Building a Data Warehouse and Data Mining for a Strategic Advantage

摘要

Technology is fundamentally changing the way companies do business. Consolidations, globalization, and deregulation have put increased pressure on managers to better understand their businesses and take them to the next level. Given the fast-paced business environment today, decision-making cycles have been shortened and managers need accurate information in a timely manner in order to make quality decisions. A properly designed and populated data warehouse can provide the relevant data necessary to make good decisions. Significant advances in computer hardware and end user software have made it easy to access, analyze, and display information at the desktop. The data companies continue to collect from their current information system provides a great source of information about its customers and processes. Data mining software programs are powerful tools that can be used to interrogate the massive amounts of data contained in the data warehouse in order to uncover relationships. To help business leaders and decision makers manage their companies effectively, companies need to make as much information as possible available and give decision-makers the tools they need to explore it according to Kapstone (1995). By implementing a data warehouse and using data mining tools companies can uncover relationships that can be used to achieve strategic advantages. First, I will explain data warehouses, why they are built, and how to build them. Second, I will cover data mining tools and the benefits companies are experiencing by using them. Finally, I will focus on the strategic advantages of building a data warehouse and extracting valuable data using sophisticated data mining tools.