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Excerpt from Oral History Interview with Jim Goodnight, July 22, 1999. Interview I-0073. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) See Entire Interview >>

Integrating user feedback

Goodnight describes how SAS integrates user feedback into its development.

Citing this Excerpt

Oral History Interview with Jim Goodnight, July 22, 1999. Interview I-0073. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Full Text of the Excerpt

We have tried to stay very alert to the new buzzwords in the industry and what things are new. We try to get there as quickly as we can. We have customers that we talk to year round through technical support that provide suggestions and ideas, and once a year we'll send out a ballot to all of our users and ask them what they would like us to be working on. Basically, [we] take [the] questions and suggestions that they've made and put them in a ballot form and let everybody vote on them. We've been doing that for over twenty years. That's been one of our very most successful programs. You keep your current users happy and make the changes and improvements, after all they are paying an annual licensing fee. They have grown to expect that the kind of things that they want to see put into the system will be put into the system. We try to respond to it and get these things in there as quickly as possible. It's been a great thing not only in trying to satisfy the users, but if you think of users as almost like an R&D [research and development] group--. They see other software. They see other people's ideas. If they see something they really like and they think it should be in the SAS system, they'll call in and make the suggestion. It's a great market research group we've got there.