Absa Bank took top honours in The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) Best Practices Awards for 2004 held in Seattle, USA, recently - scooping the first prize for Best Practices in Predictive Analytics.
The bank was the only South African company to receive an award.
The annual TDWI Best Practices competition serves to recognise innovation and share global best practices with practitioners as the field of data warehousing and business intelligence continues to expand. Nominations were judged by a panel of experts, including consultants, industry analysts, business intelligence journal editors and Institute fellows.
"What most impressed the judges about our submission was not only our good data warehouse and predictive analytic solutions, but our dedicated focus on leveraging information," says Dave Donkin, group executive: Information Management at Absa Bank Limited.
"In many corporations, information management is seen as a technology project," he says.
"By contrast, Absa's Information Management department is at the confluence of technology and business, ensuring that information really works for us. Technology is only an enabler."
Says Brenda Woodbridge, general manager of TDWI: "This year's winners clearly demonstrated that their data warehouse and business intelligence projects were truly innovative solutions to common problems faced by data warehousing practitioners."
Donkin says that other factors in Absa's success were its measurement of quantitative value and return on investment (ROI), costs versus value delivered, and the comprehensiveness of the technology that the bank has built up to support the leveraging of information.
The tools Absa uses to unlock the value of information within the bank are data mining and statistical analysis tools from SAS, the leaders in business intelligence.
The bank uses SAS to analyse and predict a variety of factors, predominantly around customers. These include lead generation, cross selling, retention, better understanding customers and their needs, identifying profitable customers and understanding their lifetime value. Absa also makes use of predictive analysis in the prevention of fraud and robbery.
Says Kerry Evans, general manager: Financial Services at SAS Institute SA: "As the only SA company to receive an award in this year's competition, we are extremely proud of Absa's achievement."
Share
SAS is the market leader in providing a new generation of business intelligence software and services that create true enterprise intelligence. SAS solutions are used at more than 40 000 sites - including 96 of the top 100 of the 2003 Fortune Global 500 - to develop more profitable relationships with customers and suppliers; to enable better, more accurate and informed decisions; and to drive organisations forward. SAS is the only vendor that completely integrates leading data warehousing, analytics and traditional BI applications to create intelligence from massive amounts of data. For nearly three decades, SAS has been giving customers around the world The Power to Know.
The Data Warehousing Institute
The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI), a division of 101communications, is the premier provider of in-depth, high quality education and training in the data warehousing and business intelligence industry. TDWI is dedicated to educating business and information technology professionals about the strategies, techniques and tools required to successfully design, build and maintain data warehousing implementations, and also to the advancement of data warehousing research, knowledge transfer, and the professional development of its members.
TDWI sponsors and promotes a worldwide membership programme, annual educational conferences, regional educational seminars, onsite courses, solution provider partnerships, awards programmes for best practices in data warehousing and innovative technologies, resourceful publications, an in-depth research programme, and a comprehensive Web site.
Editorial contacts