Data Warehousing: all the latest products, ideas, solutions
Making the most of your customers

by Nigel Cummings

Today's business managers know that in order to compete more effectively their organisations must become more customer-centric, and thus Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has become a hot topic in Data Warehousing circles. The exhibitors at Data Warehousing 98, held at Olympia in London, seemed determined to cover every possible area of CRM. Stands from the likes of IBM, Data General, Oracle, NCR, and Pricewaterhouse Coopers, provided a united front in their display and demonstration of CRM, associating and incorporating it into the latest Data Warehousing architectures, methodologies, infrastructures, applications and technologies.

While the purpose of this feature is to provide a report on Data Warehousing 98, it is perhaps necessary to spend a few column inches discussing CRM.

In enterprise-speak it would appear that there is nothing hotter than CRM. Understanding customer behaviour, analysing customer loyalty and identifying the most valuable customers, have become the key corporate goals in recent years. Data Warehousing has provided the means as the chief enabler of the enterprise's quest to become customer-centric - a move away from the more traditional product-centric approach.

From a corporate perspective, few departments are immune to the cultural and technological changes involved in the CRM philosophy. We are all customers, and we all complete some form of transaction at some time, thus we are contributing to our suppliers' data warehouses and giving them the means to identify and exploit their most valuable customers with increasingly focused marketing and sales strategies. CRM has become one of the major drivers of the data warehousing market; CRM also brings inter-departmental divides into focus. Indeed CRM has highlighted the chasm between the IT and customer. (Customers can be extremely IT phobic)

In December 1997, the SAS Institute commissioned the Harris Research Centre to gauge attitudes to CRM decision support systems. Of 100 corporate respondents, 44% said they were concerned their IT managers didn't understand enough about these systems.

With increasing levels of sophistication in this technology offering the potential for users to segment data into more and more focused sets, as far down as one-to-one marketing, there is a danger that it will be used to paper over internal cracks within the enterprise.

CRM will only work if the data is of consistent quality across the enterprise and if corporate culture encourages the exploitation of data. These requirements form a challenge for any organisation moving into the CRM arena. According to Linda Saul, SAS Institute's CRM programme manager: "CRM is founded on understanding your customers and that, in turn, is founded on customer data."

"So a data warehouse is essential to any company which is drawing on its customer data resources. And the data comes from a variety of very different sources: customer services, transactions and so on. Organisations need to sort it out at a fundamental level which incorporates everything from call centre and transaction data to information gathered through loyalty schemes."

Linda Saul also believes that: "As a strategy, CRM must be initiated at the highest level and permeate all the way down the organisation."

Recognising that customer data is a company's lifeblood is only the first step. The integration of the data resources, the delivery mechanisms and the maintenance of the warehouse must also be accounted for in CRM project planning. IT vendors have a clear vision of how organisations should adopt products to support CRM, but it must be stressed that technology alone is not the answer.

Professor Robert Shaw, Cranfield Business School and speaker at this year's Data Warehousing 98, felt that: "Too many CRM projects falter because people don't realise the radical nature of customer information centralisation." He also thought that: "Management often has crazy expectations of CRM projects. Most companies are either generally unaware of research conducted by individual departments or are so unskilled that they don't know how to use it, and this leads to some foolhardy projects costing many millions of pounds."

On a more encouraging note Professor Shaw thought the marketing community had become more aware that the basis for good measurement of customer information is often in place, but too often projects are carried out in isolation. Suggestions are all too common whereby research by one department is ignored by the project sponsors who chiefly concern themselves with spending their budget rather than analysing the real benefits of their methodologies.

Professor Shaw observed that: "There are armies of consultants on the BPRE (business process re-engineering) bandwagon who advocate a cut-and-paste approach to generic processes like enquiry management. But the key to CRM success lies at a terribly detailed level."

"You have to be specific about what goes into the warehouse. Off-the-shelf processes will never succeed. This is an issue which needs forcing by across-the-business parties so that there is genuine commonality to input processes and enquiry activities." Professor Shaw thinks investment in technology is important, but every CRM initiative is peculiar to that particular organisation. This is no place for copycat implementation. "Don't do the dumb thing of copying what your neighbour is doing, because the chances are it will turn out to be at least as dumb!"

