Rather than viewing OLAP, data mining, and other insight tools asseparate entities, the director sees them as parts of the analytic engine that a corporation places around its data warehousing environment. And the tools are running on some very high-end systems. The corporate visitors have included professionals from a large financial company. For three of thosedays, they got a sense of what various mining tools can do. Then they ran test cases against their data set.
Results are impressive.
They can take their own raw data, organize and analyze it, and then use different modeling techniques, such as customer-retention and lifetime value models. In looking at credit scoring at a large corporation, marketing executives saw new generation tools from SAS Institute and Unica. They are new generation in that they do not require a Ph.D in statistical analysis. Math and other axioms Dr. Carey is mindful, on the other hand, about how deceptively simple business intelligence software can be. There is no magic button in all this.