That scale of investment is not uncommon. So an issuer may invest $20 million-$50 million in the data warehouse, but a system of that scale often cannot come near the level of performance the company requires.For example, if the system is not tested, how are you going to know it cannot load all the data it needs to over night, because the volume of data exceeds the number of hours in a night?Maybe queries take longer then they did when the system was searching cheap tiffany money clips a volume of data, which was a fraction of the size of the new data warehouse.
Lack Of Time An Impediment To Testing"The hardest thing about doing large-scale, proof-of-concept is just getting it done," Winter says. "Sometimes it's hard to assemble a complete group of people with the software skills and experience with VLDBs."
Another common problem is by the time the project gets funded, it's already behind schedule. Testing at a facility designed to work with VLDBs can take anywhere from four weeks to three months, and with the pressure to bring the technology up as soon as possible, it is hard to make the choice to delay it further."If you don't test the system, you're taking an open-ended risk that will come back to haunt you later," Winter says. "Failure is not unlikely and more costly. It's not a good idea to roll the dice."
Here are the guidelines: If you are implementing a 250-gigabyte data warehouse, you should be able to find people with enough implementation experience that full-scale testing is not as crucial.However, if you are going to work with five, or even one cheap tiffany necklaces of data for some applications without proof-of-concept testing, you are at risk, Winter says.Many vendors of large-scale data warehouse systems do proof-of- concept at the customer's location or at a center designed for VLDB testing. IBM (IBM), for example, has developed four such venues, called Teraplex Integration Centers, that concentrate only on large- scale data warehouse testing.
"Thirty-seven women with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) were randomly submitted to drospirenone+ethinylestradiol (group I; n=19) or combined contraceptive vaginal ring (group II; n=18) therapy. The duration of the study was 6 months. The effect of treatments was assessed after 6 months of therapy. Utero-ovarian ultrasound analysis and color Doppler evaluation of uterine and stromal ovarian arteries. In addition, analysis of brachial artery flow-mediated vasodilatation and 24-hour ambulatory blood pressure monitoring were performed. Fasting blood samples were drawn for testing biochemical and hormonal parameters cheap tiffany pendants nitrites/nitrates. Both treatments improved hirsutism, hyperandrogenemia, and ultrasound and color Doppler ovarian parameters. Both drospirenone+ethinylestradiol or contraceptive vaginal ring induced a slight but significant increase of diurnal and 24-hour blood pressure. Although both therapies worsened the lipid profile, the oral pill administration was associated with a more evident increase of circulating triglycerides. The 6-month treatment with the vaginal ring significantly improved the area under the curve for glucose, insulin, and C-peptide, whereas the drospirenone+ethinylestradiol pill induced an increase in the insulinogenic index and homeostatic model assessment estimate for insulin resistance values," wrote C. Battaglia and colleagues, University of Bologna.The researchers concluded: "Vaginal cheap tiffany rings contraception appears to be preferable to oral ethinylestradiol + drospirenone administration in hyperinsulinemic patients with PCOS."
"Forty-four postmenopausal women participated in a randomized, double-blind, dose-finding study evaluating two hormonal treatments, combining 50 microg/day of estradiol delivered by transdermal patches and either 0.5-g or 1-g progesterone discount tiffany rings (PVR) given for 12 weeks. The effect on the endometrium was assessed by histology and the detection of the proliferative marker Ki-67. We also measured the serum concentration of estradiol and progesterone, the tissue concentration of progesterone and the immunolocalization of estradiol and progesterone receptors in the endometrium. Endometrial thickness was increased after both treatments, although endometrial histology appeared atrophic in most biopsies. A circulating dose-response of serum progesterone levels was observed from the first to the 12th week of PVR use. In the high-progesterone-dose group, the scarce presence of Ki-67 and hormone receptors reflected the predominant action of progesterone in endometrial glands and stroma, in parallel with a lower tissue concentration of progesterone in this group. The PVR appears to be a promising method of administering natural progesterone to postmenopausal women treated with estrogen," wrote G. Noe and colleagues.
