My Understanding of Data Mining

My Understanding on Data Warehousing, Data Mining and Business Intelligence

Due 02/19/2013

2013 Spring CIST 1200-001 Organizations, Applications and Technology: Yong Shi

In an era where information is steadily becoming abundant, we find ourselves tasked with the difficulty of storing, analyzing and interpreting data received. The concepts of Data Warehousing, Data Mining and Business Intelligence are three tools that will be discussed in this paper. With the ever changing and competitive business world, each of these concepts fined themselves ever more important as more and more data is collected.

Every business in today’s world is in need of a central repository of data which is created by integrating data from one or more sources. Centralization of data is needed to maximize user access and analysis. Dramatic technological advances are making this vision a reality for many companies. And, equally dramatic advances in data analysis software are allowing users to access this data freely. The data analysis software is what supports data mining. Data warehouses store current as well as historical data and are used for creating trending reports for senior management reporting such as annual and quarterly comparisons. I currently use such a process in my current role of my profession as a Financial Analyst. With the availability of historical data, we can compare how current productivity differs from both historical performances and forecasted performance. Having this information readily available gives management insight into trends and better decision making. The data stored in the warehouse are uploaded from our operational systems (such as marketing, sales, production etc.). This data is then retrieved from various fronts and twisted and analyzed from different perspectives depending on the trends and calculations an individual is wishing to view. The use of such information can be implemented to assist our customers make better decision ordering our...