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Poised at the edge of another year, decade, century, and millennium, it’s once again time to straddle the temporal seesaw, reflect on the recent past, and project a bit into the future. As tempting as it may be to point to the convergence of all these temporal cycles and predict massive upheaval in the year to come, I suspect that beyond some Y2K disturbances — including possible manifestations of the Crouch-Echlin Time Dilation Effect (see Resources) — and a few hangovers, we’ll reconvene largely intact in the new millennium.
Looking back on 1999, the world of decision support was most influenced by:
•The letter e (and I don’t mean the limit, as x approaches infinity, of the expression [1+(1/x)]x )
•Searching for words (that is, text processing and its derivative markets)
•Oneness (or DSS fusion).
This is a very short installment, so I will only touch on the major highlights and point interested readers to a variety of Web sites.
The LetterE
I have mixed feelings about this buzzword-laden “e-volution” we’re all experiencing. Beyond the fact that nearly every noun in the English language has an e-form to it (including e-business, e-knowledge, e-business intelligence, e-customer, e-pets, e-trade, e-scam, e-profits — and the e-losses of all those EPOs — to name a few), the e-voluton is more of an e-frastructure than an e-solution or technology. The benefits come from combining transaction and decision-support systems within an e-framework. Ultimately, the e-world is just another channel. Sometimes the customers walk in, sometimes they call on the phone, and sometimes they order on the Web.
On the plus side, e lets companies create personalized relationships with otherwise anonymous customers. Companies such as Net.Genesis and Younology are working to analyze clickstream data and combine it with offline data, which may comprise lifestyle segmentation, demographic, and internal company data, in order to cluster and analyze e-purchasing behavior. Some people, for example, behave differently online than in person. Companies also want to track status changes, such as when people who were previously just browsers become customers. Of course, the key analytical technologies are still data mining, visualization, and online analytical processing (OLAP).
Also on the plus side, e enables companies to automate business-to-business exchanges along supply chains more easily. Here again, companies such as Business Objects are building extranets affecting inventory management. And the likes of Syncra offer supply-chain collaborative planning software. Here again, as convenient as the e-medium is, the inventory planning is the real application.
On the down side, and at the risk of sounding old fashioned, I do not want to see e-relationships replacing time-honored personal relationships. E-relationships can be de-personalizing. (People who surf the Net to the exclusion of personal relationships tend to suffer from depression.) Email and e-commerce are great for enhancing relationships and allowing people to keep in touch, get a message across, or order goods and services. But they should not replace personal contacts. Society is still based on trust.
Searching for Words
As I stated in previous columns, it was inevitable that text would begin entering the mainstream of decision support. Although it’s still esoteric, more and more companies are realizing that, because most of their data is in textual form, it is crucial to leverage that information. The past year has seen the growth of several text-based application niches, such as portals (which I discussed in “Through the Looking Glass,” Sept. 14), knowledge communities, and personal assistants.
Knowledge communities are attempts to build repositories of useful information through the contributions of an organization’s workers. Orbital Software, for instance, attempts to track intra-company questions and answers so as to leverage resident experts better. The idea is to capture their knowledge on a topic the first time it’s tapped, thereafter pointing people with the same question to the electronic repository. MineShare and the like incite individuals to publish their own analyses in a way that makes them available to a wider audience.
Personal assistants are popping up everywhere. Typically they help either with organizing information (Enfish Technology Inc.’s Enfish Tracker, for example) or with finding it (ImaginOn Inc.’s WebZinger, for instance). In either event, they rely on text engines.
Oneness, or DSS Fusion
It’s encouraging to see the integration of mining and OLAP on the rise. Companies such as Maximal are integrating data mining within a visual OLAP framework for data exploration and analysis. Oracle acquired Thinking Machines and will likely integrate the OLAP capabilities of Express in an upcoming generation. Microsoft, which entered the DSS space with a splash this year on the release of Microsoft OLAP Services, is also interested in the integration of mining, OLAP, and knowledge management. Even such companies as Hummingbird, which were traditionally in the numbers space, are now offering text search engines as well.
I am also pleased to announce the formation of the Analytical Solutions Forum, a nonprofit industry consortium of which I am currently the chair. Its founding members include the industry’s leading vendors of decision-support applications, and its mission is to establish solution-oriented performance criteria and interoperability requirements within and between classes of decision-support tools (including but not limited to OLAP, data mining, data visualization, text processing, and decision analysis).
The key initiatives for the Analytical Solutions Forum will be accomplished through special interest groups (SIG’s) that are open to any ASF member. There are currently three ASF SIGs: a Benchmark SIG, a Conformance SIG, and a DSS Interoperability SIG. End users will be brought in next year.
Of note, Intel joined as one of the ASF’s founding members. I suspect that with its upcoming generation of 64-bit “Itanium” processors, Intel wants to support solutions that actually require that much horsepower. And, of course, few applications are as power-hungry as a large-scale, integrated DSS application with dynamic calculations, background data mining, and high-end data visualization.
Although I didn’t see any really new technology this year (we’re all still waiting for quantum computers), the trends that I mentioned will all affect us in the year to come. If we can use e-channels appropriately, integrate text engines within an overall DSS architecture, and provide for interoperability between DSS components, we may actually learn a few things about all this data we’re collecting and make better decisions — without losing our humanity. Happy new year!
Erik Thomsen (ethomsen@dsslab.com) is an author, lecturer, researcher, and consultant focusing on OLAP and decision-support applications. He chairs the Analytical Solutions Forum and cofounded the Decision Support Laboratory in Cambridge, Mass.
RESOURCES
Analytical Solutions Forum: www.tasf.org |
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