While the agreement gives IBM the right to use the technology patented by 3Com, and vice versa, it is not automatic that the companies can crank out new SKUs immediately."I have to figure out the work with my development team and express it in a physical entity," Baker said. "But it allows us to use products in the future, with no concern [over violating legal boundaries]."For example, 3Com last year was awarded a patent for a "Media connector cheap tiffany bangles for use with a PCMCIA-architecture communications card," he said.For most issuers, the brass ring to reach for in the next couple of years is the customer-centric business model. Customer-centric means the organization has a complete picture of customers and their stages of life, but it does not stop there.A truly customer-centric organization knows what the customer wants, and tailors products to match those desires.
It appears that while most issuers are doing what could be termed "super targeted" marketing and are moving toward the coveted "segment of one," they still are stalled in product-centric mode when it comes to matching product to person.or good reason, issuer focus has been on the data warehouse for a number of years, as they seek to translate data into strategy and strategy into action.The Emergence Of The VLDBIssuers are seeking to optimize the lifetime value of their customers -- by tapping better prospects for acquisition; incenting profitable cardholders to use the card and stay with the program; and moving delinquent cardholders into cheap tiffany cufflinks appropriate segment for collection quicker; and sometimes letting the least profitable drop out of the portfolio altogether.
All of these activities require larger cheap tiffany bracelets of data, and therefore bigger data warehouses; "very large databases" (VLDB) to be exact.A VLDB is defined as a data warehouse that contains more than a terabyte of data - something unheard of until recently, but now they are increasingly becoming more common.What is not common is an issuer having the internal knowledge of how to manage them."The immense data warehouse is a new animal," says Richard Winter, president of the Winter Corp. in Waltham, Mass., a consulting firm that focuses specifically on VLDBs.Winter and his co-author, Judith Davis, just published a white paper advocating testing VLDBs to reduce financial risk.
Many companies, such as credit card issuers, are in the process of implementing data warehouses that contain 10 terabytes of data. "A couple of years ago, that was almost unthinkable," Winter says.Feeding The Need For Data"The forces of competition are driving companies toward business intelligence solutions that involve more and more involved data," Winter says.However, while issuers may be moving beyond the frontier of established database technology, they likely will face significant risks associated with the sheer volume of data.The integration of credit management into the marketing process is a main driver of this trend."I think that what's going on in a lot of businesses is the integration of previously disparate business functions. That's where a lot of the value of data warehousing comes from," Winter says.cheap tiffany earrings marker of a natural progression toward larger volumes of data is in the general shift in the financial services market toward more integrated financial solutions.As financial services conglomerates form, "that's where the interesting new dynamics are coming from," Winter says. They need to see their customers as a total entity across multiple product and service delivery channels.Test, Or Take A $50 Million RiskIn the recent past, a company would hire a team of data warehouse professionals to create the system and start it running."But 90 percent of data warehouses are much smaller. The team's experience is based on handling warehouses that are no bigger than a few hundred gigabytes," says Winter. "They won't know exactly what happens when you load cheap tiffany key rings terabyte of data into the system."Test the system before the implementation is considered finished."Most companies do not find out what happens to a system with that kind of volume until the end," Winter says. "They don't know until the $30 million budgeted for data warehouse development is spent."
Next year ING, which manages $310 billion around the world, plans to distribute the Galaxy Funds in Europe, a new market for the funds, Mr. Joseph said. He did not specify when next year the sales effort would begin.
Fleet's agreement with United Overseas Bank involves fund management as well as sales.Fleet and United plan to launch an equity fund tracking stocks in Latin America, Mexico, and North America early next year, Mr. Ash said in an interview before his presentation. The fund would be managed and sold by United in Asia, where it has 1,300 branches. Fleet would act as a subadviser, leveraging both the Latin American expertise acquired discount tiffany money clip its recent merger with BankBoston and its relationship with the British firm Oechsle International Advisors, which it partly owns.In the United States, meanwhile, Fleet and United plan to launch a pan-Asian fund managed by Fleet and subadvised by United, which manages and advises $5 billion of U.S. fund assets. This portfolio is scheduled for a launching early next year.
For the most part, analysts said, Fleet's strategy makes sense."The mutual fund industry here is reaching a maturation stage," said James E. Folwell, a consultant at Cerulli Associates of Boston. And Fleet's bid to team up with banks should let it leverage the historical role discount tiffany necklace banks play in the investment market, he added.
But an alliance of this nature needs commitment from both sides, said Burton J. Greenwald, a Philadelphia-based mutual fund analyst."Inevitably in these alliances it's very difficult to get the salespeople on both sides fired up," Mr. Greenwald said. Still, if Fleet does a good job for ING here, they're likely to get good support from the bank in Europe, he said.
