DSstar TO SPOTLIGHT IT VISIONARIES

SPOTLIGHT ON IT VISIONARIES: THEY TURN TECHNOLOGY INTO PROFITS!

Profound comprehension of quantitative information is vital to success in business. Today, technological savvy underlies all such understanding. Thus, those with the foresight to adopt the most advanced techniques for gathering, processing, and using information will invariably outpace their competition. This was true 800 years ago when merchants in Italy became first in Europe to adopt Arabic numeration and saw it revolutionize the way business was done, and it remains just as true today. Those who recognize the potential of a new technology and are best able to harness its power WILL see profits rise.

The need to implement cutting-edge technologies in making business decisions has never been more pressing. The amount, scope, and detail of the data that it is possible to collect has exploded in recent years. Storage techniques have kept pace with this ever-increasing tide of data. Devices will soon be available that are capable of storing a petabyte of data -- a capacity equal to that of 20 million four-drawer file cabinets. In fact, burgeoning data has revolutionized the entire business environment in less than a decade!

The ready accessibility of such an immense amount of data has created both an opportunity and a challenge. Significant opportunities now exist to make connections and discern patterns that have previously been invisible. Discovery of those patterns can provide incredible insights into the nature of the forces driving markets and can lead to remarkably effective strategies for managing them. The challenge has been to devise ways of bringing those patterns to light. In other words, new ways must be found to turn data into useful information.

This challenge has been partially met with the techniques of data mining and other forms of automated knowledge discovery. Such applications delve into the mountains of available data and yield often surprising results -- revealing order in apparent chaos and yielding business strategies that cut the Gordian knot of the most complex financial dynamics. Advances in this area are constantly being made.

Nevertheless, it is a long way from the lab to the conference room. A yawning chasm exists between pure science and business practice, a gap that has been bridged by the genius of a few prescient individuals. In the upcoming months DSstar will be placing a spotlight on these visionaries, men and women who have been responsible for the alchemy whereby data-intensive computing is transformed into the most advanced money-making technology on the planet.

We will be presenting the biographies of remarkable people who, recognizing the vast potentials contained within these new technologies, have successfully brought the processes of data warehousing, data mining, and automated knowledge discovery out of academic ivory towers and into the uncompromising give-and-take of the business world. These innovators have shown others the way to turn technology into profits and have insured that the various techniques of automated decision support will be an increasingly integral part of the way businesses are run in coming years.