Overview

An interesting aspect of the business intelligence (BI) process is that although to a large degree it relies on relatively well-defined methods, architectures, and techniques, much of the success of a BI program stems from insight and intuition related to the use of data. Sometimes it is valuable to take a step back from the traditional data collections that we see on a regular basis, such as customer data, product data, and sales transactions, to evaluate the integration of information from a completely different context.

For example, by itself geographical data may not be of great interest, but merging customer transactions with rolled-up psychographic profiles associated with geographic data may provide insight into the how's and why's of your customers' behavior. In this chapter we examine alternate information contexts what kind of data is available, what its value is, and how to plan to integrate that information into your enterprise.

In this chapter, we discuss some of the more interesting issues and applications associated with the BI program: the use of demographics (i.e., nonqualitative descriptions, such as age and marital status) and psychographics (i.e., qualitative descriptions of lifestyle characteristics) for enhancement, the use of geographic information systems, and Web activity and behavior monitoring.

The Business Case

A lot of the bits of knowledge we can uncover through a BI application are not actionable unless we have some idea of what to do once we have discovered them. Making use of other data to tell us what to do with our...