Data mining, data warehousing, decision support and knowledge discovery make up the universe of DSstar, the only executive business newsletter supporting strategic employment of these technologies.

The On-Line Executive Journal for Data-Intensive Decision Support
*** Aug 24, 1999: Vol. 3, No. 34 ***
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IN THIS ISSUE:

PART II OF DATA MINING AND ROI
ARE YOUR MODELS WORKING FOR OR AGAINST YOU?
WAL-MART DOUBLES ITS DATA WAREHOUSE


ANALYSIS & COMMENTARY


DATA MINING AND RETURN ON INVESTMENT (PART II)
By Ed Colet

Executive Editor-at-Large Inderpal Bhandari presents a guest editorial by Virtual Gold's Acting Director of Research:

Data mining tools will discover interesting patterns buried within the data and develop predictive models. These models will have various measures for indicating how well they fit the data. But quite often, it's not clear how to make a decision on the basis of some of the measures reported as part of data mining analyses. How does one interpret things such as support, confidence, lift, interestingness and other things in a practical way? As a result, there is often a disjoint between the output of an analysis and the decision-making considerations that follow. One way to narrow this gap is to cast data mining results into terms that the decision-maker (who is often not the analyst) can understand.


THE DATA WAREHOUSE ON S/390: PART 2
By Dan Graham, global strategy and operations executive, Global Business Intelligence Solutions, IBM;
and Malcolm Nolan, marketing manager, Business Intelligence, S/390, IBM

In our previous installment, we put forward the thesis that, because about 75 percent of warehouse data resides in mainframes, those mainframes could better leverage return on investment by serving the warehouse. Here we discuss growth.


SPECIAL REPORT: A SUCCESSFUL UNION BASED ON SHARED FACTS

As the direct marketing deity that is customer data becomes subject to increasingly frenzied worship, the cross-selling opportunities triggered by mergers are the obvious Holy Grail.


SURVEY - INVESTMENT SOFTWARE: BALANCING THE BOOKS

A recent survey by management consultants KPMG found that 95 per cent of models contained major errors which could affect decisions based on the result of the model - 59 per cent of models were judged to have poor model design. Considering just how widely models are used for analysis and forecasting, this is cause for concern.


REPORT SHOWS LITTLE CORRELATION BETWEEN CLICK RATES AND CONVERSION RATES; ONLINE MARKETERS NEED TO UNDERSTAND REAL DRIVERS OF BRAND AWARENESS

AdKnowledge has released its Q2 Online Advertising Report (OAR). This report is a compilation of Web advertising statistics and trend analyses gathered from the AdKnowledge System and analyzed by the new AdKnowledge eAnalytics division. Together, the AdKnowledge System and eAnalytics enable marketers and agencies to measure, optimize and execute Web marketing campaigns.


VISUAL MINING ANNOUNCES DECISION.CONTROL, THE FIRST CORPORATE DECISION PORTAL SOLUTION

The Decision.Control corporate decision portal gives users the power to search, create, manage, and present customized desktop views of information from corporate data stores without needing to understand data structures or learn new reporting tools. Decision.Control presents the information to users in real-time with dynamically generated charts, graphs, and reports, while allowing them to drill down or drill through the information to find the answers they need to make informed business decisions.


ACTION ITEMS


Sybase And SGI Partner To Deliver Targeted Strategic Business Analysis Solutions
In addition to vertical solutions, Sybase and SGI will jointly develop and optimize new 64-bit versions of Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE), Adaptive Server IQ (ASIQ) for SGI's IRIX operating system that will fully leverage SGI's ccNUMA (cache-coherent non-uniform memory access) architecture to provide ultimate performance and scalability for customers.


Business Objects And Owens & Minor Win TDWI Best Practices Award
The category covers organizations' innovative use of technology and web browsers to deliver information from data warehouses to solve business problems and improve customer service.


Tessera Enterprise Systems And The Polk Company Announce Strategic Partnership Revolutionizing The Relationship Management Capabilities Of The Automotive Industry
Tessera's longstanding success in building customer-centric data warehouses, data access environments and analytic capabilities combined with Polk's deep automotive experience and robust data resources create a powerful team able to provide high-value, action-oriented solutions to automotive manufacturers.


SPSS Inc. And American Century Investments Win 1999 RealWare Award; Data Mining Leader's Analytical Solution Transforms Financial Giant's Customer Relationship Management System
The award was granted based on ACI's implementation of a closed-loop decision support system designed with SPSS products. ACI secured a competitive edge by using SPSS and Clementine software to transform previous customer insight into actionable decision-making information.


ShowCase Corporation Provides Infinium Customers With Quick-Start Template For Smarter Financial Analysis Of Enterprise AS/400 Data
Responding to market demand for a fast, effective financial data mart solution, ShowCase Corporation has announced that its Financial Analysis Deployment Accelerator now supports Infinium Software's transaction systems.


SCO, Compaq And Oracle Drive Reseller And Distribution Program For Packaged Internet Database Solutions
As the result of a recently formed SCO Division within Oracle, SCO and Oracle have launched a new program to penetrate the reseller channel with UnixWare 7 and Oracle8i, the industry's only Internet database, on Compaq ProLiant Servers.


NCR More Than Doubles Data Warehouse For World's Leading Retailer To Over 100 Terabytes
At a meeting with more than 4,000 representatives of the company's merchandise suppliers, Wal-Mart said its system, which has more than twice the capacity of the next largest Fortune 500 data warehouse, has grown from 44 terabytes to 101 terabytes over the past year.


Clinton Sets Up Group To Datamine For Illegal Internet Activity
The US President issued an executive order calling for agencies to set up the working group, which will be responsible for issuing a report and offering recommendations on how to use existing laws and technology to aid in the detection, investigation and prosecution of criminal acts conducted over the Internet.


Ardent Software Speeds The Deployment Of Business Intelligence And Analytical Applications For SAP Users
Ardent's DataStage Extract PACK for SAP R/3 enables users to extract data directly from SAP R/3 systems natively and integrate it with data from other sources, leveraging the powerful visual design process of DataStage for modeling and deploying source-to-target transformations and loads.


QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"When companies merge, there can be difficulties with establishing the definition of a customer. One of our clients has more than 20 definitions of a customer in its enterprise data warehouse." business development manager, Harte-Hanks


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