Welcome to the big integration, a Forum and a Blog dedicated to the questions of integrating web data with other customer data; web analytics with enterprise systems.The project comes from a strong interest in how web analytics, and analytics culture in general, is going to influence marketing and business as a whole in the coming years. The concepts and framework of database marketing are going to have a much bigger impact on how we sell online, and how we manage web sites based on what we know about our customers.

This is a vast and complex question that will necessitate the contribution of people from the web analytics, business intelligence, and database marketing communities. Hopefully, all those bright and busy people will see in the big integration a convenient and useful platform where to share and debate.

So, here goes: the main part of this project is a Forum. Why? Although blogging is great, it tends to be ephemeral, due to its calendar-based, non-topical structure, whereas in a forum, all various discussions can easily be grouped and referred to. In the Forum, you will find various topics ranging from specific application discussions to theoretical ones, in the hope you will find everything you need in order to do your own big integration in your organization.

The Blog will first serve as a launcher of the project, but hopefully will rapidly be used as intended, i.e. a summary of the multiple discussions going on in the Forum, through the posts and RSS feeds. My job will be to make it easy for you to follow what is going on.

If anything, you should read this most insightful text by Jim Novo. It says it all about my intention with this project.

Go to the Forum.

Go to the Blog.

Jacques Warren

February 2007