Data mining, data warehousing, decision support and knowledge discovery make up the universe of D S * ( dsstar ), the only executive business newsletter supporting strategic employment of these technologies.

The On-Line Executive Journal for Data-Intensive Decision Support
*** August 18, 1998: Vol. 2, No. 33 ***
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IN THIS ISSUE:

DATA MINING: IT ISN'T CHESS
BY ZAK PINES
MINESET'S DATA VISUALIZATION AT PROCTER & GAMBLE
BY DANIEL STEVENS
WEB-BASED DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS
BY D.J. POWER

ANALYSIS & COMMENTARY

DATA MINING: IT'S NOT CHESS
by Zak Pines

This week, executive editor at large Inderpal Bhandari presents a guest column by Zak Pines, a member of Dr. Bhandari's research team for four years. He played a key role in developing IBM's Advanced Scout data mining program and is currently employed by Dr. Bhandari's data mining company, Virtual Gold. When he isn't mining sports data, Mr. Pines can be found at Yale University, where he is entering his junior year as an economics major. Mr. Pines' coverage of the Yale football and basketball teams can be read in the Yale Daily News ( http://www.yale.edu/ydn ) and heard on game broadcasts on WYBC 94.3 FM ( http://wybc.com ).

Pines writes: "When Bruce Springstein sang of the human touch, I'm sure he wasn't referring to business intelligence. But, as I will show you, the Boss's words ring true when it comes to data mining. Mining a business's data -- whether that business is a basketball team or an insurance company -- is very different from using a data crunching system to win a chess match."

MINESET'S DATA VISUALIZATION ENHANCES CLINICAL STUDIES AT PROCTER & GAMBLE
by Daniel Stevens

Daniel Stevens is a scientist for the Healthcare Research Center at Procter & Gamble. This is a report documenting his product review, which was originally published in DM Review Magazine. The hardware architecture considered here consists of Indigo, O2 and Octane workstations, buttressed by a 16-CPU (Central Processing Unit) Origin 2000 server on the back end. Procter & Gamble over-the-counter and pharmaceutical health care products are developed at the Healthcare Research Center outside Cincinnati, Ohio. Founded in 1837, Procter & Gamble is one of the world's largest consumer products manufacturers, with worldwide sales of $35.8 billion.

WEB-BASED DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS: 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 the first article of a two-part series Power writes: "The World-Wide Web is where the action is in developing enterprise-wide decision support systems. When vendors propose a Web-based DSS they are refering to a computerized system that delivers decision support information or decision support tools to a manager or business analyst using a 'thin-client' Web browser like Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer. The computer server that is hosting the DSS application is linked to the user's computer by a network with the TCP/IP protocol. In many companies, a Web-based DSS is synonymous with an enterprise-wide DSS that is supporting large groups of managers in a networked client-server environment with a specialized data warehouse as part of the DSS architecture."

ACTION ITEMS

CA Details Neural Agent for Predictive Management
Computer Associates (CA) has offered more details about predictive technology that will be included in its Unicenter TNG management platform later this year. Yogesh Gupta, senior vice president for product strategy, said in a keynote address at the Enterprise Management Summit that the technology will be able to build complex, three-dimensional models of past events and predict faults without being instructed specifically to look for them.

Decisive Technology Delivers Real-Time Customer Intelligence Business Solutions
Decisive Technology, a pioneer provider of Real-Time Customer Intelligence, has announced that it has realigned its business to capitalize on the growing demand for individualized outsourced solutions that integrate customer intelligence into the daily decision-making process. Decisive offers a tailored, Internet-centric software and services solution designed to arm companies with continuous customer feedback that is essential for success in today's competitive environment.

MIS AG Announces Software that Automates and Enhances Business-Intelligence Methods
The German software-solutions company MIS AG has announced its award-winning MIS DeltaMiner, a business-research tool using state-of-the-art data-mining technology and integrated business-intelligence methodologies. Imitating human investigative techniques, MIS DeltaMiner explains deviations, detects compensations, and significantly simplifies the navigation of OLAP databases.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"The need for a domain expert coupled with a data mining program should not be viewed as a hindrance but instead as a golden opportunity."

• Zak Pines

CONFERENCES & SEMINARS 08.18.98

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