Chapter List

Part Overview

• Enhancing customer relationships

• Enhancing services and products

• Solving difficult problems

• Performing Data Mining

Overview

As we embark on the twenty-first century, the business climate can be characterized by two foremost challenges: fierce competition and rapid change, each amplifying the effects of the other. Change is both fueling and being fueled by the Internet explosion. It is one of the forces driving brutal competition to gain and retain customers. E-commerce, whether business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C), increases consumers' options in the competitive landscape. Responding to this environment inspires organizations to search for answers, both internally and externally. At the same time, companies are accruing massive amounts of data, which is sometimes at minute detail (such as click-stream data generated by Web-page accesses).

Data mining is becoming increasingly important to mainstream organizations because these major trends are converging. Data mining is of great interest because it is imperative for organizations to realize the competitive value of information contained within their data repositories. This book is devoted to data mining topics: why it's important, the technologies involved, management of the process, and numerous success stories.

Now that companies have finished celebrating the fact that the year 2000 began with all of the much-anticipated celebration and little, if any, inconvenience, they can again begin looking to...