• Reliability – the ability to deliver results at the expected time. SAS delivers
reliable results with powerful data access capabilities, industry-leading analytics
and diverse tools for sharing content via multiple channels. SAS delivers reliable
solutions, supporting multiple configurations to provide highly available systems.
Consistency of performance in both results and delivery are integral to the
SAS architecture.
Scalability
Reporting
Reliability
Framework Services
Interoperability
Depicted above (Figure 3) is a high-level technical reference model for the SAS®9
architecture for business analytics. This represents a taxonomy of the core entities,
without stating a specific relationship between them.
Framework services make up the application platform that delivers common core
capabilities across the breadth of the SAS architecture. Data management, analytics
and reporting entities provide activity-specific building blocks for sourcing, discovery
and sharing. These blocks are a combination of targeted functionality and user
interfaces designed to meet the needs of the specific activity.
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SAS® Architecture for Business Analytics
Data Management
• Do you have the need to access data across multiple databases and systems?
The data management building block supports the business activity of sourcing.
This could include prebuilt, high-performance capabilities for connectivity, quality,
extraction, transformation and loading, migration, synchronization and federation
of data.
Data management means having a way to fully use all the data flowing into the
organization. This includes profiling capabilities and the ability to incorporate data
quality business rules across data sources and platforms. If you can automatically
integrate data quality into data integration processes, you can ensure that data is
current and accurate.
Analytics
• Can you optimize and manage the portfolio of analytical models across
the enterprise?
The SAS Analytics building block supports discovery. The core of a business
analytics architecture is the framework support for an analytics engine, but it is how
that analytics engine is surfaced to the end user that determines its value.
SAS® Analytics
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SAS® Architecture for Business Analytics
Reporting
• Can all end users ask questions and get a usable answer?
• Do you have the ability to present the information in the appropriate format?
The reporting building block is critical for the business processes of preparing and
sharing information. This information must be presented in a way that is viable and
delivered to the right person at the right time. Only when this is done can information
become intelligence.
SAS® Reporting
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SAS® Architecture for Business Analytics
Metadata
Security
Integration
Management
Workflow
Framework Services
These services are used by all SAS architecture building blocks to provide
consistency of service and performance.
Compute Services
• Does the engine you are using handle more than SQL processing?
• Can you create customized analytical models beyond what’s provided out
of the box?
• Can the analytics engine access data from all existing data warehouses
and systems?
At the heart of the SAS architecture are the compute services. Essentially, this is
the Base SAS software that has been the engine of SAS Analytics for more than
30 years. The SAS engine remains the power of the platform, executing queries and
models to deliver intelligence.
SAS has always been scalable vertically and horizontally, but we have also
engineered SAS to be scalable across the enterprise for all types of users requiring
both batch and interactive processing.
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SAS® Architecture for Business Analytics
Feeding the engine is the SAS procedural language. This powerful language provides
the ability to analyze data using hundreds of analytical algorithms – including
simple queries, regressions, neural networks, time-based forecasting, scoring and
quantitative analytics. This is a huge advantage for users, because they are not
limited to analytics delivered through a predefined user interface. Every organization
is different, with different processes and different analytical needs. With user
interfaces that are familiar to most organizations, SAS can support 80 percent of
those needs. The remaining 20 percent can be customized to your organization to
provide unmatched analytics. With SAS software’s multivendor architecture (MVA),
SAS code can be written once and run on any supported operating system.
Analytics and data go hand in hand. The more data that is available, the better
the analytical results. One of SAS software’s core strengths has always been data
access, and SAS is continuing to innovate with high-speed analytical data storage
options, in-database processing support, and our commitment to continuous
evolution of analytics techniques and user interfaces.
Metadata Services
• Does the metadata encompass both technical metadata and business metadata?
Metadata services connect all the business processes in the platform – including
resource management, security and sharing of content.
