Knowledge Discovery in Databases for Competitive Advantage

Abstract

In today's increasingly competitive business world, organizations are using ICT to advance their business strategies and increase their competitive advantage. One technological element that is growing in popularity is knowledge discovery in databases (KDD). In this paper, we propose an analytic framework which is applied to two cases concerning KDD. The first case presents an organization at the analysis stage of a KDD project. The second one shows how a multinational company leverages its databases by mining data to discover new knowledge.

Information asymmetry and power in a surveillance society

“…RFID technology further replaces and intensifies that of barcodes (in that the products no longer need to be presented for scanning) and produces colossal amounts of data -even by 2006 Walmart's centralized database stored more than 500 terabytes of information (Petrovic & Hamilton, 2006, p. 133); double that of the Internet at the time (Hays, 2004). The data has revolutionized Walmart's supply chain, making it the most efficient of US supermarkets (Gilchrist et al, 2012) but it also has created, through combining with data from loyalty cards, considerable knowledge about customers which can be used for commercial purposes or shared with the authorities.…”

Aligning Strategic Orientation with Information Resources

“…In today's digital society, technology-based resources are emerging and changing far more rapidly than organizational systems and structures (Gilchrist, Mooers, Skrubbeltrang, & Vachon, 2012). As a result, the rate at which technological change occurs is outpacing managers' abilities to anticipate, plan for, and implement information system change.…”