The competitive implications of data mining make it hard for users to ignore the technology. Bell Canada has used IBM's Intelligent Miner and other data mining tools for the past year to segment its commercial customers for targeted marketing. Another problem was finding people with the requisite mix of business and statistical analysis skills, Hendriks said. But business-savvy data miners and database marketers are few and far between, she added. Successful mining also demands squeaky clean and slavishly prepped data.
Mistakes can be dangerous.
Chase got a faulty reading on the average balance of some credit-card customers because data had been posted incorrectly. And bad file sorting caused a data mining tool to tell Epsilon, a contract database marketing firm in Burlington, Mass., that the best predictors of interest in a client's upcoming marketing campaign were customer ID numbers a finding that made no sense whatsoever. At his former job, Suomu was about to run an algorithm when he found a data-entry error that would have fed the mining tool wrong information about each customer being analyzed. It doesn't help that most of the more than 50 data mining tools being sold now are still in the whipper snapper stage. Most of the money goes to service bureaus and integrators hired to shield users from all the complexity.