Chris Barchard
Professor Lawson
Management and Informational Systems
February 24, 2012
Homework 5
I chose the article "Kelley Blue Book taps data analytics tools to improve car valuation" published on September 1, 2011 by Jaikumar Vijayan. Kelley Blue Book is a popular website that car buyers use to find estimates for how much a vehicle is really worth. Until recently, the numbers were largely educated conjectures that
Kelley analysts arrived at by running a handful of car sales and other
metrics through a rudimentary pricing algorithm. KBB is now using sophisticated data analytics tools to sift
through volumes of historical and current data to arrive at what company
executives say are far better car valuations. Dan Ingle, vice president of analytic insights technology at Kelley Blue Book said, "We went from using megabytes of data to using terabytes of data."About two years ago, the company started using a new IBM
Netezza Twinfin data warehousing appliance, which it supplemented with a
second similar system last December. The two systems together, with
software from Information Builders and MicroStrategy, form the core of
Kelley's new data warehousing and business intelligence capabilities. KBB's efforts to mine social media and Web data such as Web logs and
clickstream data have also greatly improved the company's ability to
forecast ad inventory, gauge customer sentiment and predict user
behavior. This has turned KBB from a legacy book-publishing company to an analytics-driven operation. Hushman said, "We could do it on a daily basis if we wanted to."
I chose this article because I thought it was interesting that small and midsize businesses are now using such high tech data systems. To improve from updating every few months to once a week is a huge step, and obviously its been a very helpful adjustment. I assume the customer satisfaction has drastically increased since the advancement. The amount of information KBB can now process is exponential compared to the low numbers that were being processed by the previous system used. I was also surprised to see that KBB was one of the first SMB's to start using much more powerful analytic systems. Below I have provided a link to the new and imporsed Kelley Blue Book website.
http://www.kbb.com/
Interesting stuff, I wonder how much the switch from the old system to the new operating system has helped to improve their customer service and daily operations. I agree with the blogger when he says he believes customer satisfaction has more than likely increased. With the new processing power Kelly Blue Book has definitely seen a decrease in delay time between KBB finding the value of a car and KBB releasing it to their customers. It also sounds as if the pricing of cars will continually be updated. If this is the case then KBB users will receive more accurate numbers on a cars value a greater percentage of the time. After reading this I now believe that KBB has improved their day to day operations and I would consider using KBB's services in the future!
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