from DSSResources.com

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                       DSS News 
                  D. J. Power, Editor 
          September 28, 2003 -- Vol. 4, No. 20
       A Bi-Weekly Publication of DSSResources.COM 

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      Check case by Walton "Rebuilding an Emergency 
        Operations Center for NYC following 9/11"

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Featured: 
* Report from Teradata Partners Conference
* DSS News Releases 

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Report from Teradata Partners Conference
by Dan Power
Editor, DSSResources.COM

Teradata Partners is the premier users group conference in the 
data-driven decision support field. My journey to the conference in 
Seattle included a minor airplane mechanical problem that delayed my 
arrival. As a result I missed a dinner engagement with Mike Goul (ASU) 
and Jeff Hoffer (U. Dayton). I did get to bed "on time" and got up early 
to register for the conference.

Sunday morning I attended Stephen Brobst's workshop with about 200 other 
attendees on constructing and deploying an active data warehouse. Brobst 
is the Teradata Chief Technology Officer for Teradata technology 
evolution. Brobst started promptly at 8am and the workshop ended at 
about 1pm with a 20 minute coffee break. He went from the big picture on 
"right time", data-driven tactical decision support to the technical 
details associated with deploying a Teradata Warehouse for tactical 
decision support. Some examples Brobst gave of tactical decision support 
using "real-time" data include fraud detection, logistics, customer 
offer determination, customer retention scoring, credit risk assessment, 
inventory management and yield management. 

According to Brobst, using a data warehouse for "real time" decision 
support, business activity monitoring, "rapid" queries, and on-the-spot 
decision support for supervisors, field agents and even operations 
managers required some changes in the Teradata database software. Brobst 
discussed the use of the priority scheduling facility and resource 
partitions to provide the enhanced response needed from a data warehouse 
to provide tactical decision support. Following his explanation of 
vAMPs, USIs and NUSIs the acronyms are a bit more understandable. The 
difference between macros and procedures in the warehouse environment 
also makes some sense now. Brobst claims Teradata users will have 
"Extreme Performance", "Extreme Availability",  "Extreme Data Freshness" 
and "Extreme Application Integration". The bottom line is active data 
warehousing and improved data-driven tactical decision support. Thanks 
Stephen for an interesting workshop.

Sunday afternoon I attend a presentation on the Loews data warehouse. At 
about 5:45pm I met Mike Goul and Paul Gray and we walked to the Teradata 
dinner for University faculty guests. We had dinner at Vivanda 
Ristorante with a group of professors, consultants and Teradata staff. 
It was a great mix and a wonderful event. Ron Swift, Vice President of 
Teradata, was our host. Mary Gros of Teradata organized the event and 
she brought her enthusiasm to the event.

At dinner, I sat across from Jill Dyche (pronounced Du-shay), VP of 
Baseline Consulting, and got acquainted with the CRM guru herself. 
Following the dinner Jill and I briefly attended the Partners Welcome 
reception. Jill knows everyone it seems. For example, we chatted with 
Todd Walter, the Teradata CTO for R&D. Todd is a real "A" player.

I got back to my hotel Sunday evening about 10:45pm (12:45am Iowa time) 
and collapsed in bed. An early wake-up call Monday morning and I was off 
to the Washington State Convention Center for email, DSSResources.COM 
work and the opening session. 

Partners puts on a grand Conference Opening General Session. It was a 
multimedia extravaganza. Partners Steering Committee President Mark 
Lahr, Data Warehousing Manager at 3M, took the stage on a Segway 
personal transportation device accompanied by flashing lights, music and 
video. Mark briefly discussed the data-driven decision support successes 
at 3M and encouraged attendees to share their stories. He reminded the 
audience that Partners is about making new friends, sharing lessons 
learned and learning new skills.

Lahr moderated the General Session and introduced NCR President and CEO 
Mark Hurd. Hurd discussed driving value using decision support. He 
seemed strongly committed to growing Teradata and making Teradata the 
premier decision support company. Hurd provided some examples of "near 
real-time" tactical decision support: a grocery chain buyer making 
decisions about which trucks to send to which stores with what produce; 
an airline gate agent making decisions about which passengers get 
upgraded or bumped on an overbooked flight; a call center operator 
making decisions about how to retain a cellular phone customer. Hurd 
concluded "CEOs and CFOs can no longer tolerate decision-making based on 
partial data. But they also recognize that every part of their 
organization requires a unique view based on all of the data. And that 
powerful analytics are required to support all of their decisioning 
needs."

