Jay Upchurch of SAS: Analytics and Transformation Go Hand in Hand to Present Unique Opportunities for SMBs to Survive and Thrive

March 18, 2021 0 Comments

jay upchurch quote

Everything we do today causes data. From every click to every swipe. And when the pandemic action us into sheltering in place, it also exponentially accelerated those clinks and swipes…and Zooms…and Uber Eats and Door Dash degrees …. And you get the point. Many of the cash-based face-to-face business we’d make going into accumulates have turned into digital business and interactions. And all of this data can provide fellowships with important insights that can help guide companies during times of crisis into obligating the privilege calls on make-or-break decisions.

To get some real penetration into how all the data coming from all these digital interactions can be( and is being) assists in small and medium sized jobs during times of crisis like we have faced the last year, I recently had an instructive LinkedIn Live conversation with Jay Upchurch; CIO of SAS, a preceding analytics programme provider. We spoke at length on a number of issues, including how the role of data and analytics have changed during the pandemic, the opportunity presented by AI to help SMBs not only survive but likewise thrive in times of crisis like what we’re still facing a year into Covid-1 9, and more.

Below is an edited record of a portion of our discourse. Click on the embedded SoundCloud player to hear the full conversation.

smallbiztrends* A Few Good Minutes With Jay Upchurch, CIO of SAS

Small Business Trends: How has the role of data and analytics in business organizations changed in the year since the pandemic started, particularly with respect to customer engagement?

Jay Upchurch: You start with trust. You deserve that rely over epoch. It’s not just given to you, and you pay that through your version of the data. So to your point of, do you have access to the data? Can you interpreted the data? Can you analyze the data? And are you able become meaningful war on that analysis? And do those actions produce the result? And then as that perpetual round comes up and disappearing, cartel starts to come with it. And so, again, in uncertain times, and these are certainly uncertain times , nothing is more important than how you interpret that data and taken any steps against that.

For so many years, the enterprises and frankly some of the best managers in the world- it doesn’t matter if it’s business or not- they were always ended upon as being heroic because of what beings attended was,” Well, that’s intuition .” They had a gut feel or they were smarter or something. Something drew better then. And today, in today’s playing field, data normalizes that for all of us. Then so it’s a question of, do you have the endowment around you, as you were saying a minute ago, Brent, to access the data , normalize it, alter it, make it what you need it to be, and then analyze it and make decisions out of that? That’s the hard part of this industry today. And I would tell you, we talk about it a good deal, it’s a knack dearth. So one of the things that we try to deal with is, how do we reach everybody a data scientist? Because there’s only really a few that come out every year that are truly data scientists. So how do we offset data available to all, and provide tooling to anybody that can come along and do work on it? That constituent is what’s fascinating to us. Another one of the purposes of that we speculate a great deal about is just the maturity arc that everybody has to go through when “ve been thinking about” analytics and AI.

So, as two examples, getting access to the data, analyzing it, and then time showing it on a dashboard or a report card, that’s step one fundamentals. And beings learn and start to see more and more streams of data that come in the more and more penetrations I can get out of it. And then the next mile is, okay, I have these penetrations. Now, what do I move do? How do I taken any steps with that? And how do I automate that? And how do I apply sits in place and maintain those representations because the data all around us continues to change? Same thing with this pandemic. We thought we had the right data in March, April of last year. Think about how that’s changed over the past nine, 10, 12 months and where we are now. It’s the same thing, the pose that you might’ve had specific to COVID-1 9 back in March last year, probably dramatically different than what you have today.

Deepen in Data Leads to Changes in Business

Small Business Trends: It goes right into this question that my friend Alan Berkson has.” How has the data that you look modified from before the pandemic til now? And what we might see after the pandemic ?” Because a lot of the things that we used to do, be able to go to the grocery store and just go in and buy a loaf of bread and then pay with currency and then walk out. There was no data on that kind of interaction or exchange. Now, you have to buy your groceries online that aims the storage are well aware, and if it’s being delivered, the transmission people know it. So there’s a lot more data, there’s a lot more things that you could look at. And so how has that changed over the last year or so?

Jay Upchurch: Yeah, you’re exactly right. Data now is exploding. There’s more of it coming from a lot of different neighborhoods, and it’s not just large-scale information and data that are shared or that people contribute to. It’s coming out of, going back to the grocery example for a second, Brent, I make, that’s a great case where IoT is coming heavily into play, and we’re getting data out of sensors that people are interacting with without even understanding or realizing it. And so just thinking about all the different information and data that we have and marrying that data up, cross chipping it with data from a variety of roots. You mentioned it’s cold outside, so if I’m a diner, how do I take advantage of the data that I know around forecasts for weather with the data I is available in supply with the data that I have with parties coming in? Maybe updating in real occasion with, is everybody ordering something hot versus cold? How do I wrap for optimizing my benefit?

