My odyssey culminating in this book began in 1991, when, after an 8 year
absence from analytical work, I joined a small database marketing firm located
in Washington, DC and discovered the world of database marketing which later
was one source of Customer Relationship Management (CRM). I was hired as the
firm’s Director of Statistical Services, and soon found myself immersed in data
mining, fuzzy logic, survival analysis, neural networks, and customer retention
and lifetime value models. That work led me to two discoveries that put me on
the road to this book. First, I discovered client/server enterprise computing and
soon after Object Technology and the work of Ivar Jacobson, James Rumbaugh
and his co-authors, Grady Booch, and James Martin and James O’Dell. And second, I discovered data warehousing a field that coupled with database marketing,
and data mining placed me back in touch with my career-long interest in Executive Information and Decision Support Systems (DSS).