CONCLUSION

Chapter IX - The Pitfalls of Knowledge Discovery in Databases and Data Mining
Data Mining: Opportunities and Challenges
by John Wang (ed)
Idea Group Publishing 2003

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DM helps deliver tremendous insights for businesses into the problems they face and aids in identifying new opportunities. It further helps businesses to solve more complex problems and make smarter decisions. DM is a potentially powerful tool for companies; however, more research is needed to measure the benefits of DM. If managers are better able to quantify the benefits of DM, they will be in a better position to justify its relatively high costs. In concert with better justification and acceptance will come the treatment of DM as a more legitimate and serous tool in organizational development.

With DM, the same process should be applied as with any other organizational development tool. Once a DM process has been implemented, a company should take the steps needed to monitor the process and obtain feedback from all elements of the process. Monitoring and feedback will give a company the information necessary to determine if it is encountering any of the potential pitfalls and develop corrective strategies to take through the implementation → monitoring → feedback loop. For example, if a company sees lowered costs as a result of the use of information obtained through DM but loses revenues as a result of a loss of customers having concerns about privacy issues, then no real grain is made. Through the process of monitoring and feedback, firms can better maximize opportunities to increase revenues and lower costs while minimizing the risks posed by any of the pitfalls to DM.

Regardless of the many pitfalls that were found and discussed by this chapter, DM should still be considered as a valuable tool to many corporations. DM is only a beginning. DM does not make decisions, people do knowledge and experience are the most important factors.

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