Hi Wiz,
You are absolutely right when you say "Data Warehousing is going to be the hottest thing on the planet", when people were migrating from flat files "Cobol, Fortran and proprietary languages" to RDBMS based languages. RDBMS languages like Oracle, Sybase and Informix where the hottest things on earth then.
Now that most organizations have migrated, or in the process of migrating, to RDBMS applications, these firms like Financial, Insurance, Telco's, Government etc.. Have acquired so much of data about their customer's life, spending, saving etc..habits, that they can make a lot of use of and turn these customers to their advantage, by showing them that they know them better and offer them the services they really need.
This is where DW comes to picture.. A simple, non-relevant maybe, example.. One of the Internet supermarkets in the US is building a DW about their customer's shopping habits and trends. By doing this, and after building a sale transaction history, they know the daily, weekly and monthly consumption of my house in individual items (groceries) like soap, toilet paper, Cooking Oil veg.s etc.. And they can proactively call their customers and inform them about what they are running out of.
On the other hand, Data Mining a derivative of DW a good example for that would be, lets say I want to do a search on "Cancun Special Offers" on the web right now, I will probably get 500 hits with only 2% relevant sites, the problem is that I will have to research all the hits.. With Data Mining It is an intelligent tool/utility that will allow you to get intelligent answers based on preset criteria's.. It is very useful for identifying and filtering names and subjects etc..
If FNTN is in the process of developing or establishing something in these lines at their BackOffice, then you can be assured that this is not something that can be done in a week or two.. It took companies like AT&T, American Airline, Lucent, Wal-Mart, Kmart etc.. From 1 to several years to have it up and running then to start collecting the data required to make it work..
I remember we discussed this issue sometimes last year. My guess is if FNTN has started developing something like this they probably be finished with it by now.
I can already smell the meal being roasted on a slow fire (with our threads Famous Tomato sauce) , will be in a better position to taste or eat in the week(s) to come.
Best regards to all
TMK |
