Friday, February 22, 2008
Data Mining in the Workplace
I graduate in a few months and so I've been job hunting lately. I attended the Technical Career Fair here at BYU a few weeks back and I was impressed by the number of companies that were interested in data mining. With the exception of one or two companies, they all either were currently involved in data mining or were interested in becoming involved in the near future. I think that as more and more companies amass mounds of data, they are realizing that collecting data for data's sake is useless and that they can get much more out of their data than they have in the past. Data mining is no longer 'a hiss and a byword'. I am witnessing firsthand that it is the direction that many companies are taking to improve the efficiency of their operations.
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3 comments:
You have started a nice blog! Topics covered seem interesting.
Regarding your post: I am happy to see that data mining has some interest in the US. In Switzerland, most companies don't know about data mining. It is still to early. They are now at the business intelligence (BI) level.
Here in the US it is by no means perfect, but it seems to be taking big steps forward. If you ask the average Joe-Schmo off the street they probably think that data mining is just some tool the CIA is using on Facebook to spy on everyone. But in business settings, I sense a growing acceptance of data mining. Expectations sometimes are a little bit off because of misunderstandings regarding the limitations of the data/methods/tools used in data mining, but that will come over time as companies gain more experience.
Thanks for your interest in our blog and in data mining in general.
Sandro, you are right. I spent 3 and a half years in Switzerland working for a company called ELCA (great company by the way: www.elca.ch). We worked really hard at getting companies to pick up on data mining and only had marginal success. Hopefully we did get the word out a bit. I think that in many ways, Swiss companies are rather conservative and shy about trying things that haven't been proven before. But hey, that kind of conservativism is also the great strength of this fine country!
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