Competitive advantage from data mining: some lessons learnt in the information systems field

Data mining (DM) is still a technology having great expectations to enable organizations to take more benefit of their huge databases. There exist some success stories where organizations have managed to have competitive advantage of DM. Still the strong focus of most DM-researchers in technology-oriented topics does not support expanding the scope in less rigorous but practically very relevant sub-areas. The current situation with DM has similarities with situations during the development of some other information technology (IT)-related sub-areas earlier. Research in the information systems discipline (one of those IT-related sub-areas) has strong traditions to take into account human and organizational aspects of systems beside the technical ones. We suggest in this paper that these user and organization related research results and organizational settings include essential points of view with respect to developing DM research to produce practically more relevant results for domain areas where human and organizational things matter.