There’s a whole lot of different data sets that are coming now, and parties are coming to business like SAS with the question of,” Well, how are you able help me make sense of all this ?” And it’s not only, again, thinking about the data and the resources, how to devour it, particularly in a mas life now, because data comes structured, unstructured, in a brook, after the facts of the case, and it comes in a lot of different ways. But how do you take action on that analysis? And do “youve had” the talent around you to take advantage of it? I think back to our conferences around small business, that’s a huge challenge for the small business market and truly the mid sell too. I’ll tell you, industrial enterprises people are having challenges with it as well. So where do you get that consult from? Where do you get those advisory services from? And then what various kinds of implements do you bring to bear to help kept it into action for your business?

Can SMBs Survive Without Transforming?

Small Business Trends: In calls of small-time and mid-sized firms, a lot of them before the pandemic … there were still a somewhat substantial quantity of small businesses that were not using or exercising the mas as effectively as they maybe could have. I think there’s a stat where perhaps 50% or so of SMBs still didn’t have a website. There weren’t a good deal of them percentage-wise doing e-commerce. So how does the pandemic reform the usage of the mas? How does it modify the uses of things like websites and IoT? How important is it for small-scale, mid-sized businesses to begin to utilize these things? Maybe they were able to get and do things to a certain extent before the pandemic without expending these implements, but can they survive if they don’t prepare these moves, start implementing these tools more efficiently and effectively?

Jay Upchurch: That’s a great question. I find it hard to believe that you’re going to be able to survive without it. I think we are all faced with the question of, what does the future of work look like? And there are plenty of beliefs about when people may come back to the office place, when they may not, when people return to some normal statu of man. And I think that there’s still going to be a long tale of things that we have learned, things that we’ve started to accept as regular, that will remain or will become the new ordinary, if you will, as we move forward. And I think in the case, when you look at the new criterion, I think it violences all businesses to become digitally enabled. I think some people talk about digital conversion and everybody wants to have that Uber transportation moment where,” Oh, we’ve got this idea. We’re going to totally change an entire manufacture ,” and that’s not undoubtedly the case.

You’ll check one of those out of a million. I imply , not everybody’s going to have that time. And so how do you drive changeover in your business? I tell people all the time, it’s based on your maturity representation, your digital maturity example, and you’ve got to make small steps in going through and figuring out, do I have a process? Is it well understood or is it still in the heads of a few? Is it put into a organization? Can you actually automate it and understand it and use it? And then can you optimize it? And then later on, are you gave the right to eventually convert it? And so there are those natural steps. So I think you come back to the small business owner who may have had a local vicinity. They had a great local viral suffer that helped grow their business to a certain scale. All of a sudden, 180 stage modify. People stopped coming in. Everybody’s doing it remote. It action you to adopt digital technologies.

So I actually think that the pandemic helped make the superintendent off the car a little bit when it comes to how fast you can go to adopt some of these brand-new cloud native engineerings. And I’ll tell you, at SAS, and this not an infomercial for SAS, but we’ve been faced with this for quite some time. I represent, trying to figure out how we transform our own commodities to being more digitally native, more cloud native, and how to drive support. You mentioned data a minute ago. The world around us right now is changing at such a rapid tempo that our scaffolds, appropriate tools that we commit our purchasers in the market to be able to use, has to embrace open informant, the open generator society, the new technologies that are coming. We have to remain open, because it would be awful for us to say,” Well, here’s your tool, but ignore this data set or that data set. We don’t want to give you access to whatever, our tool doesn’t allow it .”

Our tool and scaffolds and our industry answers are only as good as the data that feeds it and your own mind’s creativity and how to perform those results.[ inaudible 00:08: 50] countryside, it’s changed. I signify, there’s so many different tools that out there today. There are small niche implements that are easy to come in and endorse plug in and plug out after you try them. There are currently large-scale organizations that undoubtedly are continuing to be highly disruptive and give us brand-new strength and everything else. Somebody’s got to help make sense of all of that, and then run your campaigns across that in a way that is meaningful in terms of how you measure your engagement. And sometimes that’s significant challenges in and of itself, only making sense of the ecosystem that you’ve, interesting fairly, volunteered to take on.

The Need for Speed

Small Business Trends: We’re getting all this new data, like you talked about. It’s coming from a variety of places. Who was talking about things like Clubhouse last year? Probably nobody, but now that’s a canal and there’s probably going to be some interesting data coming out of that. More and more of us are involved with live streaming and in virtual affairs, so there’s all this stuff coming at consumers and companies alike, and it’s coming from a variety of areas and it’s coming with this unrelenting rate. And yet still it feels like if you don’t got something with that information abruptly, you lose an opportunity to create a meaningful interaction. So what about hastened and the rapidity of data, but too the speed to be able to react to the data and turn it into something meaningful, fit in this equation?

