Knowledge Discovery Nuggets IndexKnowledge Discovery Nuggets IndexKnowledge Discovery Nuggets(tm) 98:6, e-mailed 98-03-15
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Date: Fri, 06 Mar 1998 10:09:01 -0500
From: 'Dr. Sreerama K. Murthy' murthy@scr.siemens.com
Subject: PC WEEK: Mining for intelligence without a shovel
It seems as if U.S. Intelligence forces will do anything to get enough data to prove that Iraq is making chemical weapons, including going to war. Companies seeking good data that will give them a competitive edge also have their battles to fight.
IBM's massive business intelligence announcements last week are meant to show that companies can arm themselves for battle. But before anyone gets carried away, there are a couple of fundamental questions everyone should ask: Who, exactly, stands to benefit from business intelligence tools, and will they even work?
"Business intelligence" is another of those randomly created terms that defines the set of tools and services for getting and analyzing data. Some analysts lump everything from spreadsheets to report writers into the BI market. But I'll take the high road on this one and narrow the field to higher-end products from OLAP to data mining tools.
Either way, BI is a humongous, multibillion-dollar market. IBM considers it one of the company's five major initiatives this year, right in there with year 2000, electronic commerce, big-iron servers and packaged enterprise resource planning applications.
Study them carefully, though, and you'll see that the IBM announcements are basically about a couple of upgraded tools and a few new services wrapped in a huge marketing blitz. The company, for example, will spend five to seven times more this year than last on marketing its BI wares.
The IBM announcements center on DecisionEdge, which is an IBM service program that deals with customer relationship marketing, and Discovery, which includes product announcements and additional services. Discovery itself is an umbrella term that covers IBM's Visual Warehouse and Data Miner products.
The only thing BI guarantees is the feeling that we're making the right decisions based on the data we have. |
It's safe to say that most companies have access to a large enough quantity of data to make reasonable business decisions. The data they have, however, may not be usable. Like trying to search for a particular phrase in a library of books, or a person in the phone book when all you have is a first name, the problem lies with the presentation of data--not the amount.
BI tools and services help filter information. IBM's Intelligent Miner, in particular, does an excellent job of sifting through and categorizing data into meaningful information. But there are a lot of interesting BI implications. The best solutions are enormously expensive, more than $10 million (including hardware and setup) for a big site. They are also very vertical, targeting specific industries such as the insurance and medical fields.
Can BI help you? For those industries, and particularly for the rest of us, the only thing BI guarantees is the feeling that we're making the right decisions based on the data we have. But there are other implications with BI. A kind of pecking order emerges as those who have access to data have all the power, regardless of whether they can make the right decision.
Carry that forward a little bit and the companies that have the best access to coherent data, in turn, have the most power.
That's just about where the real data mining business is. It's in the hands of the 500 most powerful companies in the country, those that can afford to spend half a million bucks on a departmentwide implementation.
Whether those companies can do anything with data is another story. CBS has incredibly rich historical and real-time data (much of it provided by IBM), and it couldn't put on a good Olympics show.
What about all the data that the United States is gathering on Iraq? Will it be put to good use? We shall see.