Oct 17, 2008

What is Data Mining?


The word "Mining" refers to the extraction of valuable things like minerals from the earth. However, data mining is the process by which we can extract interesting patterns and knowledge from huge amounts of data. The data mining is a relatively new field of study and research and has generated huge interests among business communities. It is a an important part of business intelligence which deals with how an organization uses, analyzes, manages and stores data it collects from various sources to make better decisions.

In the popular article, "IT Does Not Matter" Nicholas Carr argued that the use of IT is nowadays so widespread that any particular organization does not have any strategic advantage over the others due to the use of IT. So IT has lost its strategic importance. But data mining is one of most important concept of IT that proves him wrong. It reflects that an organization can create strategic advantages over its competitors by making use of data mining to get to important insights from the the data it collects. The way an organization collects data and analyzes it is not same for any organizations. So an organization can easily gain competitive values over others using data mining.