Even as it teams up with foreign banks, Fleet is said to be eyeing an expansion of a sales agreement with Mellon Bank Corp.'s Dreyfus subsidiary.According to James A. Neiland, senior vice president and national sales manager at Dreyfus' discount tiffany pendant institutions group, the two banking companies are in discussions that could eventually result in Mellon's selling the Galaxy Funds. Fleet already sells the Dreyfus Funds, Mr. Neiland said.As it happens, Dreyfus already has an alliance with United Overseas Bank. But the Singapore bank, which entered the relationship a year ago, has yet to jointly develop any investment product with Dreyfus, said David T. Goss, a managing director at United.MARCHING ON IN ITS BID to become a top provider of computer and networking components, IBM Corp. signed a cross-licensing pact with 3Com Corp. giving each wide access to the other's technology.Under terms of the deal, IBM, Armonk, N.Y., and 3Com, Santa Clara, Calif., will share patents on IBM technology including server access, load balancing, Web caching, ATM/Ethernet/Token Ring, network interface cards and network management.
IBM will have access to 3Com technology that includes hardware and software on cheap tiffany devices, network interface cards, modem technology, as well as routers, switches, voice-over-IP and LAN telephony.The pact between the two companies is the latest major deal for the IBM Technology Group. Earlier this year, it signed multibillion-dollar deals with Dell Computer Corp., Round Rock, Texas; The Acer Group, Taipei, Taiwan; and EMC Corp., Hopkington, Mass., in which IBM will supply computer and networking technology and components.The division is also in talks with Compaq Computer Corp., Houston, about a major outsourcing deal-including the licensing of IBM's copper processor technology, said executives at both companies.IBM's agreement with 3Com is not the first between the two companies, as discount tiffany ring have had longstanding licensing agreements. Bruce Claflin, 3Com's president, is also a former top executive at the IBM PC Co."What's occurring [is] each company is getting access to the patents of the other," said Tony Baker, director of intellectual property and licensing for the IBM Technology Group. Baker reports to Jim Vanderslice, IBM's senior vice president for the Technology Group, and is a force behind the partnering moves."We're excited about it," Baker said. "It just promotes the relationship between the two companies." Unlike the other megadeals, the 3Com agreement is not being measured in dollars and cents."It gives me access to patents of 3Com's that I can incorporate into technology products and sell in the OEM space," Baker said. "It empowers them with the same ability. It gives freedom of action. I can now take some of their innovation in the areas of modems, and use it in the ideas I have," he said.
The marketing realignment has resulted in a leaner staff that has borrowed a Procter & Gamble branding philosophy to create nine individual profit centers that DMC manages, says Seyfreth. The department has been cut to 19 staffers from 30, with half of them deployed to DMC's nine facilities. Early and consistent marketing evaluation has been a key component in making the transition smooth and justifying the department's new direction. For instance, a recent nurse recruitment campaign was evaluated on whether it made the phones ring and the quality of nurse candidates.The internal communication process for reaching DMC's 15,000 employees and 3,000 physicians needed to become much more efficient. After evaluating what communication channels were most effective, DMC can now reach its internal audience in discount tiffany bangle than a third of the time it once took -from two days to eight hours. On average, marketing programs are evaluated on a monthly basis.
Although the marketing department has survived significant cuts, marketers aren't expected to be incredible at everything. "It's important to identify one or two excellent skill sets and share those talents across the organization," says Seyfreth. It's also important to regularly demonstrate how departmental achievements are contributing to organization-wide business goals like physician referrals and staff recruitment - an area where PR professionals often drop the ball.
Presentation is EverythingUltimately the way you are discount tiffany bracelet professionally is based on how you present your achievements. For Melissa McMahon, associate director of PR for America's Blood Centers (ABC), selecting major projects that demonstrate national PR results is key. McMahon's position was newly created when she joined ABC three years ago. She is annually evaluated on achieving national awareness for ABC and developing stronger PR relationships with ABC's 90 member organizations.