The new leader of the Teradata division Mike Koehler spoke next. Mike 
became Senior Vice President Teradata Division in March 2003. According 
to Koehler, Teradata is growing with more than USD$1.2 Billion in 2002. 
He sees the Teradata Warehouse solution as the platform to give 
companies an enterprise view for decision support and a competitive 
advantage.

The last speaker in the General Session was Michael Treacy. Some readers 
may remember Treacy from his MIT days. His new book, Double-Digit 
Growth, provided the core of his presentation. He noted if companies 
want to grow, then IS/IT needs to collect more data about sources of 
revenue to support decision making. Companies already spend significant 
resources collecting cost data and that should continue, but it won't 
help managers focus on growth. Treacy said "Any firm in this room, if it 
is correctly led and managed, can grow steadily at double-digit rates -- 
forever."

During lunch I met with Mike Goul, Vice Chair of SIGDSS, to discuss the 
new SIG DSS by-laws. We're making progress in finalizing them for 
approval by the Association for Information Systems Council in December.

After lunch I attended a session and met with vendor representatives in 
the Expo Hall. Monday evening the Expo Hall was the setting for a 
conference reception. I must have spoken with 20 vendor representatives, 
MicroStrategy, Brio, Cognos, and watched as many demonstrations. My head 
was swimming from information overload but it was great. 

I ended Monday evening at Partners with a ride on a Segway Human 
Transporter (www.segway.com). It was great ... easy to use ... lean 
forward, lean back, turn the knob on the steering handle. 

Teradata University Network (TUN pronounced "tune") was my focus for 
Tuesday morning. After continental breakfast, I listened to Barb Wixom 
and Jeff Hoffer brief Teradata and Microstrategy executives on progress 
in creating a web-based resource for teaching data warehousing. Jeff 
discussed the data sets and software that are currently accessible. TUN 
is a free resource provided by Teradata. Faculty can find out more at 
http://www.teradatauniversitynetwork.com/. The site is currently being 
upgraded to incorporate Microstrategy BI software.

Following the TUN meeting I spoke with Sanju Bansal, Chief Operating 
Officer of MicroStrategy. I had attended Bansal's Monday presentation on 
BI trends and welcomed the chance to get his views. I'm hoping we'll 
have an article from Bansal at DSSResources.COM in the near future. BI 
or data-driven DSS is enterprise-wide and scaling to thousands of users. 
Dashboards are back but the data detail is what makes them "work" in 
today's environment. Bansal and I also discussed decision support at 
Best Buy. One of my goals for the next 6 months is to develop a Best Buy 
case study for DSSResources.COM.

Lunch was a press briefing. Alan Chow briefed us on enhancements to 
Teradata Warehouse 7.1. Bob Fair, Chief Marketing Officer, discussed the 
Teradata Survey of Senior Executives on decision-making issues. The news 
release about the survey is at DSSResources.COM. According to Bob, a 
crisis in decision-making is developing. He said "Executives are deluged 
with data and decision-making is deteriorating as a result."  
Enterprise-wide, data-driven decision support systems seem to be the 
magic bullet that executives want. The executives in the survey see 
decision support as a means to better, faster decisions.

After lunch I hurried to catch Jill Dyche's Super Session on "Segmenting 
the Stages of CRM". Jill used greek mythology characters to illustrate 
the "good" and "bad" approaches to CRM. The Centaurs charge in, the 
Nymphs lack vision and focus on data marts, the Dorians lead an 
IT-focused CRM invasion, the Cyclops start small and think big. The 
Dryads have an investment in the success of CRM and nuture it. Finally, 
the Argonauts are on a journey to improve customer relationships using 
technology and they understand the journey is "fraught with peril". 
Thanks Jill for an interesting presentation.

Tuesday afternoon I spent some time discussing Teradata certification at 
the booth in the registration area. For many attendees, the Partners 
conference is a technical "boot camp" and certification at various 
levels is the goal. Only about 270 people in the world have the Masters 
level of Teradata certification. Readers can get more information about 
Teradata certification by contacting Oliva Baronner, Program Manager, 
email oliva.baronner@ncr.com.

