The Revival

  Business Intelligence   Strategy  

Back in 2001, I wrote an article about the promise of one-to-one marketing. The synergies between CRM and business intelligence were undeniable. And with both fields generating tremendous excitement, I certainly thought it was inevitable that the power of business intelligence would be used to improve personalization to the end customer through CRM solutions.

Here we are four years later, and I feel that my interactions with corporations via phone, e-mail and the Internet are no more personalized than they were four years ago. Perhaps the dot-com bust and a poor economy in '01 and '02 forced organizations to abandon one-to-one CRM efforts. Perhaps these enterprise efforts had a high rate of failure and were shelved for less risky efforts. Perhaps it was a fad of its time and now focus has shifted to other priorities. Whatever the reason, the promise of the one-to-one enterprise now seems like a distant dream.

Let's consider some examples of the lack of one-to-oneness in our world. Each day, when I go to the Yahoo website, it is no more personalized for me than when it was first launched five years ago. At my brokerage account at Ameritrade, I still see no personalized tracking or industry analysis of equities and bonds that are relevant to my investments. The e-mails that I receive from the Northwest airlines frequent flier program don't even recognize…

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