Data Mining: Success Stories

Gaining The Mainframe Advantage

Texas Education Agency

IBM's work at the Texas Education Agency (TEA) served as a catalyst to help TEA develop powerful data mining capacities to help measure student success, a major component of Texas' nationally-recognized public education accountability and assessment system.

Texas Education Agency's "Just For The Kids" program evolved from IBM technology. IBM's work at the Texas Education Agency (TEA) served as a catalyst to help TEA develop powerful data mining capacities to help measure student success, a major component of Texas' nationally-recognized public education accountability and assessment system.

A nonprofit organization based in Austin is utilizing the TEA information in a most creative way. Just For The Kids has a web site, www.just4kids.org, where anyone can examine performance measures of any public Texas school. The statistics offer five years of longitudinal data, a breakdown of statistics by grade and ethnicity; and a comparison of school performance to schools with similar socioeconomic characteristics.

This use of performance information underscores the role data mining can play in "slicing and dicing" statistics. More important, Just For The Kids demonstrates how powerful information can be made accessible within security boundaries to any parent, teacher or student, and used as a tool to improve classroom learning.

The Next Level of Performance

Princess Cruise Lines

As one of the leading cruise lines in the world, Princess Cruises Lines needed a planning solution that would enable them to aggregate data quickly and accurately, allow employees to analyze data and look at the "what-ifs," be flexible enough to quickly update models based on the business climate, and provide their senior management with greater business visibility. With the Cognos EP solution, Princess has been able to reduce some financial reporting processes from days to just minutes, create an ongoing monthly forecasting process, and provide data transparency allowing visibility into all levels and departments of the business.

Greg Bozigian, director of financial planning, Princess Cruise Lines, said, "The Cognos solution has given us increased visibility into our business operations and based on our success to date we are continuing to broaden our Cognos deployment throughout the enterprise with Cognos solutions in our human resources and boutiques operations." said "Cognos has allowed the financial planning team to eliminate the time required to summarize spreadsheets and utilize that time for more value-added analysis. In addition, senior management now receives information in a timely manner, which allows them to make the operational and strategic decisions that guide the company."

Best in Business Intelligence

State of Tennessee

MicroStrategy is providing the State of Tennessee's end users with comparative and exception reporting, more efficient and timely data analysis, enhanced financial data analysis, summary level reporting for management, and consistent interpretation of financial data definitions and business rules. In the future, the State of Tennessee will expand the reach of its business intelligence initiatives to support 800 end users and develop additional BI applications to include budgetary, grants, projects, contract and vendor financials, as well as payroll analyses.

With MicroStrategy, decision-makers in more than 60 statewide agencies, including the Departments of Human Services, Mental Health and Education, are able to more effectively track revenues and expenditures, and make more informed decisions that can reduce costs and increase efficiency.

Tennessee's official state Web site, www.tennesseeanytime.org, ranked first in the nation in Brown University's third annual survey of state e-government performance. TennesseeAnytime has more than one million visitors a month, and since its inception has hosted more than six million e-government transactions. Much of the traffic comes from the more than 60% of qualified TennCare providers accessing TennCare eligibility information online, and the nearly 120,000 citizens that have renewed their driver's license or updated their addresses online.

U.S's Geological Survey

According to Harry House, group leader at the U.S Geological Survey, Wisconsin District, Data Center, Oracle's shared services model "offers the best of two worlds" by encouraging creative initiatives in a governmental agency." The approach is paying off, House said, noting that the data center is two-thirds funded through offering its project services to other agencies. It not only spares each agency the hassle of IT development, administration time, and equipment costs, it ultimately helps the environment by opening floodgates to research information previously locked in each individual agency's databases.

Oracle 10g's automated management features help meet the Data Center's challenges so that managing a growing data center with limited resources hasn't been a problem for the USGS. "As our programs grow and increase in complexity, it is becoming critical that our supporting systems be increasingly self-managing," House said. "Just because a customer doesn't have a lot of resources doesn't mean they don't have high expectations. They see what's on Google or Yahoo, sites that have millions of dollars behind their systems, and they want us to create something like that for them. We have to figure out ways to supply as much as we can for as little cost as possible."

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