Turning 60/40 into 40/60

    I was talking recently to an IT executive at a large bank about why he was looking at enterprise information integration (EII). When I asked him about the primary driver, he told me that it was the marketing analysts. That sounded strange at first, but then he told me about 60/40.

 Marketing analysts at banks are the people trying to figure out how to sell you a new home loan, second mortgage, credit card, or whatever product you don’t currently have. These analysts look at spreadsheets or reports and try to figure out what offers they should mail to what people.

 Turns out, though, that ‘analyst’ is somewhat of a misnomer. Or maybe a better way of putting it is that these analysts are forced by a lack infrastructure to do another job most of the time. To be precise, according to this executive, these analysts spend three days a week trying to gather data, and only two days a week analyzing data. Hence the 60 (3 days) / 40 (2 days) ratio.

    “These people practically need to take an ETL developer to lunch to get their jobs done,” he told me. They run around looking for spreadsheets, asking for new data sets to be loaded, and uploading CSV files. He sees EII as a way to change all that and make the analysts more productive.

 With EII, the model changes. Rather than continue the spread of data marts for all the analysts in all the groups, EII would allow the creation of a self-service model. Views, as they are called in EII, could be set up to span data sources. IT would still be involved in the initial set up, but the virtual nature would allow faster, easier customization by the analysts without the need for an ETL developer’s assistance. The EII layer could span all kinds of sources, from operational data stores, data marts and data warehouses. That’s not to say ETL would go away – there’s still a need to clean, master data and for the data warehouse.

 So EII can change the ratio. It can change 60/40 to 40/60 – or even better. Aside from developers who need to start buying their own lunch, that should make everyone happier and more productive.

Comments

[Susan Thomas]

I am amazed that there are still some banks that don't have a good data warehouse system in place. How can such a bank even be competitive? Most banks today have some sort of analytics department to are using predictive modeling and customer church http://www.themarketinganalysts.com/customer_churn_defection.html studies and other similar modeling for fraudulent activity.