Leading executives, managers, and experts from SMBs and large enterprises share their insights and perspectives with bMighty on a host of IT issues, challenges, and opportunities that small and midsize businesses face.
The seeming simplicity of a term like business intelligence belies the rich potential that its implementation can provide to a smaller company. Data mining is the backbone of BI -- it means sorting through company data and identifying and extracting valuable information about operations. In a customer-centric business, the information can be particularly compelling. We turned to Gordon Linoff, a principal at Data Miners, to learn what data mining for BI can do for smaller businesses.
bMighty: Where do smaller companies fit into this BI picture?
Linoff: Well, it depends on their relationship with their customers. If they only have a handful of larger clients, they know them. But one of our clients, The Vermont Country Store, is a cataloguer that sends to several million people. The company has about 400 employees. How are 400 people going to know about several million people? They need to use the information they collect in order to better serve their customers and increase revenue. But there's not an overall approach because businesses are different and there are several different levels that businesses operate on. Some are campaign-driven to encourage customers to buy and [business intelligence helps] them optimize each campaign, and [some use] traditional predictive models associated with data mining, tailoring aspects of their Web sites to their customers or sending e-mails to their customers to return to their site.
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