Tuesday night I attended a reception for North American Teradata 
customers at the Space Needle. The monorail provided a quick trip for me 
from downtown. Some conversation, jazz, good food and drinks and a 
wonderful setting at the top of the Space Needle ended a 17 hour day. A 
return trip on the monorail and a short walk got me back to my hotel.

Wednesday morning was check out day for me.  I was up early and hurried 
to the convention center.  After breakfast I checked some sessions, 
worked on this report and spoke with Teradata Press staff: Dan, Virve, 
Marcela were a great help.

On the way to the airport I chatted with a Partners attendee from Des 
Moines, Iowa, Craig Gard of Meredith Corp.  Small world.  As many of you 
know my home base is Cedar Falls, IA and the University of Northern 
Iowa. At about midnight I arrived home.  Thanks Teradata Partners for a 
great conference experience. My plan is to follow-up on some of the 
customer success stories for case studies at DSSResources.COM.

Please note: NCR Teradata paid Dan Power's expenses so he could attend 
this conference 9/20-9/24/03.

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DSS News Releases - September 15 to September 26, 2003
Read them at DSSResources.COM and search the DSS News Archive

09/26/2003 Super Computer, Inc. announces GameStorm 64-bit technology 
for gaming featuring America's Army for the AMD Athlon(TM) 64 processor.

09/25/2003 MicroStrategy wins 2003 Software Business Industry award for 
best product development.

09/24/2003 NII Holdings selects Teradata® Profitability Analytics 
Solution.

09/23/2003 Survey of senior executives shows developing crisis in 
decision-making.

09/23/2003 Owens & Minor ranks first in the 2003 InformationWeek 500.

09/22/2003 Ascential Software highlights web services to meet real-time 
integration challenges of the active data warehouse.

09/22/2003 Information Builders cited as "most cost-effective" option 
for two categories of business intelligence reporting in new Ventana 
Research TCO study.

09/19/2003 Teradata introduces servers to boost data warehouse power.

09/19/2003 'Closer Communications' delivers first customer acquisition 
management and lead retrieval system that operates on the Pocket PC and 
other hand-held computing devices.

09/19/2003 Business Analysts releases VisualVault, Web-based document 
management software.

09/18/2003 Intergraph sponsors GI Days for Geospatial Intelligence 
Community.

09/18/2003 InTouch delivers Web based, intuitive and secure patient 
information for McKesson HIS database.

09/17/2003 Intergraph collaborates on interoperability with other OGC 
members Autodesk, Laser-Scan and MapInfo for more customer choices and 
better flexibility.

09/16/2003 New Mindjet Software captures the 'meet' of meetings.

09/16/2003 Toshiba to preinstall Microsoft Office OneNote on all of its 
new portable PCs worldwide.

09/16/2003 Balanced Scorecard Collaborative honors Fulton County 
(Georgia) Schools, University of California, San Diego, and United 
States Army with Prestigious Hall of Fame Award.

09/16/2003 Provia introduces Supply Chain execution optimization 
product.

09/16/2003 SaskPower selects 'IMPACT', a Siemens Financial Management 
Solution.

09/16/2003 Formation's Advanced Integrated Recorder (AIR) selected for 
NATO Air Command & Control System.

09/16/2003 Developing Use cases? Duvessa Software has developed a new 
tool that allows anyone to create software development estimates early 
in the requirements phase.

09/16/2003 SGI puts supercomputing on wheels with the SGI Mobile 
Innovation Center.

09/16/2003 Major U.S. Retailer CSK Auto successfully deploys 
MicroStrategy platform for reporting & analysis.

09/15/2003 University of Wisconsin Medical Foundation standardizes on 
Crystal Decisions.

09/15/2003 ePeople Teamwork for PeopleSoft CRM Sales 8.8: Enterprise 
team selling solution shortens sales cycle and maximizes each sales 
opportunity.

09/15/2003 BP Lubricants selects Kalido Data Warehousing for management 
information pilot program.

09/15/2003 Naval Research Laboratory first to install 128-processor 
single system image SGI Altix 3000 supercomputer.

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DSS News is copyrighted (c) 2003 by D. J. Power. Please send your questions to
daniel.power@dssresources.com.

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