Jay Upchurch: Yeah. The frightening thing is that the data is coming at you at a rate of pace that you literally cannot deplete. We talk about our occasions managing engineering, which is again a type of technology that allows you to consume real time data off of sensors at incredible speedings. So my station there is that it’s going to be difficult exactly to even followed with, and that’s where the modelings that you compose has to have technology that can ingest that data, read that data, and give back a develop that’s meaningful. There’s no way that anybody in today’s day and age can perform all that data, correlate it, and come back with an revelation in a manual nature. So the platforms, the tools, the solutions that are available, SAS , non-SAS, everything that’s out there sanctions the business. And it doesn’t matter if you’re small-scale, medium, or large.

I think the other thing about rush is we have a natural reluctance as humans not to be as puzzled as we should be. I talked about this in an article that I published about a month or so ago, and it only talked about the dominance of interest, and it’s actually one of our core values at SAS that we really stress. You have to be curious about the data. The data will depict the picture for you if you allow it, but you’ve got to empower your crew, the people around you, yourself, to be curious. And it’s funny, because as children, we’re naturally curious. And I’ve got three lads, there’ve been plenty of goes where I’ve had to beg them to stop asking questions. Shame on me for that, because I don’t want to suppress that natural curiosity because later on in live, it’s actually what helps you be successful, and it’s what helps you be successful with data and analytics, is your own personal curiosity.

So I feel from a rate standpoint, don’t be afraid to jump in and have those discipline experimentations. Play with it and find. Understand the impact of moving data in and out and what that does to your sits. I think there’s another aspect of rush, and that is model management. Your modelings atrophy because the data around you alters, again. At a pace of hasten that we cannot really comprehend today. And so you have to be mindful that what worked for you yesterday may not definitely work for you today. And so there are plenty of employments, again, SAS, being one of them, where we stress that model management, that prototype, that analytic life cycle, if you are able to. So you’ve got to make sure that just because you’ve stand something up and you’re working with it that you’re continuing to care and feed and expand on it.

And then I belief the last one that I would say on speed is you’ve got to make sure that, again, it doesn’t matter what sizing business you are, you’ve got to make sure that your science experimentation is something that will scale up with you as you proliferate. And that’s an interesting place again, where you come back to trust of, are you leveraging implements? Are you leveraging datasets? And are you leveraging aspects of your business that you trust that will allow you to scale and grow up? Because this thing can take on a life of its own if you allow it. So, again, that’s a place where we as SAS feel like we’ve done a pretty good job over the last four years. And when world markets around you moves and having the data and the penetration to know confidently how to pivot your business into a brand-new country for, again, for your business survival, that is really one of the things that I fantasize most companionships under appreciate around analytics.

Analytics, AI and SMBs- A Formula for Surviving and Thriving the Pandemic

Jay Upchurch: A pile of parties “ve been thinking about” analytics and was just trying to articulated advisers into action more as a means to an intention for cost containment or gain maximizing, or whatnot. But it actually allow you so much more than that. If I think about the digital twin capability and the way to test new ideas and explore them in a way that is a lot less high-risk than maybe in the past, that’s one of the things I think is really impactful. We’ve got a friend of mine who am talking about me a good deal about the taxi business, and he mentions how bad the taxi industry has been disrupted in all regions of the pandemic. And there’s an example of a firm that has rotated more into nutrient bringing and using fishing fleets and the systems for routing and for scheduling for food service instead for traditional human passenger service.

Small Business Trends: Right.

Jay Upchurch: And it’s one of those things where you’re like,” Yeah, you know what? That’s a logical natural expansion of the use to new technologies .” But again, the use of data, the use of analytics allows you to pivot into that industry seamlessly and assemble, again, where the demand is. So they already had the furnish slope of it figured out. That, to me, is really interesting.

AI is really merely taking analytics and putting it much more into automated activity and instrumenting and coding and beyond that.

Through some natural language processing, for instance, in customer service, you can be a small business and apply these technologies and unexpectedly operate at endeavour flake. And again, back to our discourse on how you take experimentations and turn them into scale, that is a big part of what I think some business struggle with in trying to figure out, how do I move these beyond just the experimentations of the world?

AI is fascinating. I was on a committee about a month ago for North Carolina Technology. It’s a neighbourhood, statewide house that does a lot to help promote startups and SMBs, any technology across North Carolina. And on that panel, we talked a lot about AI and the future of AI, and the fact that we’re just now starting to meet the promises of what AI was back in the’ 70 s and’ 60 s where reference is started come through here and people started dreaming about all of these different things. And now, as we start to leant more and more of those in reality, the enjoyable thing is beings don’t even realize how much of it is under the hood and your daylight to epoch actions. You don’t even realize it’s there, it’s around you, it’s participating in the world and it improves their own lives without you even really even realizing it.

And so I mull as small businesses and medium businesses, as we move into that and we cuddle that, I think it are really give us more competitive advantage. It devotes us the ability to operate at scale that we would have 15, 20 years ago look back and been resentful of the enterprise. And now we say,” No , no. We can compete. That obstruction to enter is now much lower”.