BI Blogs

In the first session early on Sunday morning, I participated in a workshop lead by Ron Swift on Enhancing the Value of your Data Warehousing Solutions. The focus is on defining value to the business and, in particular, creating and perceiving that value in the DW.

Ron Swift of Teradata: Given the dramatic downturn in global economy, it is more important to define tangible business value from your data warehouse. Ponder…What is value in your company? Good discussion of the interplay of revenue and cost over a variety of business functions. Example of top railroad companies using DW to reduce costs, along with ‘going green’.

Al Corsino of BAYER Corporation: Toward a unified data environment when moving all kinds of business data into SAP. Goals are: Data in one place, comprehensive, invisible app boundaries, enhanced across functional, high performance. Each business unit within Bayer is different; Each project to integrate that data is different. Bayer used Teradata DW as the staging platform for SAP, enabling correction of thousands of errors, hundreds of hours of rework, doing rapid report creation. Highlighted many issues not discovered previously.

Sonja Betschart of Touring Club of Switzerland: 1.6 M members, 1,200 employees, 50% market share, like AAA in US. Focus is CRM as rational (technical) versus emotional (human side). What you want is active customer satisfaction. Started an emotional branding program through perceived value by customers and behavior processes with customers. Supported by DW with 9 subject areas, 372 tables, 3 languages. Was organized as segmented functions that did not coordinate interactions with customers. Now all interactions are coordinated. Begin small and plan for big volumes. In one case, they increased return rate of a marketing campaign from 2.4% to 4.8%. And in a second case, a campaign follow-up changed from 20% buy-rate (and lack of information on why the 80% did not buy) to 40-50% (with knowledge of why the rest did not buy). Over time they will understand their customers better.

Daniela Tolentino Calaes of VIVO Mobile of Brazil: They have 42M mobile customers. Their DW is 78TB (growing to 100TB next year). VIVO has acquired six companies, whose data has been integrated via the DW covering most of their business on the DW: cust mgt, rev assurance, campaign mgt, etc. She covered several cases: consolidated reporting, revenue assurance, bad debt management, customer segmentation, direct marketing, churn management, and network planning. I was impressed by the variety of value impacts at VIVO.

Richard Hackathorn of Bolder Technology: The best talk of all – NOT! Summarized several case studies on active DW, emphasizing common theme, lesson learned, and benefits realized.

Ron summarized by explaining why you should understand your management’s perspective and focus on business value from their perspective. He suggested, “Tell stories! …not describe the technology” and gave a list of practical suggestions. Mentioned the Teradata EDW Roadmap for your BI infrastructure, which can be view top-down (business to technical) and bottom-up (technical to business). List of various resources (whitepapers, case studies).

This was a great session that showed clear examples of business value from data warehousing. The bottom line is that IT professionals must be business-smart, constantly thinking about efficiency and, especially, effectiveness of information derived from the EDW.

[Blog stream from the Teradata Partners Conference is here.]