Data Mining & Analysis, LLC

CASE STUDY

Independence from IS for sales and marketing Users at CompuAdd
An Interview with Susan Smith, Director of Sales and Marketing Systems for CompuAdd

Q. What business challenge were you facing?

Smith: CompuAdd's sales and marketing users constantly need to use data to get new answers to new questions, fast. Historically, we in IS met their needs by supplying a set of programs that allowed them to produce any one of a series of predefined parameter driven reports. But when one of them needed a new report that didn't fit one of our standard formats, the user had to call in our IS specialists to write custom queries for them.

Q. What changed to give them what they needed?

Smith: We recognized that we needed to put the data in a warehouse, separate from our operational systems, where the users could get data quickly.

Q. So you bought a database and a UNIX system?

Smith: Yes. We put Oracle on an IBM AIX RISC 6000 computer system and set up Oracle distributed server to refresh the data warehouse instance from our operational Oracle system to keep the data refreshed twice a day at noon and midnight.

Q. And you also gave them a way to get at the data easily. How did you choose the query tool?

Smith: We set four criteria. First, and most important, the tool had to allow our users to ask both simple and very complicated questions, without making them become programmers -- In other words, it had to be easy to use. We also wanted to be sure our users would get rapid response, and although most of the speed comes from the IBM AIX system, we wanted to be sure the query tool could deliver that speed. And we also looked for versatility - which means that the query tool had lots of extra functions our users might need in the future. And finally we wanted to be certain we in IS could manage and administer the distribution, support, and security of the query tool without causing difficulties for our users.

Q. What query tool did you choose?

Smith: We decided on Cognos' Impromptu. It seemed to us and our users to be the best for non-technical users who want to ask complicated questions.

Q. And did it meet the rest of your criteria?

Smith: Absolutely. It gives us speed. It has a great many extra bells and whistles. And it makes it easy for us to support of our users. All in all, it was a fine choice. 

Note:  This warehouse implementation was only a portion of CompuAdd's overall client/server migration.  See "A Downsizing Client/Server Diary" for complete details.