When the Obama campaign was in full swing in the last US Presidential elections, a consulting company called Target Smart helped them send out very precise targeted emails that netted a lot of success for them.
This is is the new face of Layered Business Intelligence Mashups! Target Smart was able to get the name and mailing addresses of people living within a particualr state, males between the ages of 18 and 39 and who have contributed recently to a charity! Targeted emails to this group seems to have maximized campaign contributions, apparently!
TargetSmart had a lot of demographic, geographic, charity contributions data but were able to mashup all of them together with appropriate data cleaning and filtering so that the final output was an Excel spreadsheet with the names and addresses of specific people within a state that are good targets for the Obama campaign to reach out to! You can see their press release at that time here.
SRC's Alteryx engine allows you to draw a visual flow of the entire data cleansing, extraction, unions and joins for doing all mashups in a simple workflow like interface.
Here is a cool demo of the same Alteryx technology that helps you select the kinds of customers that will patronize your retail store, plot them on a map and see for yourself visually, the clustering of your most promising customers near your planned location.
Business Intelligence is fast becoming BI 2.0 or something that enables you to assemble the data in whatever order you want visually, and get your results quickly rather than wait for some IT guys to give you a timeline and schedule for you to get your results!
I really like the way they have made no distinction between data preparation and the the way different sets of data are combined together - whether they be demographic, geographic, or census data.
The brave new world of mashups and the way data can be turned into actionable intelligence as soon as possible!
These are the kinds of tools that can really break new frontiers in Business Intelligence for the data rich but information starved IT folks in companies!
Knowing a great deal is not the same as being smart; intelligence is not information alone but also judgment, the manner in which information is collected and used - Dr. Carl Sagan.
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