Interview

3) What is your typical daily schedule?

Well we have offices in Silicon Valley and Alley, with me working out of the West Coast, so my days start with catching up on what has been happening in the New York office. This typically means sorting through e-mail, voice mail, attachments, analyses, client reports, etc., all the type of digital communications an e-business today generates. In between e-mail and conference calls, I write, however I always have to be available to talk to clients or team members in both offices. When writing a book and articles there are no weekends, luckily with a notebook, wireless modem and cell phone I can still catch my daughter�s volleyball games and stay connected to everybody including nervous editors and publishers. I do quite a bit of traveling between the Bay Area and New York; I also visit clients all around the country and this year I made presentations in Canada, Europe, South America, and the US.

4) You used to teach web mining seminars. Tell us some interesting or surprising stories you hear from your attendees.

Well, we got out of the business of web mining seminars; we found that most of the individuals attending our WebMiner Camps tended to be vendors and consultants, in other words, our competitors. Although I still participate in conferences and panels I no longer do tutorials. One of the most surprising stories is of a VP of very large IT related company with hundreds of Internet servers. He came up to me after a session and told me that his company had just bought a large eCRM system, the kind that cost half a million dollars. Anyway his problem was that he did not know what it did, what data mining technology it used, what kind of analytics it performed, or how to use it. I think that back in 1999 and early 2000 people were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on e-commerce suites, with little consideration for ROI. Today, of course unless you can demonstrate a clear ROI and profits you are not likely to make it or survive. By the way, I recently got a call from this VP informing me that he was available and was sending me his resume, his company apparently was downsizing its e- business operations from 125 workers down to 4.

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