Data Mining: What’s in It for You?

One of the popular buzzwords these days is data mining, and while data mining in and of itself is part of computing science, the term is often used for wider data analysis, especially in relation to business intelligence. An important point to note is that the term ‘data mining’ is quite unfortunate and does not describe what it refers to - while the term ‘mining’ should indicate that data is being removed from some source, data mining does not actually involve the extraction of data but the multifaceted analysis of data coming from various sources in order to achieve specific analytical goals.

Why do you need data mining?

If your organization is on the cusp of new development, expansion, acquisition or growth, or if you have some important decisions to make in the nearest future about your business processes, customer relations and so on and so forth, you need some hard numbers and facts to help you understand the full complexity of the problem before you. Traditional data analysis methods often fail to grasp the multidimensional and multi-formatted nature of data, which leads to fragmented knowledge and thus decisions that may not be completely adequate to your declared goals. Data mining allows you to reconcile data coming from various sources and (at first glance) in absolutely incompatible formats in order to create business intelligence analysis truly worthy of your attention and the attention of your clients and team members.

What can data mining do for you?

Through complex algorithms and a lot of behind the scenes work, professionally and correctly administered data mining can work miracles on large segments of data. As data mining can be deliberately done without reference to previously established connections or groupings within the data, the processes involved in data mining can point to similarities between user groups, purchasing decisions, technical processes and so on and so forth that would have never before been parts of the same equations. Data mining as part of business intelligence gathering can assist in thus observing connections and interrelationships within your data sets that you had no idea about while also making the data easier for the eyes through vivid summarization and visual representation.

Data mining and business intelligence

While business intelligence includes more than just data mining, there is certainly a very notable interplay in place. Data mining assists and informs with business intelligence work by conducting real time analysis of vast scopes of data. Customer behaviour, product interconnectivity, reference to historical data, benchmarking, and predictability are all parts of the complex web of phenomena coming together in data mining within business intelligence processes.

If you have the right tools and the right talent in place, your data mining approaches can make your business or organization several steps ahead of the game when compared to your competition. If you are able to pinpoint client decision interrelations, as well as the things that truly work and certainly do not in your regular sales and promotions calendar, the benefits of such business intelligence work are felt almost immediately.

Contact our experts at Thoransoft to learn more about data mining