Carefully making the most of your existing investments doesn't mean we're ambivalent about vendors. Steve Mong chairs the DW/BI SIG for the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) and offers the following input on Microsoft's analytic product line: 2005 Q4 Newsletter: Excel Data Mining Add-Ins (182 kb)
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE JOURNAL
Market ConsulTeks contributes to the Business Intelligence Journal (formerly the Journal of Data Warehousing.) Sponsored by The Data Warehousing Institute, this publication is an important resource for professionals dedicated to improving the relevancy of information flowing throughout enterprises. Business Intelligence: The Savvy Manager's Guide (182 kb)
Our Summer, 2003, review looks at David Loshin's attempts to summarize BI's benefits, tricks and traps from management's point of view. Internet-Enabled Business Intelligence (135 kb)
Our Spring, 2003, BI Journal book review examines William A. Giovinazzo's far-ranging take on deploying decision support systems via the net.
PRESENTATIONS
Since the early '90s, landmark work by McKinsey and others has stressed the impact of savvy pricing on a firm's operating profits. The following lecture was given to members of the AMA in mid-2003.
Pricing Tools and Techniques (1 mb)
Price management and optimization--once associated with airlines and hotels--are now key concerns for retailers, manufacturers and distributors. This presentation, co-authored with PriceWorks Corp., quantifies price management's benefits and shares industry success stories.
Enablers: Data warehousing, OLAP data marts, data mining + management science.
Market ConsulTeks' Steve Mong had the pleasure of giving the following presentations within INTERNET WORLD's CRM track.
CRM: How To Get Your Feet Wet Without Drowning (153 kb)
This presentation reviews statistics and forces underlying CRM implementations, examines the importance of corporate culture in pulling off these projects, then examines why 'CRM analytics' is so popular.
CRM: Building the Enterprise Customer Data Store (175 kb)
The money and effort required to get real-time customer data flowing throughout a company is daunting, but a hot topic for vendors. We believe system integration to be valuable, though real-time analytics much less so.
A case study focuses on Target's ZLE system, and illustrates how Acxiom's products are used to perform the very difficult task of linking customer records.
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OLAP SCREENSHOT
The screenshot displayed via the button below is an example of Online Analytical Reporting (OLAP). A linked graph and cross-tabular report are displayed. 'Slicing and dicing' performed on one would affect the other.
OLAP tools 'understand' hierarchies, correctly calculating average expenses, for example, up and down a detailed income statement. OLAP technology also provides period-over-period analysis to be performed without constantly asking for new reports from IT.
This screenshot illustrates a simple and inexpensive OLAP report created with Microsoft's "Data Access Page" technology. Such a solution is appropriate for reports distributed within a company (strict requirements need to be met by all browsers seeking access.) More sophisticated--and lenient--alternatives are available for companies needing to distribute information outside their firm for access by a variety of browsers over the internet.