Unlike the agency background McMahon comes from where the discount tiffany cufflink process was driven by a leadership/management rating system, ABC's professional assessments are more informal. It's up to McMahon to develop communication goals and demonstrate key achievements.As a rule of thumb, she highlights three or four projects that convey national media results and demonstrate her ability to work with local PR counterparts. In addition to her base salary and 7% raises, McMahon receives sporadic bonuses for work well done. A recent example of work that earned her a bonus involved a crisis management project. One of ABC's local blood centers received bad press when a paper inaccurately reported that it had not adequately tested its blood supply, which resulted in a man contracting HIV from a tainted blood transfusion.
McMahon worked with the local center on developing accurate talking points discount tiffany earring set the record straight, tracked down appropriate FDA experts who confirmed the center was using appropriate blood tests and identified expert spokespeople. These efforts helped to contain the negative press and prevent it from spreading on a national level, says McMahon. The strategies also showed upper management that a solid communications infrastructure is in place for proactive media relations.Fleet Boston Corp.'s asset management unit has struck sales agreements with leading banks in the Netherlands and Singapore, a senior executive told an industry conference here.The deals -- with ING Group of Amsterdam and United Overseas Bank Group of Singapore -- are part of the banking company's strategy to expand national and global sales of its mutual funds through strategic alliances, said Robert L. Ash, managing director and chief executive discount tiffany key ring of retail investments.Mr. Ash, who oversees the $20 billion-asset Galaxy Mutual Funds Group, said the company is looking for growth abroad because "the industry is glutted in the United States." He spoke at a sales conference sponsored by American Banker and a sister publication, Bank Investment Marketing magazine.The deal with ING has both a domestic and an international component, said Richard Joseph, director of business development for the Galaxy Funds. The Dutch bank's U.S. sales force, totaling 6,000 people, has begun selling the Galaxy Funds, and Fleet's 1,160 full- service and platform brokers are selling ING's fledgling $800 million- asset U.S. fund family and its annuities.
Exceptions to this rule are papers in smaller markets with a high Internet presence. The 180,000-circulation Austin (Texas) American-Statesman has had 51 dot-com and e-retail advertisers since March, said Jack Puryear, national manager of major accounts. Advertisers are flocking to Austin because "we're No. 2 on the list of the most-wired cities in America," he said. E
Advertise? Yes. Pay? Maybe.A problem for newspapers with e-retail accounts is worrying about whether they'll pay their bills."We haven't had a bad experience, but there are those who have," said Nicholas Cannistraro Jr., president/general manager of the Newspaper National Network. Cannistraro said that some advertising agencies for e-commerce firms try to practice "sequential liability," which allows them to avoid financial liability if their tiffany money clip on sale don't pay up. But Cannistraro won't accept that, since agencies are customarily liable for their clients' bills. If he's unsure of a client's or its agency's credit, he demands cash upfront, he said."We ask for credit information, and if it looks reasonable, we're fine, but if it doesn't, we ask for cash upfront," said Ernie Pricco, national advertising director of the San Francisco Chronicle.
"There's lots of undercapitalized operations among e-commerce companies and their agencies," Cannistraro said. "Newspapers have to be careful about getting paid." - Ken LiebeskindWith hospitals in an intense penny-pinching mode, the climate couldn't be better for demonstrating how your communication programs contribute to the bottom line.Increasingly hospitals are rewarding this accountability with attractive incentives and -more importantly - the opportunity to contribute to strategic organization-wide decisions up front.PR and marketing departments are no longer considered afterthoughts, but tiffany necklace on sale players in shaping the organization's strategic direction. To this end, PR and marketing executives must show how they make the cash registers ring. The days of warm-and- fuzzy community relations campaigns that don't deliver quantitative branding results are over.To arrive at a definitive explanation of what the performance expectations are for healthcare PR and marketing executives, HPRMN spoke with several senior-level communicators from a wide range of healthcare organizations who provided candid insight on what it takes to prove your worth to upper management tiffany ring on sale get the professional compensation that goes along with it.
Achieving Quality Kaiser Permanente stakes much of its employee performance expectations on achieving quality-focused goals that shape the healthcare system's mission. PR professionals who work in the Oakland office and handle national PR programs are expected to demonstrate how they've contributed to at least three annual organization-wide goals that deal with either quality improvement initiatives or new quality planning efforts, says Alan Mann, Kaiser's VP of public affairs. Senior executives who achieve these goals are offered varying levels of incentives that range from 10% to 25%. Kaiser is also considering making similar tiffany pendant on sale available to mid- management.
