Decentrix Offers Big Brother in a Box

As their jobs become increasingly complex, station group CEOs are looking for ways to gain quick access to financial and sales information from their far-flung stations and sort through it effectively so that they can identify and act on problems.

One company that says it has a solution for such needs is Denver-based Decentrix, which specializes in business intelligence for media industries.

For broadcasters, it offers a product called BIAnalytix, which allows CEOs and others to rapidly drill down through data, even to the level of an individual salesperson.

Overlaying a Microsoft "data warehouse" with Decentrix's own proprietary software, the system captures data from all the source systems at stations that a CEO might want to analyze, including program management systems, traffic and billing, proposal systems, Nielsen audience data and online automation systems.

Decentrix has already sold systems to three major TV station groups, but is not at liberty to identify them.

TVNewsCheck's Peter Caranicas spoke to Decentrix founder and CEO Wayne Ruting, a veteran of broadcasting and the Internet, about his product and how Decentrix is positioned to help the TV station business.

An edited transcript:

In a station group, who could benefit from BIAnalytix?

Everybody, including the CEO, the CFO, the VP of sales -- every executive in the company. If you are going to execute a business intelligence solution, you want it to be very widely used through the corporation in order for it to have the greatest value.

Can different individuals have different levels of access?

Yes. When they log into the system they're authenticated by their login and password, and that gives them rights to a particular data slice of the data warehouse. For instance, if they're a salesperson at a station, they could be looking at exactly the same report as the CEO, but what they'll see is only the data for their clients.

For a station sales manager, the view will be for all the salespeople below him. The regional managers would see all the stations underneath them. And the CEO can see everything.

I assume it's Web-based to allow access from anywhere.

Yes. It's all provided through a portal. You can be in a hotel room and if you have Internet access you have total access to the information and to the data you have rights to have access to.

You say that BIAnalytix interfaces with other systems at the stations. How does it connect to those?

It's a very simple process. What we want to do is include every transactional element, or transaction. If you're talking about a traffic system, you want to know everything there is to know about a spot: whether it is edited, has been moved, canceled. We want each of those transactions to be extracted. We define a very simple mapping from the operational systems to what we call a staging area, or a staging schema.

This involves very simple map where a vendor of that transactional system can look at it and say, OK, I can map this field to that staging schema; I know exactly where it goes. It's essentially a superset of all the transactional information we are aware of in all these systems.

Do you define a transaction as a sale?

It might be a sale, but at more granular level a transaction describes the spots themselves. The order [for a spot] is kind of high-level for us. An order will comprise lots of different pieces of advertising placed over multiple days, often with multiple pieces of copy.

We pull information about the actual individual spot -- what it is, what the copy was, what dollars are attached to it, what precisely was the time it was placed, and everything that happens to it afterwards. We want to know when it was moved, where it was moved, whether it was canceled or amended.

The history of everything is in there?

Yes, it's all in there. Consequently, if I want to step back into the past to, say, exactly the same day last year for comparison purposes, I can. When I step back to that day, I am actually looking at the data as it existed on that day with 100 percent accuracy. I'm not looking at a summary. I'm looking at the detail as it appeared at that point in time.

So you can access anything you want as long as the data goes back that far?

Absolutely. We're in an Olympics year. If I want to make comparisons, I can step back four years.

How long would it take to implement this?

Typically the process of taking a brand new system and mapping it requires about three or four weeks. Once you have accomplished that you can extract the transactional information and homogenize it into a data warehouse. We generally work with the vendor of the operational systems.