Data mining provides a method for businesses to get a competitive advantage. Its usefulness can be accounted for in many aspects. One way to use data mining would be to maximize the effectiveness of advertising by researching a product’s demographic. Knowing an age group, preferences, opinions, etc. can completely change the outcome and improve sales.
Another way data mining can provide benefits would be researching into investments. This would help understand where money is going and provide an opportunity to reallocate the money spent to prevent wasting it or be more productive. Now when you bring technology into the picture, data mining can increase efficiency and reduce man hours by speeding up this process and focus on the important information at hand, instead of unorganized data that can be difficult to interpret. Thus, going to show just how technology and data mining working hand in hand can improve a business’ potential for success.
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Data mining is an important part of today’s business world because it saves time by taking a large collection of information, analyzes the information and puts it into a useable format. Stair and Reynolds (2014) quoted the CEO of Blue Cross and Blue Shield saying data mining turns the information “into actionable information and insights that will improve the quality and delivery of care” (p. 157). The same effect can be stated for any organization, in any industry. Data mining essentially takes the “grunt work” out of finding the important information. The requirement is that someone must be capable of reading the information given. Data placed on a piece of paper isn’t always easy to interpret and often requires someone trained to read these reports so time is not wasted by misinterpreting data. This is something I have to deal with when I work on organization assessments and surveys, and depending on the size of the report, can take a few days to a couple of weeks as I cross reference information and use other tools to help confirm or deny information. Another requirement is trusting the information to be accurate as Stair and Reynolds (2014) stated when comparing online analytical processing (OLAP) and data mining.
As the saying goes, time is money, so any tool that saves a company time is worth spending a little time using.
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Business intelligence in the Navy has grown tremendously over the past ten years. Ten years ago most of the systems did not collect much data for trending; the majority of this relied on paper logs that were accessible but not very analyzed due to the amount of paperwork. With new improved systems and the more involved use of computers data can be easily pieced. Systems throughout the world, much like that used at plants, not only displays data but it also collects this data and stores it to provide trends. Another way is the use of mobile devices, ten years ago when in a maintenance upkeep it was hard to get approval to accomplish certain tasks because of the amount of detail that needed to be provided. Stair & Reynolds (2013) “The use of smartphones and tablet computers to connect the corporate databases has increased. Data can be sent to smartphones or tablet computers when they are connected to larger computers or wirelessly.” (p. 155) Because of this we can now send unclassified
