BI in Action

A couple of years back, in a movie called "Minority Report" (based on a book by Philip K. Dick), the Washington, DC police department had established a "Pre-Crime" division that was able to apprehend individuals before they committed (or even thought of committing) their heinous acts.

Ethics and legalities aside, the movie actually made a fascinating use case for predictive analytics, except for the fact that at the core of the police department's system was a bizarre setup involving psychic mutants who were kept in a sensory deprivation chamber and had their brains hardwired into the computer system. This was how the original story was written, of course.

But it would have been really cool and believable if the police relied entirely on pattern-matching and analytical software to develop their pre-crime scenarios. (That would have given the movie's main actor, Tom Cruise, a good reason to jump up and down on a couch or two!)

Minority Report was supposed to be based in the year 2054. A new story in the New York Times, however, shows that we may be closer to this reality than we imagined, thanks to analytical technology.

The NY Times relates how the Richmond, Virginia, police department had been able to deploy BI solutions to help bring its crime rate down -- 20% last year, more this year.

The department employs software that culls through the department's data stores, such as 911 calls and police reports, and overlays other streams of data, such as neighborhood demographics, payday schedules, weather, traffic patterns and sports events — to predict where crimes might occur.

For example, the NY Times relates, the technology "pointed to a high rate of robberies on paydays in Hispanic neighborhoods, where fewer people use banks and where customers leaving check-cashing stores were easy targets for robbers. Elsewhere, there were clusters of random-gunfire incidents at certain times of night. So extra police were deployed in those areas when crimes were predicted."

Likewise, the NYT article describes how similar analytical software is helping retailers such as Wal-Mart Stores and Kohl’s use advanced computing and math to more accurately predict what sizes of clothes should go to what stores. Harrah’s and other casinos decipher slot-machine results to optimize customer traffic and profits. Stockholm and other cities use traffic data and patterns to determine “congestion pricing.” In the financial industry, Capital One and other banks mine all kinds of transaction data to identify, and stop, fraudulent transactions.

Whirlpool, which sells 25,000 washing machines a day, also now automatically scans warranty reports as well as manufacturing, supplier, sales and service data to try to further trim its warranty costs and improve quality. The company says it has trimmed by 30 to 90 days the time required to detect and fix parts or manufacturing problems that cause defects.

Similar technology is being put to work for more mundane applications as well, as as tracking employee productivity within enterprises. Tracking e-mail traffic, instant messages and other digital communications — stripped of personally identifiable information — is helping companies understand how work and ideas flow through their internal social networks, NYT reports.

And, thankfully, no mutant psychics were harmed in the making of these implementations.