A Bank is a Bank Is a Bank, Except….

When it's not, Geoffrey Moore says. The author of Dealing with Darwin, Inside the Tornado, Crossing the Chasm explained to Teradata users why analytics is such fast-growing tool in mature businesses, like banking.

"You walk into some banks and say it’s cool. Or you like a Web site or a loyalty card at a supermarket. We have a window of seconds to up-sell or make an offer so we are forcing the data out of the warehouse to the front line….so analytics does from being the aftermath of transaction processing to the fabric of transaction processing.”

In mature businesses, innovation comes around the edges, not at the center, and that requires constant innovation, experimentation, killing the losing ideas and putting resources into the winners...launch, analyze and then conduct triage.

Moore

says the perimeter philosophy is about engaging more deeply, more frequently, gaining more share of wallet in service dollars (fees) as well as product dollars through high value low cost extensions to the existing infrastructure.

            “This is the money machine behind analytics.”

Lloyds TSB must agree – it has dual Teradata data warehouses in production for improved performance and disaster recovery. Denise Cook, information domain architect at the bank, said a review of continuity planning showed it could take a month to recover production data. The bank has deployed what Teradata calls Dual Active at two geographically separated sites for high availability, better performance on increasingly complex queries and disaster recovery.

Strong prevention can cost more than it is worth, so it is important to understand your data, determine how fast is fast enough in recovery and design a system that won’t cut too much into the firm’s capital.

“Data warehouses have problems because they are often a shared environment and it is often unclear who pays. The business value is often not well understood or well documented.”

Fortunately, sort of, in a Teradata upgrade they had an unplanned outage which focused bankers attention on the importance of the data warehouse. Cook did not explicitly recommend this as a way to obtain funding, but still…

“Teradata suggested we start small but we ignored them and put in two systems about the same size.” They are both used in production all the time during the workday.