Korean Business Intelligence

Next Generation Data Warehousing Conference

IDG, Seoul, South Korea, February 16th 2011

I’m in Korea having just given the keynote address at this conference. I was asked to speak about the future of intelligence (and I will talk about some of my ideas in another post soon) but first a little about the rest of the conference. 

This was my first visit to Seoul and it has been interesting to see business intelligence from a new perspective. The presentations were evenly split between those by vendors with a technology platform emphasis, and client case studies. The 3 case studies were:

• Korea Credit Bureau – using a DWH Appliance (Neteeza & Greenplum) to improve efficiency and reduce costs at this industry owned credit checking business. Future directions were discussed and these included the use of Neteeza Spatial to analyse their credit data using maps.
• LG U+ – enhancing the EDW to support improved customer analytics at a large mobile telco.
• Hanwha General Insurance – integrating data after the acquisition of the Jeil Fire Insurance company.

What impressed me most was the detail given in the presentations and the methodical approach taken to solve the problems. It was nice to see people talk in some detail about their solutions. All too often I find that case studies are short generic stories of little interest. These presentations went into considerable detail and I got real insight into the strategies employed. Very impressive.

I could be generalising, but the Koreans seem to have a no-nonsense, ‘just do it’ approach to BI. Is this one of the reasons why I now find my life in Australia surrounded by the products of Samsung, LG and Hyundai?