These incentives, however, are not in addition to base salaries; they are a part of the overall salary structure, which means a portion of executive salaries are at risk, says Mann. Compensation is based on achieving a performance mix that is based on two-thirds organization- wide goals and one-third individual goals. With such an emphasis on performance, Kaiser holds workshops on writing effective employee evaluations. Mann works with his department on developing communication plans that include actionable and measurable goals. "It's vitally important to state goals precisely by choosing verbs that describe exactly what's going to be accomplished in the tiffany sale year," says Mann. Key examples include using verbs like "develop" and "execute" to describe a strategy instead of plans that "improve" or "continue to achieve" progress in key areas.Early/Consistent Evaluation
When the Detroit Medical Center adopted a decentralized branding approach for its nine facilities earlier this year, it overhauled the marketing department to become an integrated delivery network for communications that relies on shared resources. To make this marketing transition, DMC consulted with Jenny Seyfreth of Seyfreth & Associates who is the system's interim VP of marketing.
While building the awareness of its connoisseur brands,Tabacalera poked fun at itself with the Vega Fina Natural campaign. The machine-rolled product tapped into pro football fans as the brand they can trade up to from mass market stogies or down to when they do not have the inclination to buy a $5 smoke. Along with sampling at sports bars and restaurants in NFL cities, print ads and airplane banners dragged above stadiums carried messages like "Premium cigars even the punter can afford,""For those who can't quite say aficionado," and "if you insist on an expensive cigar, light it with a $ 10 bill" Next month an image campaign breaks for cheap tiffany necklaces Louis Rey positioning the brand as the patron saint of the six-figure income, the leveraged buyout and the finer things in life.
Another tool Tabacalera is using to pass along knowledge and drive consumers to retailers is the Internet."There are two kinds of people: online and those that are not online," said Young."The online folks like to think that everyone else is not, and you've got to let them feel that they are in the know." Yahoo!'s Shereshewsky contends that there is a high correlation between premium cigar smokers and consumers who are online-more than 80%-and that demo is more affluent, older and more educated than your typical packaged goods consumer.
Among the early online forays was a Father's Day promo with Yahoo! for Romeo y Julieta.Tabacalera took ownership of a few generic terms like premium cigar, wine+cigars and competitor brands like Montecristo, Macanudo and Partagas so a banner ad for a free Romeo y Julieta cigar popped up on the results page when visitors executed a search.The link included a brief survey of cigar buying habits, and coupons were mailed to consumers with a map showing the 10 closest retailers.Last month, Tabacalera partnered online with Cigar Aficionado.A generic page on the magazine's Web site offered visitors who completed a short buying-- habit survey a video called The Art of Premium Cigar Making, starring cigar master Benji Menedez. Both online efforts increased the company's database of smokers and cheap tiffany pendants a window to their purchasing habits.
"There may be four different ways people look for a product,"said Young. "They may only buy robustos and only Dominican cigars. They may only shop for a certain wrapper or they only buy cigars that cost $4. There's a lot of different variables, and once you crack the code,you give them what they want."
On the education front,Tabacalera is using Menendez's instant credibility in an Ask Benji"Web page and is mulling a signing tour and dinners, at least with the retail trade. Other online initiatives on tap include another promotion with Yahoo! that cross markets watches, golf, travel, clothes and other undisclosed brand merchandise to motivate consumers to get involved with a Web page in addition to flagging nearby cigar retailers to visit with maps cheap tiffany rings coupons that can be downloaded from the Internet.
"What we're trying to do is get people to the tobacconist said Young."The relationship with the tobacconist is how you really enjoy what you're doing. It's an education and we're trying to hook up people interested in a product with people who are selling it.That's a relationship."
Snagging legal-smoking-age consumers may require special tactics. While there are a tiffany on sale share of image ads showing the successful middle-age and paunchless man with a gambler's glare and either a babe by his side or a snifter full of brandy in his cigarless hand, newer brands are taking a different tack to snag younger smokers, said Mike Jessee, assistant editor of Smoke magazine. Even in the post-fad days, enough women are still smoking cigars to warrant targeted ads. Thus, Domingold ran a beefcake ad of a topless hunk with a cigar in hand."You're not going to sell to women with the same kind of ads that have been targeted to men,"said Jessee.