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
*** September 22, 1998: Vol. 2, No. 38 ***
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IN THIS ISSUE:

INDERPAL BHANDARI LOOKS AT THE PITFALLS OF CUSTOMER RELATIONS MANAGEMENT
BENEFITS ANALYSIS FOR HEALTHCARE: PART II
BY SID ADELMAN
PAMG CONSIDERS MISSION-CRITICAL DW/DS SYSTEMS

ANALYSIS & COMMENTARY

PROFITABILITY CONSIDERATIONS IN CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT
by Inderpal Bhandari, executive editor at large

Inderpal Bhandari is widely recognized as a leading researcher in data mining and computer science. He is one of the few experts who have successfully demonstrated how the emerging technology of data mining can be translated into useful applications that offer a competitive advantage. Recently, he formed Virtual Gold, Inc. to implement his technical vision. Virtual Gold also offers a consulting service to help clients differentiate themselves from their competitors via the use of data mining technology.

From 1990-1997, Dr. Bhandari was a member of the research staff at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, where he received several awards for his pioneering work in data mining and in software engineering. He was the creator and project director of IBM's Advanced Scout, a data mining program used extensively by coaches of the National Basketball Association to devise new strategies based on the automatic identification of hidden patterns in game data and video.

He was educated at Carnegie Mellon University (Ph.D, Electrical & Computer Engineering, 1990), the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (M.S.) and the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India (B.Engg). He has published extensively in leading computer-related journals and conferences and has deployed several cutting-edge technological solutions to business problems.

Dr. Bhandari writes: "We all know that the customer is always right. But how do we know if we have the right customer? That, in a nutshell, is what customer relationship management is all about. CRM is the latest twist in the evolution of database marketing techniques. The emergence of large on-line databases led to the targeting of customers -- specific products were pitched to the specific customers most likely to purchase those products. Such targeting -- while quite effective as a mechanism to increase sales -- did not necessarily translate to profit as explained below."

BENEFITS ANALYSIS FOR HEALTH CARE: PART II
by Sid Adelman

Sid Adelman is President of Sid Adelman & Associates, a Sherman Oaks, California based consulting firm specializing in data warehouse and strategic data architecture. He co-authored a methodology and project planning tool tailored for data warehouses. Sid is an international speaker at data warehouse and industry conferences. He has written a number of articles on data warehouse and has chapters on data quality and organizational and cultural issues in Data Warehouse: A Practical Guide from the Experts. Readers may find that Adelman's two-part analysis has much relevance for industries other than healthcare.

The first part of this commentary may be retrieved as D S * article 100300 .

DATA WAREHOUSES/DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS GO MISSION-CRITICAL

According to a recent survey of data warehouse users conducted by Palo Alto Management Group, Inc. (PAMG), data warehouse/decision support based applications are rapidly becoming mission-critical. Respondents to the survey were presented with a list of nearly 25 system purchase criteria and asked to rate the importance of each one. Three out of the top five choices were items that are normally associated with "can't fail" applications.

ORACLE INTROS INTERNET-CENTRIC DATABASE

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who owes the explosion of client/server computing for much of his company's success, now states that the architecture is all but dead. In its place, said Ellison, is computing built for the Internet.

MICROSOFT AND COMPAQ ANNOUNCE ENTERPRISE DATA CENTER INITIATIVE

Compaq Computer Corporation and Microsoft Corporation have unveiled their initiative to propel the Microsoft Windows NT Server operating system into a premier role in the enterprise data center. The companies announced an initiative that will continue to provide customers with the cost-effectiveness and ease-of-use of Windows NT in addition to the advanced clustering, OLTP scalability and robustness of Compaq's best data-center technologies. The results of this work will be incorporated into future releases of Windows NT, and will be broadly and openly licensed to the industry.

ACTION ITEMS

NCR Invests in Merchandising Solutions for Data Warehousing to Enable Retailers to Forecast Consumer Demand by Store
In an aggressive move to further expand its data warehouse solutions for retailers, NCR Corporation today announced it is buying 50 percent of Stirling Douglas Group, Inc. (SDG), a privately-held software firm based near Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Terms of the cash transaction were not disclosed. SDG's Profit Series is a best-in-class suite of applications for high performance merchandise forecasting, planning and automated replenishment, designed to maximize the value of a retailer's data warehouse.

IBM RS/6000 SP Posts New Business Intelligence Benchmark (TPC-D) Results
The RS/6000 SP, configured with IBM's award-winning AIX operating system, DB2 Universal Database Enterprise-Extended Edition, and IBM's Serial Storage Architecture disk technology, set record-breaking Transaction Processing Council (TPC-D) benchmarks on August 17, 1998, for a 300GB database using IBM's new 332 MHz SMP nodes.

Data Warehousing, Vital Tool for R&D Management
If you run an R&D operation, chances are you're drowning in data. Data warehousing can systematically conserve corporate knowledge, and integrate business, technology, client and regulatory data for efficient retrieval by decision support systems and executive information systems.

Church & Dwight Simultaneously Deploys SAP R/3 and Data Warehouse Using ActaLink for SAP
Acta Technology, a leading provider of data warehousing solutions for packaged applications, has announced that Church & Dwight Co., Inc., better known for products it develops and markets under the historic Arm & Hammer brand, has simultaneously completed an enterprise-wide deployment of both SAP R/3 and a crucial sales data warehouse built with ActaLink for SAP. ActaLink is enabling Church & Dwight to extract data from SAP and non-SAP sources, transform and cleanse the data, and load it into a data warehouse for strategic business analysis.

Innovest Strategic Value Advisors Launches Ecovalue '21 Platform
Innovest Strategic Value Advisors Inc. has announced that it has launched EcoVALUE '21, a set of proprietary investment decision-support tools that assist financiers and investors to evaluate the financial implications of companies'environmentally-driven risk and opportunities.

Prism Introduces End-to-End Solution for SAP Data Migration and Data Quality
Prism Solutions, Inc., a leading provider of solutions to deliver business intelligence applications, has introduced its end-to-end solution to help customers extend the functionality of SAP R/3 in data migration and data quality management.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"Analysts today spend between 50% and 90% of their time gathering data; the remaining time is spent actually performing the analysis."

• Sid Adelman

CONFERENCES & SEMINARS 09.22.98

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