Back 9 years ago when I was at eCRM, my buddies Jay, Fishferbrains and Chochain considered the possibilities of path analysis. It is something that, as far as I know, has still not cracked the world open although it has the potential to do so.
What originally got us thinking about this was the idea of how we could analyze the stickiness of a website in our eCommerce analysis proto-product. We understood that every session had a beginning, middle and end. How many steps did it take to satisfy a customer? How much time did it take? The added value of course was that uniquely in Hyperion we could monetize all of that and EPM it via ERP integration and the traditional strengths of the company.
What was more interesting was where our intuition took us. What about health care? How many doctor visits does it take to cure a broken leg? What about justice? How many trips to the attorney's office, the court, mediation, police station, would an individual suspected in a crime take before he was convicted or absolved? Every room in every building in every profession could be thought of as a web page. What we could do for website analysis, we could surely do for any number of service industries.
That was about as far as we took it - but we figure there is a world of analysis out there. The trick is to get the transaction data and sessionize it. I understand that since those bad old days, the folks who work on the Hadoop suite have mastered sessionization and put it into open source. Very nice.
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