With increased competition bearing down on all industries, the use of data mining to help in business decision-making continues to grow.
Tangible proof of this trend is the current wide adoption, in a broad range of industries, of customer relations management (CRM) software and processes, which use data mining for analysis.
This is the general outlook for data mining technology according to experts attending the three-day Asia-Pacific Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Conference which ends on Wednesday. The conference was organised by the E-Business Technology Institute of the University of Hong Kong.
'Interest is definitely on the rise,' said Ronny Kohavi, the conference's keynote speaker and director of data mining at CRM vendor Blue Martini. 'Many companies today are discovering the value of data mining to know what their customers want.'
Simply put, data mining is the analysis of data for relationships that have not previously been discovered. As part of the CRM process, the technology is used to analyse large databases to solve business-decision issues.
Information gathered from such analysis, for example, can be used by a catalogue-based retailer's marketing department to target which profitable customers to give their new catalogues to.
According to research firm International Data Corp (IDC), the need for new and established companies to measure, predict and optimise business performance has fuelled demand for analytic application solutions.
