Business Intelligence Data Mining
Keep the Gold Rush under control

Definition of Business Intelligence and Data Mining

Business Intelligence or BI describes a set of concepts and methods to improve business decision making by using fact-based support systems.

Data mining is the process of sorting through large amounts of data and picking out relevant information.

We could say that Datamining is the set of tools that make the BI process more efficient:
- Business Intelligence or BI Software
- Key Performance Indicator or KPI
- Dashboard
- Data warehouse
- Data mart
- Pivot table

And permits to implement techniques like:
- Business Performance Management
- Business Activity Monitoring
- Benchmarking

In a world where valuable information is the new gold, Business Intelligence can be considered the new Gold Rush. See the results figures of Google if you are not convinced.

Why and When to use Datamining techniques

In a Process driven organization measurement of performance is a key success factor, whatever the improvement initiative comes from:
- top-down like in the strategic planning process using the Balanced Scorecard methodology
- bottom-up when you are providing the process users with the skills to manage their own improvement initiatives

Getting a clear overview is even more important and previous to Business Process modeling for the following:
- Full map of your Business Process can take some months
- You need to focus first on the processes with more room for improvement
- For that you need to extract useful information from your systems to support your evaluation of the situation and choose the best quick win initiative.

How to start with Business Intelligence

My recommendation is to make an inventory of the Key Performance Indicators you are already use to manage your Business or Organization and classify them into through the BSC perspectives:
- Financial Results (Benefits, Sales, Costs…)
- Customer Satisfaction (On Time Delivery, Claims…)
- Business Processes (Quality indicators, defects, waiting time…)
- Learning & Growth (People satisfaction, Competencies, People & Systems Performance…)

Complete with the KPIs you don't use but you could obtain easily from the Information Systems.

Make your BSC tree, linking the Indicators depending on the impact you suppose they have on each other.

This exercise should help you:
- in a top-down approach identifying the root objectives you have to focus on first, for a quick improvement of your top indicators
- in a bottom-up approach evaluating the business impact of the improvement initiatives you propose, to build their Return On Investment

Probably you will detect some lack of data. No problem: include a task in your study phase to obtain them before starting the improvement project.

How to define KPI and build a Business Dashboard

Data Mining Software: Selecting the tools for the Gold Rush

On line survey tools: to get feed-back from your Processes stakeholders also.
But be sure first of your survey process.