US Bank won the 2006 SAS Enterprise Intelligence Award for capitalizing on data created by 13 million consumer-banking customers and 1 million business customers, notes David Stodder in a recent issue of Intelligent Enterprise. "Never-ending modeling and mining cycles provide critical intelligence for multiple (and multichannel) US Bank marketing campaigns," he explains. "Using the results along with SAS Interaction Management software, the bank can track customer behavior and let representatives know when to get in touch, especially if they become aware of anomalies or important status changes."

The award was presented at the recent SAS User Group International (SUGI) conference in San Francisco. "Data mining and CRM analysis professionals, as well as their direct business and IT management bosses, understand better than most the idea of information refinement cycles based on their experience with testing models," Stodder explains. "What's new is that this notion is spreading to other parts of organizations and affecting many more kinds of business computing."

As Stodder further points out, continuous improvement "is an essential component in making business process management (BPM) a success." Expect this commitment to continous improvement to continue gathering momentum in the corporate world -- just as Kaizen helped Japanese auto companies outperform Detroit and ascending the levels of the capability maturity model (CMM) has built the credibility of the Indian software and services industry.

Robert Pirsig captured the drift in his mid-1970s classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. "The real train of knowledge isn't a static entity that can be stopped and subdivided," he writes. "It's always going somewhere. On a track called Quality."