Weekly blog #5

This week we learned in class about data warehousing and the uses it has in business. By data mining, a manager can discover all kind of data patterns. It can find associations, sequences, classification and or classification. All of it can be very useful for forecasting or planning. This can even be done online through the OLAP. Another thin we learned was about customer relationship software also called CRM. Similar to data mining, CRM can be used to find patterns and associations in customer data and help on the marketing and selling efforts. It can also help customer service by better suiting their needs and helping with questions, problems and technical support.


The following article: Rx data mining: Improving health care or invading privacy? Talks about how data mining and privacy. One of the examples it gives is how it is used by pharmaceutical companies to gather prescription data to target doctors who are not prescribing their drugs and try to influence them. This issue raises privacy issues and how much data should be traced and kept and for what purposes. Doctors are fitting back claiming that pharmaceutical companies what to tell them what to prescribe even if it is not in the best interest of the patients. Are all used of data mining legal, even ethical?