One of the clichés of the IT era and competitive market is data mining and warehousing.
Data warehousing: It is basically an IT architecture aimed at storing and organizing information in a meaningful manner. A data warehouse system consists of a set of programs that extract data from the operational environment like reports on sales call, branch and regional performance, product/ brand performance/ customer complaints, service calls, and so on. The strategy of data warehousing involves providing data to the users in a meaningful manner, thereby helping them in taking operational and strategic decisions. Typically, successful data warehousing involves the following:
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Providing information to both the operational and strategic decision maker.
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Data warehouse often supports analysis of trends over a period of time and comparisons of current and historical data.
Data Mining: The term data mining is just one of several terms, including knowledge extraction, data archaeology, information harvesting, software, and even data dredging, that actually describe the concept of knowledge discovery in databases. Let us begin with a few basic facts to explain what data mining really means:
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Many organizations, both private and government, have devoted a tremendous amount of resources to the construction and maintenance of large information databases over the recent decades, including the development of large-scale data warehouses.
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Frequently the data cannot be analyzed by standard statistical methods, either because there are numerous missing records or because the data is in the form of qualitative rather than quantitative measures.
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In many cases the information contained in these databases is undervalued and underutilized because the data cannot be easily accessed or analyzed.
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Some databases have grown so large that even the system administrators do not always know what information might be represented or how relevant it might be to the questions on hand.
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It would be beneficial for organizations to have a way to “mine” these large databases for important information or pattern that may be contained within.
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There are a variety of data mining methodologies that may be used to analyze data sources in order to discover new patterns and trends.
The idea behind data mining, then, is the nontrivial process of identifying valid, novel, potentially useful, and ultimately understandable patterns in data. Marketing Research provides information at a specific time on customers, trade, competition and future trends in each of these segments. Most of these Research exercises help strengthen an enterprise and assist it in strategic decision making. But marketing is a war that requires continuous surveillance of markets (customers), competition, and other structural components like government policy. Based on this continuous surveillance, successful enterprises evolve their tactics to win smaller battles which help it win the war of market shares.
The entire concept of market intelligence is similar to military sciences, where it is a known fact that no army can win a war without good, effective, and timely information on enemy forces and the terrain on which the war is going to be fought. Learn more about data mining and data warehouses only at the University Canada West.