ANALYSIS & COMMENTARY
DECISION TECHNOLOGIES IN DATABASE MARKETING: PART IV
by Gene M. Ferruzza, Senior VP, Decision Technologies
For 14 years, Gene Ferruzza has provided integrated business solutions for clients in telecommunications, electric utilities, financial services, aerospace, manufacturing, and retail. He is an internationally recognized expert in strategic database marketing planning and implementation, as well as development and application of data marts, statistical and A.I. modeling, and decision systems for understanding and predicting human behavior. In addition, he directs research in statistical, neural, evolutionary, and hybrid modeling techniques, and the implementation of decision technologies for marketing programs and software productization. He has also developed and marketed his own database management and segmentation software and is currently advising in on-line market research services and products. Prior to CMS, he worked as a consultant and instructor for two leading neural network hardware and software providers (HNC and NeuralWare). Gene graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics.
In this fourth installment of an extensive multi-part series Feruzza writes: "Matching at the customer level is critical for assembling a data profile for each individual customer in the data mart. In a data profile, all customer activity and information, across all of the data mart's data sources, should be accessible through one unique customer identifier. The variants of addresses become even more diverse when records are matched for householding applications, because data collected on the household come from different individuals in the same household." Parts I, II & III of this series are available as D S * articles 100073, 100080 & 100085.
JUSTIFYING A DATA WAREHOUSE PROJECT: PART I
by D. J. Power
Editor of the World-Wide web site DSS Research Resources and the ISWorld pages on Decision Support Systems, Daniel Power is professor of Information Systems and Management in the College of Business Administration, University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA. His research interests include the design and development of decision support systems and how DSS impact individual and organizational decision behavior. Power has published more than 20 articles and papers. He is also the senior author of a textbook titled Strategic Management Skills (Addison-Wesley, 1986). Power served as the Head of the Management Department at UNI from August 1989 to January 1996. He served as Acting Dean of the UNI College of Business Administration from January 1996 to July 31, 1996.
In part one of a two-part article on issues related to justifying a proposed data warehouse project, Power states: "What is the return on investment for a proposed data warehouse project? What is the payback period? What is the opportunity cost? What are the anticipated benefits? What can we do with a data warehouse that we can't do with our current information systems? Do our competitors have a data warehouse? You may be asking these questions about a data warehouse DSS project. Are you receiving satisfactory answers? If you hesitated and said 'maybe' that is not surprising because justifying a data warehouse project can be very difficult. Why?"
PRE-DECISION SUPPORT
by Robert S. Seiner
Robert (Bob) S. Seiner is a Senior Consultant with Spectrum Technology Group, Inc. ( http://www.spectrumtech.com ) with over thirteen years of experience assisting companies in implementing automated solutions to solve technical and data related issues. Bob has lectured at several major conferences pertaining to Data Management and Data Warehousing in the past few years. In addition, Bob is also the publisher of an on-line newsletter titled The Data Administration Newsletter located on the Web at http://www.sgi.net/tdan
In this article, Seiner notes: "The industry of data warehousing has single-handedly raised the awareness of the need for corporate data management. Beyond data management, data warehousing has also raised the awareness of the need for meta data management and more precisely meta data that supports the data warehouse."
ACTION ITEMS
NCR Will Upgrade Teradata for OLAP & DM
NCR Corp. plans to turn its Teradata database into a turbocharger for OLAP
and data mining applications. Specifically, NCR is prepping a Teradata
upgrade that can take over pieces of the analysis calculations currently run
on separate online analytical processing (OLAP) and data mining servers. That
means data will no longer have to be pulled out of Teradata and reassembled
on other servers.
Informix Introduces Complete ROLAP Solution
with Informix MetaCube ROLAP Option 4.0
Informix Corporation, a leading provider of innovative database
technology, announced availability of MetaCube ROLAP Option 4.0 for the
Informix Dynamic Server, a complete relational on-line analytical processing
(ROLAP) solution that enables companies to improve the performance and
automated administration of data warehouse and data mart environments.
META Group Announces New Data Warehouse
Marketing Trends and Opportunities Report
META Group, Inc. has announced the availability of Data Warehouse
Marketing Trends/Opportunities, a comprehensive study of data warehouse
marketing trends and opportunities based on user data from more than 2,100
interviews with Global 3000 companies.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
"In most cases, warehouse end-users ask specific questions about
warehouse data that, if left unanswered, jeopardize the success of an
accepted decision support environment."
-- Robert S. Seiner, Senior Consultant, Spectrum Technology Group
D S * INFORMATION
D S * welcomes bylined comments for publication.All comments regarding editorial content should be sent to: dseditor@tgc.com