Data Mining
Industry Evaluation
Some of the major players in the industry are search engines like Google and Yahoo, which have the capabilities of gathering data about the people who surf the Web and of providing various levels of detail for the specific information that users search for (Story, 2008).
IBM and Oracle are also two of the other major companies in the data mining industry. IBM provides a wide range of analytic and data warehousing solutions that enable the best approach for every organizational situation – from traditional multi-dimensional data mining capabilities to mashups and industry models (IBM, n.d.). Oracle, on the other hand, provides data mining capabilities within the Oracle database, which can also be written as SQL functions (Oracle, n.d.).
There are a vast number of opportunities that are made available to and by the data mining industry. For example, through data mining, marketers can provide customers with customized service such as information that the customers are likely to use, special promotions, news updates, and stock quotes (Konrad, 2001). This can significantly reduce advertising costs and increase revenue. However, such opportunities also come with threats such as complaints about the consumers’ violated right to privacy and information misuse. In particular, data mining companies like Google are able to gather user information through cookies that track the users’ web activity. Similarly, with such capabilities, having the users’ personal information fall into the wrong hands can result in crimes like identity theft.
Current Status of the Technology
Although many of the major organizations now have data mining capabilities implemented in their systems, it can be said that this technology is still under R & D as many more organizations have yet to employ this technology. For example, scientists claim that Amazon has yet to perfect its data mining capability (Konrad, 2001). In addition, more and more companies are joining the industry where the focus is on the creation of automated data-mining applications for non-statisticians. Moreover, many of the ERP companies, such as Deltek (Ghoniem, 2003) and Infor (Infor, 2012) are in the process of incorporating data mining capabilities into their suite of products. Furthermore, a type data mining called video data mining is still currently being developed (Saravanan & Srininvasan, 2012).
The data mining technology is highly reliable in that so many companies are already taking advantage of it in order to provide better customer service. However, in the end, its reliability depends largely on the amount of ingenuity, knowledge, and skill of the analyst.
With regards to predictions of future development, it can be predicted that data mining capabilities will be developed for video content as mentioned earlier. Data mining applications may also be developed for social media (Montalbano, 2012) and perhaps even for home computer owners for the applications that they commonly use such as email, file storage or file management systems, and office applications.
Implementation Issues
One of the major challenges in implementing data mining systems is the integration of redundant or conflicting data that come from various sources (“Data Mining: Issues,” n.d.). The implementation process would also involve the tedious process of identifying and cataloguing data, which involves data integrity, data ownership and the determination of what the data are, how data is processed, how reliable the data is, and who own them (Breen & Rodrigues, n.d.). There’s also the possibility that some of the data have errors or missing values.
Another issue is whether to set up a multi-dimensional database structure or a relational one. Multidimensional structures enable multidimensional data mining but relational structures have been proven to perform better in client/server environments. Moreover, with the number of people involved in this initiative, some employees may not be as cooperative as the others since not everyone will immediately appreciate the value that a data mining application brings. As well, considering that data mining applications can be quite complex, users should be provided with sufficient training on how to correctly use the application and how to make the most out of it.
No matter how good the application is, if it is not set up correctly or if the users do not have the necessary knowledge to use it then there’s the risk that the application won’t provide the correct data or that the user will interpret or analyze the data in the wrong way.
References
Breen, C. & Rodrigues, L. M. (n.d.). Implementing a data warehouse at Inglis Innovative
Services. Retrieved from http://www.himss.org/content/files/jhim/15-2/him15202.pdf.
Data mining: Issues. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/
jason.frand/teacher/technologies/palace/issues.htm.
Ghoniem, E. B. (2003, June). Deltek: A major player in the ERP arena. Contract Management.
Retrieved from http://www.ncmahq.org/files/Articles/DF4D2_06_03_p62.pdf.
IBM. (n.d.). Data warehousing and analytics. Retrieved from http://www-01.ibm.com/
software/data/infosphere/data-warehousing/.
Konrad, R. (2001, February 8). Will data mining revolutionize e-commerce? CNet News.
Retrieved from http://news.cnet.com/2009-1017-252162.html
Montalbano, E. (2012, January 26). FBI seeks data-mining app for social media. Information
Week. Retrieved from http://www.informationweek.com/news/
government/security/232500552.
Oracle. (n.d.). Oracle data mining: Powering next-generation predictive applications. Retrieved
from http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/options/
advanced-analytics/odm/index.html.
Rocco, C. M. (2011). Guest editorial: Data mining in reliability and risk assessment.
International Journal of Performability Engineering, 7 (1), 3-4.
Saravanan, D. & Srininvasan, S. (2012). Video image retrieval using data mining techniques.
Journal of Computer Applications, 5 (1), 39-42.
Story, L. (2008, March 20). A company promises the deepest data mining yet. The New York
Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/20/business/media/
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