Spring 2005

Alumnus and Professor Mine New Angle

Data mining. The term brings to mind number crunching credit card purchases and loyalty cards that track purchases at supermarkets.

“Take a look at the shopping baskets in the grocery store,” says Dr. Hamid Nemati, associate professor in the Department of Information Systems & Operations Management. “What are the two most common items in the baskets? In other words, what are the two most-purchased items in the store by the largest percentage of people? Let’s say it’s…beer and diapers. You have that information. Now what do you do with it?”

That’s a question that Nemati and Chris Barko, a 2001 graduate of the Bryan MBA program, tackle in a new book “Organizational Data Mining” (Idea Group Publishing, 388p, ISBN 1591401348), a book that breaks new ground in the area of business intelligence, a hot topic of late.

“Our objective was not to produce a data mining how-to manuscript,” said Barko, who works at Laboratory Corp. of America in Burlington. “Instead, we intended to explore and bring to light a number of interesting and practical domains within ODM which integrates both data mining and organizational disciplines such as organizational learning and behavior, business culture and ethics, business strategy, and knowledge management.”

Nemati and Barko define organizational data mining as using data and information to attain and maintain a competitive advantage in a given market place.

Businesses have been using data mining for years, collecting information on customers or potential customers.

But, while businesses have been gathering information for years, Nemati says, very little research has been done about how to use the data and use it effectively in a business organizational sense.

“A lot of books and a lot of the writing on data mining look at the topic from a purely technical point of view,” Nemati says. “They look at getting the information. Very few look at the consequences of having that information and how you manage that information. The basic notion is that the data is there, the technology is there. What do you do with it?”

Nemati and Barko took the technical aspects of data mining and married them with the organizational behavior aspects that are so prevalent in the study of business administration.
The project began as a research project by Barko for one of his MBA classes. He wanted to examine how companies use the data mined from databases of purchases or other sources. A questionnaire was sent to 150 businesses asking about the nature of their data mining activities. The responses and Barko’s analysis turned into the paper “A Survey of Current Practices.”

After the paper was published and received some attention, Nemati and Barko began to look at how they could improve upon the research. They quickly received three book offers on the topic.

The pair now receives requests for articles and joint projects on the subject, and the term “organizational data mining” has become something of a catchphrase in the business lexicon.