In what has been hailed as one of the most innovative implementations of a standard software application from SAS Institute, the Liberty Group is stretching the basic functionality of SAS IT Resource Management to deliver critical bottom-line business benefits.
So says Annemarie Cronje, Initiative Manager: Organisational Intelligence at the local subsidiary of the global SAS Institute, who explains that SAS IT Resource Management (formerly SAS IT Service Vision) is generally utilised for IT resource capacity planning.
"Most implementations of the product are designed to help the customer to better determine which of their systems will run into resource problems and thus improve their ability to forecast their capacity needs.
"Liberty Group not only does this but, by adding value to the basic SAS tool, has succeeded in adding significant real value to the entire organisation. For example, SAS IT Resource Management is also used by Liberty to extract critical business data, such as the specific utilisation of business applications and information relating to online transactions.
"It takes all the transactions, puts the data together and produces a one line report per user ID which allows for accurate portioning out of application and system usage cost per person anywhere in the organisation," Cronje says.
Pam Esterhuysen, developer in the Liberty Group's IT Service Division, says Liberty has taken a basic SAS tool and made it "work really hard."
"Initially we wanted a solution to assist with the collecting, storing and analysing of IT logs generated by the various operational systems running on two large mainframes and 37 Unix boxes, as well as a variety of other servers. We needed to track our Internet, intranet, and server usage in addition to mainframe SMF (system management facility) data and all applications.
"There are a lot of data sources through the Liberty Group and SAS allows us to read from source rather than transport it to a server. In fact, SAS's ability to get to data - no matter where it resides - and its analytical capabilities are therefore critically important," she adds.
According to Esterhuysen, SAS IT Resource Management allows application and machine usage to be tracked. These records are used to shift workloads so as to ensure the best possible utilisation of the Group's IT resources. The implementation has reduced reporting times on IT-related events and provides early warning on capacity planning issues.
"But once the basic implementation was in place - and this only took one month - we realised we could use the system for far more than capacity planning," Esterhuysen adds.
"We can also extract transaction records from the online systems and determine what type of records are going through the online systems, which business transactions are performed, who did it, how often, and which database - even which file - was accessed.
"In fact, we can go beyond determining which applications are being used. We can see which tasks are executed. This information is enormously useful to numerous departments throughout the Liberty Group including HR, Finance and internal auditing," Esterhuysen concludes.
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SAS IT Resource Management is an all-encompassing, enterprise-wide approach to IT service reporting. This solution enables IT to "speak" to business by aligning IT direction with the corporate bottom line, while bridging organisational gaps. And SAS IT Resource Management handles more than 1 000 sources of unique service components - a level of support provided by no other solution.
SAS IT Resource Management lets users to bring disparate data into a customised warehouse where it can be used for:
* IT resource management across the enterprise from the desktop.
* A Web report gallery where users can point and click through detailed analytical reports.
* Maintaining a single point of control over the information delivery process and creating repeatable processes that reduce maintenance costs.
* Accurate, consistent reliable analysis of all your business and IT resource information from the globally recognised industry leader in analytics.
* Integration with other SAS solutions.
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SAS is the market leader in providing a new generation of business intelligence software and services that create true enterprise intelligence. SAS solutions are used at more than 39,000 sites - including 90% of the Fortune 500 - to develop more profitable relationships with customers and suppliers; to enable better, more accurate and informed decisions; and to drive organisations forward. SAS is the only vendor that completely integrates leading data warehousing, analytics and traditional BI applications to create intelligence from massive amounts of data. For more than 25 years, SAS has been giving customers around the world The Power to Know(r). For more information, visit http://www.sas.com/sa.
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