July 1998
Data Mining and Workflow Empower COLD
Some software developers choose not to duplicate the work of companies that have written powerful COLD applications. They choose instead to make others' products more useful.
IA Corp. (Emeryville, CA phone), for example, produces InfoXtract, a
data mining tool, to maximize the value of most existing COLD systems. IA
vice-president Thierry Leger calls it, "Intelligent data extraction from
print streams." IA employs online analytical processing (OLAP) filters
that establish new relationships between data that were previously buried
in huge COLD reports.
Using COLD information, a financial services firm could find subsets
of its customers that need a particular product. For example, IA software
can tell which customers have income above a certain level that also took
out a mortgage during years when interest rates were high. The people in
that subset may be good candidates for refinancing.
Other developers are answering the question, "What do we do with the
data once we retrieve it?" One response comes from SolCom (Sioux Falls,
SD phone): "Enter the data into a workflow system, thereby automating
COLD reports' use. There is life after retrieval," quips Rose Devadas,
SolCom vice president. "COLD data merged with workflow magnifies the
benefits of both technologies." SolCom software, MultiManager, is a
suite of knowledge management components for the AS/400 platform. For
$3,000, SolCom offers a graphical user interface for IBM's COLD product,
OnDemand.
Main Article:
