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Another in the recently launched and incredibly unsuccessful ‘30 second guide’ series.

After learning all about data warehousing, I didn’t see Sue for a while. I assumed she was working elsewhere on a long term project. However, after 18 months I finally managed to track her down.

For some inexplicable reason, she had left IT (and data warehouses behind). She lived, alone but content, in a Crofter’s cottage in a remote part of Scotland making tartan rugs. She looked a little surprised but pleased to see me on her doorstep.

‘So Sue - what about all this CRM stuff ?’

Sue sighed. ‘Norman - what do you want to know now ?’

‘Well - the let’s take this Pareto Principle for starters’

‘The Pareto Principle states that for all businesses, 20% of the customer base delivers 80% of the profit.’

‘Oh I see. Well how do I identify that elusive, profitable 20% ?’

‘That, Norman, lies at the very heart and is the central tenent of Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Solving that problem is the Holy Grail of CRM’.

‘Oh I see. I keep hearing these clever marketing types talking about “propensity to churn”. Are they feeling unwell ?’

‘Propensity to churn refers to the likelihood of customers terminating their contract and going elsewhere. If you have always bought your gas from British Gas for 24 years, always had a BT phone line and always used the same bank, then your ’propensity to churn’ is low. If you switch mortgages every two years chasing the cheapest rate, then your ‘propensity to churn’ is much higher.’

‘I see. So what is a segment ?’

‘A segment is a simply a set of customers. Remember sets and Venn diagrams at school. Take the set of all male customers. Take the set of customers aged 30-35. Take the set of customers earning over 40K. Take the intersection of all three sets. That is a segment.’

‘Well that’s easy enough. And what about this so-called nirvana of 1:1 marketing ?’

‘Marketing people think that the smaller and more selective a segment is, then the higher the chance of selling to that segment. The smallest segment (with the highest possible chance of selling) is obviously a single person. However, you need a lot of criteria (information about the individual) to derive a segment of one. However, that is what marketeers dream of at night.’

‘I see. What about a channel ?’

‘Telephone, TV, radio, internet, newspapers, letters, billboards - any way in which you can interact with a company’

‘Err - how do I ’interact’ with a billboard ?’

‘You may not think it but you are subliminally reading the marketing message.’

‘Lifetime value ?’

‘Exactly what it says on the tin. How much money are you worth over your lifetime to a company. One element of the Pareto Principle is that some customers (out of the 80%) are bring in less money than they cost to administer. People who pay off their credit card balance in full every month are just one example. Identifying these customers and losing them may actually be beneficial to the business.’

‘One last question. What is cross-sell and up-sell ?’

‘Cross-sell is selling you home insurance when you call to renew your motor policy. Up-sell is selling you that Uninsured Loss Recovery that no-one understands, wants or needs or the expensive travel insurance bundled with your holiday.’

‘Well Sue. Thanks a lot. That was really informative but you did drone on for rather more than 30 seconds.’

‘I know Norman. That’s the nature of CRM for you. Cliches and 24 words where 1 would suffice. Would you like a rug in the Brightside tartan to take home with you ?’

Look at this gentleman's very amusing profile on LinkedIn.

Look at his modest, self-deprecating description - 'I hate it when our friends become successful'. Such a refreshing change from some of the pretentiousness you usually find.

This is the title of one of my favourite Morrissey songs. If only space had permitted the author to add 'especially when they're Northern'.

Now look at his employment record and the impressive list of high powered job roles he has fulfilled for major blue chips in an exciting and varied career spanning over 20 years in IT:

• Junior Programmer (AmberPoint)
• Dogsbody (Kenamea)
• Ringleader (Sun)
• Plumber (Forte)
• Fitter (Sybase)
• Jack of All Trades (Ingres)

Now take a look at the same gentleman's blog and profile picture. At last, you have encountered an American with a sense of humour.

Until you realise he's another music and football loving Brit who crossed the water.

Many years ago, my horrid manager refused me a wonderful opportunity to go on an all expenses paid training course all about data warehousing in some exotic location.

I was moaning about this to a colleague over lunch. She was an ex-teacher and happened to work in the prestigious data warehousing consultancy group. 'There, there Norman. Don't cry. Tell me exactly what you wanted to learn from this course ?'

'Well Sue, I just feel so stupid. I don't even know what a fact table is, or a slowly moving dimension let alone a star schema - all that fancy data warehousing terminology'.

'Shut up and listen. You buy a sandwich in Tesco. The sandwich costs £2.55. You have a table called TRANSACTION with a column called PRICE. There are other tables called PRODUCT, REGION, STORE, DATE and CAMPAIGN. There are a load of foreign keys from the fact table to the dimensions and the data model is highly normalised.'

'The TRANSACTION table is a fact table because it records a fact - an event that actually happened. Fact tables tend to be large. Just think of all those massive queues for all the the checkouts at all the Tesco stores.'

The other tables are called dimensions - these tables tend to be smaller and describe elements of the business and allow managers to report on sales by product/region/store/campaign/month/year/quarter.

'Oh I see but what about a star schema ?'

'Draw a picture with the fact table in the middle and the dimension tables around the edges. Connect the tables together. What do you see ?'

'Oh I see. A pretty star. OK then. What about a snowflake ?'

'Draw 7 stars and join them up. What do you see ?'

'Oh I see. A lovely snowflake. Thanks a lot, Sue. That really has been very useful.'

'No problem. Data warehousing isn't actually that hard.'

'Now what is the Pareto Principle ?'

