Silver Circle Profiles
A Look at Frank DiIorio
posted: August 2006There aren't many people who would tell you that a software program changed their life. Frank DiIorio is one of the few.
The Chapel Hill, NC, resident was a graduate student in city planning at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill in 1975 when he earned a fellowship that required computer expertise. All he knew at the time was a bit of the Fortran programming language. His university employer handed him a copy of SAS and a batch of survey data. "The whole document for the software fit into 250 pages," recalls DiIorio. He felt lucky that his employers were using software built just down the road – in nearby Cary, NC. "If you were having a problem you could just bring your plotter over and they'd help you."
His first big break
DiIorio felt lucky to have learned a marketable skill, since job openings for city planners were scarce when he received his degree. Instead, he used his new SAS programming skills to find other jobs at UNC and then got a big break when a colleague recommended him for a job with the Bank of New Zealand. He had been eager to live overseas, and his knowledge of SAS was critical to making the deal happen. In fact, his first task at the bank was to help figure out whether to use SAS or an IBM product to run some reports. "I'll never forget, we did a benchmark and SAS ran in one-seventeenth the time it took to run the reports using the IBM product."
Back in the United States, he discovered that although there wasn't a well-defined niche for SAS programmers, "it was obvious there was a need," and DiIorio gave up any thoughts of using his city planning degree. "Over the years, SAS programmer evolved from a curiosity into a job category with consistently high employment opportunities."
A career using SAS®
Today, DiIorio's resume includes 14 jobs where he has used SAS. He is President of CodeCrafters Inc., of Chapel Hill. His current client is Rho Inc., a contract research organization. A developer with expertise in metadata and tools, DiIorio is helping Rho streamline drug development submissions to the Food and Drug Administration. Every day a submission is delayed costs drug developers thousands of dollars. So when DiIorio wrote a program in SAS to embed and verify hyperlinks that are required in every submission, it saved money. Before that, Rho sent the hyperlink work to a subcontractor at the cost of a two-week delay.
Rho's head of submissions, Jeff Abolafia, brought DiIorio on at Rho – thrilled at the opportunity to work with a man he considers a mentor. "I started going to his talks in 1985 when I was a biostatistics student at UNC. He blew me away. He had a big influence on my philosophy toward programming, and I learned so much from him on how to check my work."
At every turn in his career DiIorio has advocated for SAS because his experience with niche vendors was always so poor. "You might have a vendor that has a more elegant solution for one type of statistical problem, but overall you do better if you use SAS for everything rather then a bunch of ‘best of breed' niche players." It's the difference, says DiIorio, of potentially making multiple calls to multiple vendors' tech support lines or just one call to SAS in the rare event of an error.
A steadfast advocate
Many times in his early years of using SAS, DiIorio's clients and employers needed to take a "leap of faith . . . to select a SAS tool that didn't quite fit into a specific category and (believe) it would get the job done. These experiences have always been exciting and intellectually demanding and the clients have always been happy."
He's never wavered from his own desire to work with SAS, even when colleagues expressed uncertainty. DiIorio has enjoyed opportunities to share his experience with other SAS users. He began presenting papers at SAS Users Group International conferences in the early 1980s, "then found an even bigger outlet for my urge to write." DiIorio is the author of SAS Applications Programming: A Gentle Introduction and co-authored Quick Start to Data Analysis with SAS. He is a popular mentor on SAS user boards, co-chaired 1994 and 1996 conferences of SouthEast SAS Users Group and traveled throughout the U.S., U.K., Australia and New Zealand presenting papers to users groups. "As with writing the books, this is a part of my professional life that I never even remotely considered when I started out."
"In a real sense, SAS has ‘been' my career and has provided job, writing and other opportunities that were as unexpected as they were welcome. Publishing, conferences and job opportunities may be taken for granted by the next generation of SAS programmers, but I will always be impressed with what a varied, fertile professional world I've been able to inhabit."