One of the stands I visited at Data Warehousing 98 was that of Leonard's Logic, the company behind Genio, an enterprise tool which manages information supply chain and metadata. Leonard's Logic had recently implemented Genio for British Midland who had then used Genio to solve their own specific enterprise data problems.

Initially British Midland, the UK's second largest scheduled service airline, adopted Genio for handling the exchange of data between normally incompatible Oracle and Essbase databases. In the future the company will use Genio as a strategic, enterprise-wide application, which is also to be used with numerous other information systems, as well as providing a crucial 'data-ageing' solution in the airline's Year 2000 compliance preparations.

Graham Rhodes, Applications Development Manager at British Midland said, "Genio meets all our requirements in moving data across systems, eliminating the need for someone to do it manually using complex code, which very few people understand. It is simply a much more user-friendly and cost-effective solution. It opens up corporate data to many more employees, and has the flexibility to cope with all our systems, now and in the future."

Like most large organisations, British Midland's IT systems have grown and multiplied over the years to encompass a wide variety of databases in which vast amounts of business-critical data have been amassed. Indeed British Midland was faced with the all too familiar problem of managing data stored in multiple, incompatible systems, where it could not easily be accessed and used effectively.

Graham Rhodes added, "We regard Genio as a standard enterprise data solution, and based on the results of our trials - carried out over the last six months - we have been very impressed. We are discovering new applications for it all the time, including tackling the Year 2000 issue, which is obviously a major priority for everyone right now."

For more information on Genio please contact Leonard's Logic on 01344 382182, or browse their website at http://www.leologic.com.

Hyperion Software were displaying Hyperion Enterprise, an application for financial consolidation and management reporting, Hyperion Pillar, an application for enterprise-wide budgeting, and Hyperion Essbase, an award winning open, scalable OLAP server

The August 1998 issue of this Newsletter carried an article about OLAP (On Line Analytical Programming). It was shown at this time that OLAP offered significant benefits in the Fast Analysis of Shared Multidimensional Information (FASMI). Recently the OLAP Report (www.olapreport.com) stated that Hyperion had become a market leader in the application of OLAP, possessing a 24.7 percent share of the 1997 OLAP market, 4 points above the closest competitor, Oracle.

The OLAP Report developed the ranking for Hyperion Solutions through a combination of the previous rankings for Hyperion Software and Arbor Software. The two companies merged on August 24, 1998 to form Hyperion Solutions. According to the OLAP Report, the OLAP market totalled $1.4 billion in 1997 and should near $2.0 billion in 1998.

Prior to the launch of Hyperion Solutions, The OLAP Report had predicted that no single vendor would dominate the OLAP market within the next two years. The latest edition of the OLAP Report ranks Hyperion Solutions as the dominant player. Nigel Pendse, one of the OLAP Report's co-authors said: "If Hyperion manages the merger correctly and maintains focus, it will dominate both the OLAP and analytical application software sectors," More information about Hyperion can be obtained from Hyperion Solutions on 01344 664000.

Next stop was the Neural Networks Group, whose message was "Making data make money." This company's Knowledge Miner was being highlighted as essential software to make sense of the selected data and to design the models required by clients. Due to the immense storage capacity of databases, it is impossible to effectively use all the stored data by simply searching individual records. Neural networks enable the exploration of complex relationships that exist in corporate databases. By analysing these relationships, models can be designed to assist forecasting and planning.

Knowledge Miner was of interest to me because it displayed some unique features, which had been developed in-house. In use Knowledge Miner was shown to be extremely quick in training and very accurate in forecasting. It was also claimed that the Neural Networks Group's software will allow consultants to train networks without the supervision required with traditional neural networks.

