Baylor Wins SAS Institute Computing Award

by Alan Hunt

SAS Institute, the world's largest privately held software company, has named Baylor University as the winner of its 2000 Enterprise Computing Award for Academic Applications. The university was recognized for its use of data warehousing and data mining for both administrative and educational purposes.
Jim Goodnight, president of Cary, N.C.-based SAS Institute, presented the award to Baylor representatives during the 25th annual SAS Users Group International conference in Indianapolis, Ind. The Enterprise Computing Awards are given yearly to organizations that best illustrate the use of SAS software to meet business goals.
For administrative purposes, Baylor is using SAS software to build a university-wide data warehouse that will provide accurate and accessible information. Baylor's Graduate School is implementing this system first due to its pressing need for comparable data. "We have almost a hundred separate graduate degrees and programs, each with distinct missions and unique data," said Dr. Larry Lyon, dean of Baylor's Graduate School. "The Graduate School must integrate these programs to ensure that the overall mission of the university is served. Without comparable, reliable, accessible data, that job cannot be done."
On the educational side, Baylor is introducing students in the Hankamer School of Business to SAS software and solutions, offering them "real world" business skills in data mining and data warehousing. "Data mining and knowledge management are very hot topics across corporate America," said Dr. G.W.K. Willis, professor and chair of the information systems department, and director of the Center for Applied Geographic and Spatial Research. "Our students will be learning current practices that will help them be more competitive in the marketplace."
Additionally, Baylor, in conjunction with SAS, has developed a data mining and knowledge management center, enabling students and faculty to search for relationships and correlations within data.
"The rapid growth and importance of data mining and data warehousing requires that all business students understand the fundamental technologies associated with this area of knowledge management," said Dr. Reagan Ramsower, associate dean for technology at Hankamer.