Chapter 12 - Alternate Information Contexts

Abstract

This chapter discusses alternate information contexts in terms of data availability, its value and planning to integrate that data information into the enterprise. Several interesting issues and applications, such as demographics usage (nonqualitative descriptions, such as age and marital status), psychographics (qualitative descriptions of lifestyle characteristics) for enhancement, application of geographic information systems, and web activity and behavior monitoring, associated with a business intelligence (BI) program are discussed in the chapter. An interesting aspect of the B I process is that it relies on well-defined methods, architectures, and techniques, and 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, such as customer data, product data, and sales transactions, to evaluate the integration of information from a completely different context. The use of different kinds of information contexts can add breadth and dimensionality to the kinds of data that may be created internally. By making use of creative data analysis tools that augment the traditional BI framework, one can exploit out-of-the-box thinking to achieve better actionable results.