The Neural Networks Group can be contacted on: 0171 580 6690 or http://www.mccann.com

Sybase were exhibiting their product line-up and also broadcasting the message that 'Data Warehouses Must Not Dictate The Business Model'. Sybase agree that Data Warehousing is intended to provide a means to make the information assets of an enterprise readily accessible and available for use by key decision-makers. However, according to Sybase, in the rush to 'deliver the goods', long term planning for data management - constructing effective links between operational systems and data warehouses, and a strategy for managing the inevitable proliferation of data marts - is often overlooked. Because of this, Sybase believes, many data warehouse projects fail to meet their original business objectives.

"All to often data warehouses dictate the business model, rather than fit it," said Jon Farley, Business Development Manager for Data Warehousing, Sybase UK. "The key to achieving return on investment is to ensure that an effective architecture is in place. Such an architecture should facilitate the creation of a data resource that is accurate, reliable, shareable, easily accessible throughout the enterprise, and easy to adapt, manage and maintain."

As well as their crusade, Sybase also had time to preview 'Sybase Warehouse Studio', a new integrated product set which covers all the activities of the data warehousing lifecycle - design, integration, management, administration and visualisation. Sybase Warehouse Studio was said to increase the value of data warehouse-based business solutions by providing reduced total cost of ownership and faster time to deployment, with features including:

• a comprehensive product set delivered and supported by a single vendor, centrally installed, interoperability tested and metadata driven to enable organisations to think globally and act locally
• intuitive development tools to accelerate deployment, coupled with high performance data management technologies to process information requests up to 100 times faster than other solutions
• centralisation of data processing as appropriate, and offering business users the opportunity to ask "anything from anywhere."

Users are further assisted by Sybase Warehouse Studio automating the creation of semantic layers for end user business intelligence tools such as Cognos Impromptu and Business Objects.

More information about Sybase can be obtained on: 01628 597100. The company's Web address is http://www.sybase.com.

Seagate Software presented a white paper on 'Enterprise Information Management', effectively putting forward a vision to 'consolidate corporate information, analysis tools, and delivery infrastructures throughout the enterprise'. More on this will be reported at a later date. The company also had time to unveil Seagate Crystal Reports 7, an all new version of the world's most widely used reporting tool. Seagate Crystal Reports 7 is said to 're-define' reporting with ad hoc query and report creation over the Web, interactive geographic mapping, legacy report conversion, and powerful report integration for developers.

David Brocklebank, Seagate Software's marketing director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, had this to say: "Data is only valuable if it can be turned into decision-making information, and reporting - as the key medium for interpreting business data - plays a mission critical role in any business or corporation. Version 7 of Seagate Crystal Reports extends the value of business data for all users in an organisation and reinforces our commitment to provide the best reporting solution on the market."

More information about Seagate Software can be obtained on: 0181 566 2330.

Finally I stopped by at the BRIO stand to find out more about their Enterprise Software Suite. Apparently this new product enables end-users to report from and analyse information held in data warehouses and data marts. Its Brio Query range of tools provide the full spectrum of OLAP functionality to client/server platforms. Brio Insight and Brio Quickview deliver similar capabilities to web users, whilst the Brio Enterprise Server combines full-featured Web-enabled OLAP - a big reason for customers to invest in Brio solutions. Brio Technology can be contacted on: 0181 569 8999.

Data Warehousing 98 proved to be an excellent showcase for the latest applications and solutions. The interest in CRM was clearly intense; overall there could have been no clearer representation of Business Intelligence, the need for quality rather than quantity of data, and the application of such intelligence across the entire enterprise.

Before concluding this report, special mention must be given to Data Warehousing 98's Seminar programme. Nearly forty seminars took place over the two day event. The seminars were hosted by such companies as Cognos, Red Brick, IBM UK, NCR, Sequent, SAS Institute and Seagate Software. A great deal of interest was shown in these seminars, which added terrific value to the overall proceedings.

DATA WAREHOUSING 98 was organised by Business Intelligence of Wimbledon (0181 879 3300) and sponsored by the SAS Institute (01628 486933) and Data Warehouse Network (01829 741453).

First published to members of the Operational Research Society in OR Newsletter January 1999