Customer types might be in one database and employee skills in another. Data mining can help find matches for regional and global alliances. Let's say you plan a research project in all 50 states. Every state uses a different database and sometimes the city within it has a different database as well. The beauty of data mining is you don't have to merge the databases.
Experts can write a program based on on-line analytical processing and algorithms.
It will look in each database and pull out the essential information. Data mining is also critical for global companies, or any company that has grown through mergers and has different databases as a result. The challenge lies more in defining which information to mine than in how to acquire it. Business intelligence can be a form of measurement, such as the success of a particular company campaign. The program would find an indicator, such as sales increases this year compared to last, or number of customers from this year to last, and one part of the company could compare it to another part where there was no campaign.