Email annoyances and getting to the Strategic Inbox
The original idea behind this post was to talk about what my day is like as senior vice president and CMO of SAS, and ask you what your day is like. But I got stuck on email. More about my day later. When I first entered the workforce, if you wanted to send text you had to type it, or go to a shared PC and print it out, then go to the mailroom and copy it and put it in people’s mailboxes. Sending an email wasn’t an option and typing a letter was a chore, so p

The re-emergence of the customer
I found another interesting theme at our recent Premier Business Leadership Series event: the re-emergence of the customer. Companies that have been forced to focus on satisfying their immediate business needs are waking up and remembering that the future is all about how you deal with the customer. Personalized, focused marketing is coming back into play, and the need to understand

Risk, fraud, innovation. Who’s in the driver’s seat?
There was another trend I noticed at our recent Premier Business Leadership Series event. Risk and fraud have been important areas of focus for us and our customers, and the downturn shed a lot of light on those areas. We had some great panel discussions on those topics at PBLS and SAS Media Day that have been nicely covered on the sascom Voices blog. Plus, PBLS took place alongside the

Is optimization the enemy of innovation?
Last week I delivered a keynote on the first day of our Premier Business Leadership Series event in Las Vegas. My topic: Innovate and Optimize. People often say optimization is the enemy of innovation. I disagree. Moreover, you can’t have one without the other, particularly right now. Optimizing for its own sake without considering how you will innovate is foolhardy. Innovating without any thought to how you will improve your practices is t

The downturn didn’t kill sustainability
I had a busy travel week recently. I attended the SAS Forum Netherlands, a CIO roundtable event and the SAS Forum Belux. All were great events and it was especially good to see SAS customers participating at these forums. We learn so much from direct interaction with our customers and nothing will ever replace that. The theme of SAS Forum Netherlands was sustainability. I think a lot of people thought the economic downturn killed sustainability initiatives, but that’s not true at all. That attitude is really more of a reflection of what the media pays attention to.