Application of Data Mining and Knowledge Management for Business Improvement: An Exploratory Study

In recent years, there have been a lot of approaches employed by organizations to satisfy their customers and gain competitive advantage. Continuous development of Information System applications is also changing the ways in which businesses are conducted. From scanning barcodes at point of sale (POS) to shopping on the web, businesses are generating large volume of data about products and consumers which are being stored in different data repositories. While a lot of useful knowledge about products, sales and customers that can assist in business decisions are locked away in these databases unexploited. However, the need for organizations to survive in this dynamic business environment depends on how proactive they change these data into useful knowledge which can aid value creation. Presently, customer relationship management and marketing turn out to be the domains which have the potentials to utilize data mining techniques for decision support. This paper examines how business can improve on their performance through utilization of knowledge management (KM) and data mining (DM) applications to manage and support their strategies. Lastly, synergies and challenges of implementation of KM and DM as a tool in business are also critically analysed