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With ever greater levels of complexity and functionality to database software upgrades, does the marketer really need such high- end applications to analyse records? David Reed reports
If your job is primarily computer-based, then chances are you spend most of your day using Microsoft Office. It has become the default productivity package for everything from word processing and spreadsheets to presentations and contact management.
With every new release of the application suite, features and functions are added. And every time this happens, the gap between its total functionality and the proportion of its capability used by the average worker widens. Expert users of every component are few. But expert users of specialist elements are many.
When it comes to database software, something of the same issue can be identified. Many organisations have taken the opportunity presented by customer-centric strategies to put in place enterprise- wide customer management systems. These include marketing databases and analytical packages that can deliver insight into those records. Yet these have not supplanted the high-end analytical software used by experts.
A shorthand for this type of deployment might be Siebel and SAS. The combination provides data everywhere and data mining capability in most places. But to really get to grips with what is happening, data analysts still demand sophisticated applications.
It presents a challenge to business owners and IT directors. Should they accept the doubling up and overlap that exists between broad application suites and narrow vertical software? Or can they argue that in the presence of one, the other is no longer needed?
Total DM managing director Andy Wood is evaluating database mining and management tools in exactly this context. "Where we reached our boundaries was with a European grocery retailer. We can deal perfectly happily using the tools we already have with 2 to 5 million customer records. But with 80 to 300 million transactional records, we have recognised a need," he says.
There is an important shift between analysing customer records to understand their profile, identify defining variables and apply segmentations to processing high-volume behavioural data to spot changes in buying patterns and event triggers. The nature of the tools required for the latter activity is more complex.
"Most of what a marketer wants to do can...