SAS Portlets, Widgets, Themes and Tutorials for sale

I have started doing some work looking at integrating Graphical Information Systems (GIS) with SAS environments (more on that later).When looking at the benefits of doing this integration 3 come to mind:

1. Using the spatial dimension within analysis (i.e show me all customer within a 100k radius of our Auckland office)
2. Displaying spatial attributes (i.e show me the boundaries of the property at 100 Queen St, Auckland)
3. Visualisation of data/information on geographic maps (i.e show me the ethnicity of people in Auckland as a pie graph, by city)

When thinking about advanced visualistion of data I have always found that GIS tools seem to deliver this better than most other tools (hence point 3). An example can be seen in the middle of the “Business Intelligence Visualizing Your DatabaseVisualizing Your Database” pdf presentation from ESRI.

Now SAS has some advanced graphing capabilities, just checkout the examples at
“Robert Allison’s SAS/Graph Examples!” to see some in action.

But these are fairly static and still require manual code, if you are using the GUI front ends (i.e Web Report Studio, OLAP Viewer) the options are still fairly limited (not that any other of the large BI vendors tools that I know of are any better).

You could try the SAS BI Dashboard Framework, but it is in my experience fairly difficult to use and maintain (some would say it is still a beta product, but 9.2 will bring a more robust version)

It is one of the reasons we are working on building our Flash Graph Portlet.

But if you look around the web while you start seeing some pretty sexy , not to mention useful ways to visualise data. An  example:

• Boston Redsox Home runs

Is sexy visualisation the way to go? Well whenever I stumble across any kind of award for dashboards or visulaisation, they are always fairly plain, with lots of text and a few bar graphs.

Checkout the winners of the MicroChartsCompetition No speedo’s or heat maps there.

So whats your thought.  Is it that visualisation is sexy and dashboards are not?

Do people expect to see sex and sizzle in a demo before they buy a product, but the users just really want easy access to lots of information?

While you mull that over checkout the SAS/GRAPH Dashboard Samples over at the SAS support site. Lots of good examples of both award winning dashboard styles, and speedo’s plus downloadable code examples.