Integrated metadata (information about data sources, how data is derived, business
rules and access authorizations) is crucial for producing accurate, consistent
information. SAS stores technical metadata and business metadata in an open,
centralized and integrated repository. Data changes only need to be documented
in one place. There are fewer systems to support and business users can count on
high-quality information. A single version of the truth is available to all. Better use of
staff time lowers the total cost of ownership for IT infrastructures.
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SAS® Architecture for Business Analytics
Security Services
Integration Services
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SAS® Architecture for Business Analytics
Management Services
The SAS Business Analytics infrastructure is able to operate and integrate into
existing IT enterprise system management facilities such as:
• System administration for the automation of start, stop and restart semantics.
Workflow Services
Workflow services allow for extension of workflows for greater integration with
enterprise business processes. It is possible to generate multiple-level approval and
review processes. With standard APIs for accessing workflow status for integration
with business applications, analytics process flows become more manageable,
visible and documented.
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SAS® Architecture for Business Analytics
The SAS architecture is designed to be flexible enough to support the five styles of
business analytics that are used by all organizations. Each style has its own set of
architecture requirements. Multiple styles may be used at the same time within an
organization. Understanding these styles can help you assess what architecture
building blocks you should consider. For more details about these five styles of
business analytics, please read Architecture for Business Analytics: A Conceptual
Viewpoint, available at www.sas.com/reg/wp/corp/17871.
Classic business analytics is the basic process of data sourcing and may include the
creation of a data mart or warehouse, information discovery – via data exploration
or predictive analytics techniques – and sharing generated reports or information
at different levels of an organization. Traditional report-driven BI processes put
information into the hands of users, leaving them to interpret the situational context
and how it affects the business process.
In many ways this style is similar to classic business analytics except that it
recognizes the need to cleanse and standardize the sourced data, so it integrates
data quality into the data sourcing process. This could be critical to your organization
to improve trust in the data or to meet regulatory requirements.
SAS Enterprise Data Integration and DataFlux® dfPower® Studio provide prebuilt
transformations and data quality algorithms to build data warehouses with
standardized data. SAS can help you manage the entire data life cycle to ensure
that your data is clean, relevant and can be acted upon.
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SAS® Architecture for Business Analytics
This style supports cyclical business processes with a defined time window, where
specific information is needed to finalize decisions. For example, you might want
to provide specific recommendations into a procurement workflow. On a regular
schedule, you may need to forecast sales to determine what you need to order to
replenish your inventory. Data is extracted and cleansed using SAS Data Integration
Studio, analyzed using advanced forecasting techniques with SAS Forecast Studio,
and then specific information on recommended purchase amounts is written back
to the operational system via message queues. Procurement system users can then
access the recommendations to better guide their decisions.
There are instances when it is unknown exactly when a specific service might need
to be executed to gather information because it is triggered when specific behavior
is observed. These situations benefit from analytical enrichment by combining both
contextual and historical data with very quick responses. This leads to a need for
real-time business analytics.
This style of business analytics reflects the need to trigger analytics or data collection
and delivery in real time from an operational application. Contextual data is combined
with existing historical data and analyzed. The results are sent back to the original
touch point for a person to make a decision or for business rules to drive basic,
automated decision making. One example is the real-time scoring of customers in a
bank to see if they qualify for a loan. SAS® Enterprise Miner™ scoring models can be
called via Web services, and the resulting score can be sent back via another Web
service to the calling application to be used in the loan application process.
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SAS® Architecture for Business Analytics
The SAS architecture is unique because it supports all five styles of business
analytics from one deployment. Because of the service-oriented approach,
capabilities are encapsulated, extended and integrated to deliver the required
business analytics. SAS architecture building blocks work together out of the
box, supporting the ability to deploy some solution blocks first and add additional
modules later.
The SAS application platform – SAS framework services – allows the infrastructure
of the SAS architecture to be managed separately but delivered as part of any SAS
solution. This provides flexibility in delivering targeted building blocks to support your
business analytics activities. There is no need to reinvent the functionality provided by
the framework services when deploying different SAS solutions.
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SAS® Architecture for Business Analytics
Conclusion
• The analytical capabilities you need to support the best decision making.
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A