October 2003 Cutter Benchmark Review -- Trends and Issues in Data Mining

by Robert D. Austin

Cutter Business Technology Council Fellow Ken Orr has observed that a company's data is the reason information technology exists: to capture and process that data so that it can, ultimately, inform the company's decisionmakers. But as anyone in the IT profession knows, these tasks are a lot easier said than done. Too often, we succeed in only part of this mission. We capture data but then store it badly, so we cannot process it effectively. Or we process data in a way that fails to preserve its consistency or accuracy. Too often, in the end the data fails to inform.