Unfortunately, my helpful teacher suddenly remembered she had an urgent meeting to go to and the '30 second Guide to CRM' was postponed.

Prizegiving ceremonies at school are a similar experience when you are a parent as when you were a child.

The event seems to last a long time. The tedium is punctuated by the odd, brief moment of excitement when little Norma (or someone loosely known to you) walks up to receive her book token.

Your mind starts to wander asking such important questions as: 'What exactly did Christine Baverstock-Davis do to merit the award of "Outstanding effort in 'resistant materials" ?'. Did she spend countless hours after school bashing iron, steel and rocks with hammers, mallets and pickaxes ?' You start to wonder why your wife neglected to attend this years 3 hour marathon in stifling heat. Must remind her that it's her turn next year.

Of course, as a parent, you feel immensely proud when your child steps up for their book tokens on three separate occasions (Exceptional Student, Effort in Food Technology and Surrey Schools Trampolining). In fact, you are so proud, you nudge your two immediate neighbours urging them to clap a little bit louder.

You furtively reach for those humorous red and white inflatable hands with England flags on and raise them aloft. As your offspring is carefully marshalled back though the aisles by a prefect to their assigned seat, they look absolutely mortified, go beetroot red and whisper 'Dad - put those down - NOW'.

Two hours later, just as the keynote speaker (first ever Head Girl from 1964) nervously steps up for the main speech, there is a kerfuffle outside as some ruffian runs past the open double-doors singing 'Ole - Ole - Ole - Ole. Eng-LAND. Eng-LAND'. You smile to yourself as six teachers simultaneously arise from their seats and run menacingly (while skilfully appearing to be walking fast) to identify and silence the culprit (using force).

You decide to seek the individual out later, give him a lift to hospital and reward him with the inflatable England gloves.

After the event, you are once again immensely proud when your child tells you:

'Dad - when Alistair Barnstormworth did that stupid singing outside, I started to laugh. When I looked round. you were the only mum or dad in the whole hall of 700 people who was also laughing.'

Occasionally, I have had the odd dig at the parochial, inward looking nature of the US TV and printed media.

However, last week, the UK media commemorated the first anniversary of the July bombings in London with endless pages of words and pictures together with and hours of footage, analysis, interviews, documentaries and coverage of yet another two minute silence.

Since August 1997, a nation that was once renown for a 'stiff upper lip' and dignity has somehow been transformed into 60 million professional grievers and bereavement counsellors.

This week, four times as many people lose their lives in Mumbai in a set of horrendous train bombings by terrorists. Curiously enough, this story is buried on page 13 after important updates on corrupt politicians, corrupt businessman and corrupt footballers.

I presume all the people affected by this tragedy in India also have mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters, so put down your paper, turn the radio off and spare a thought for them. May all the victims rest in peace.

On message boards and blogs around the interweb, fans of the TV series Lost are discussing the many, different storylines speculating about what is actually going on and proposing far fetched theories.

One such undercurrent is the periodic entry of a secret code '4 8 15 16 23 42' into a computer located in an underground bunker. People want to know what will happen if the code is not entered.

Warning: Spoiler ahead. I know this because yesterday I failed to get there in time...

A corporate screensaver appears displaying perplexing, enigmatic, dark, cryptic words which, in turn, only fuels more mystery and suspense...

We lead by example
We work together
We respect the individual
We seek the facts and provide insight
We are open and honest in our communication
We are committed to our communities
Above all, we act with integrity

HDTV. Robert Scoble is an intelligent chap but has some truly bizarre thoughts. This theory is perhaps the most bizarre of all.

Playing is better than watching. Watching in the ground is better than HDTV. HDTV is better than TV. Watching on TV is (sometimes) better than listening on the radio.

To achieve success at 'soccer', you actually need to run around on a field not slump in front of TV with four gallons of soda and a mountain of cheesy nachos. If the latter was the criteria, England would surely have lifted the last two World Cups and European Championships.

When I visit customers, I am usually granted read-access to production servers. Mostly I am working closely with IT staff to explain what I am doing and why. I am not normally granted the passwords to administer the production system which is just the way I like it.

Otherwise, Siebel server CRMPROD1 which has been working fine for 2 years, unexpectedly core dumps, the call center is down, the business is losing 2 million dollars every minute and everyone is staring inquiringly in your direction.

Occasionally, the screensaver kicks in after a predefined interval. So the person has to unlock the screen. However, if the person is in a meeting or otherwise unavailable, the screen remains locked until he returns. This can waste valuable time so I prefer to keep the screen accessible at all times, if at all possible.

Consequently, I find myself acting like John Locke in 'Lost' who has to strike a key on the keyboard of a computer every 2 hours to avoid dire (yet unknown) consequences.

So, don't be surprised if you are working with an Oracle consultant who nervously keeps looking at his watch during a fascinating conversation about Siebel architecture. If he then rudely and abruptly terminates the dialog by hurtling back to his temporary desk and launches into a desperate, full length, athletic dive across the room to desperately hit a random key, that's why.

This superb photograph from NASA gives me a taste of what I missed.

Finally. All that painstaking effort creating multiple splogs, scribbling my blog URL on whiteboards at every client I visit, commenting twice daily on the A listers, spamming the newsgroups and bribing people for inbound links has paid off.

This humble blog has finally broken through the 100,000 barrier.

Day 324. Technorati Rank: 96,498 (56 links from 32 sites)

Poor old Doug (a lowly 1,389,569) needs to pull his finger out. My life is complete. Almost.