Data Mining For Professional Service Firms - The Marketing Mother Lode May Already Be in Your Files

No one needs to tell you about the value of information in today's world--particularly the value of information that could help grow your practice. But has it occurred to you that you probably have more information in your head and your existing files that you realize? Tap into this gold mine of data to develop a powerful and effective marketing plan that will pull clients in the door and push your profitability up.

The way to do this is with data mining, which is the process of using your existing client data and demographics to highlight trends, make predictions and plan strategies.

In other words, do what other kinds of businesses have been doing for years: Analyze your clients by industry and size of business, the type and volume of services used, the amount billed, how quickly they pay and how profitable their business is to you. With this information, you'll be able to spot trends and put together a powerful marketing plan.

To data mine effectively, your marketing department needs access to client demographics and financial information. Your accounting department needs to provide numbers on the services billed, discounts given, the amounts actually collected, and receivables aging statistics. You may identify a specific service being utilized to a greater than average degree by a particular industry group, revealing a market segment worth pursuing. Or you may find an industry group that represents a significant portion of your billed revenue, but the business is only marginally profitable because of write-offs and discounts. In this case, you may want to shift your marketing focus.

You should also look at client revenues and profitability by the age of the clients. If your percentage of new clients is high, it could mean you're not retaining a sufficient number of existing clients. If you see too few new clients, you may be in for problems when natural client attrition is not balanced by new client acquisition.

The first step in effective data mining is to get everyone in the firm using the same information system. This allows everyone in the office who needs the names and addresses of the firm's clients and contacts to have access to that data. Require everyone to record notes on conversations and meetings in the system. Of course, the system should also accommodate information that users don't want to share, such as client's private numbers or the user's personal contacts. This way, everyone can utilize the system for everything, which makes them more likely to use it completely.

Your information system can be either contact information or customer relationship management software (a variety of packages are on the market) or you can have a system custom designed. When considering software to facilitate data mining, look at three key factors:

1. Ease of use. If the program isn't easy to use, it won't get used, and will end up being just a waste of time and money.

2. Accessibility. The system must allow for data to be accessible from anywhere, including laptops, hand-held devices, from the internet or cell phones. The data should also be accessible from a variety of applications so it can be used by everyone in the office all the time, regardless of where they are.

3. Sharability. Everyone needs to be able to access the information, but you also need privacy and editing rights so you can assign or restrict what various users can see and input.

Don't overlook the issue of information security. Beyond allowing people the ability to code certain entries as private, keep in mind that anyone with access to the system as the ability to either steal information or sabotage your operation. Talk to your software vendor about various security measures but don't let too much security make the system unusable. Protect yourself contractually with noncompete and nondisclosure agreements and be sure to back up your data regularly.

Finally, expect some staffers to resist when you ask them to change from the system they've been using. You may have to sell them on the benefits outweighing the pain of making a change and learning the new system--which means you need to be totally sold on it yourself. The managing partner, or the leader of the firm, needs to be driving this initiative for it to succeed. When it does succeed, you'll be able to focus your marketing dollars and efforts in the most profitable areas with the least expense, with a tremendous positive impact on the bottom line.


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Should Corporate Think Tanks Scan IT Logs, and Data Mine for Innovative Ideas?

Most people in the corporate environment would have a problem with their bosses snooping their e-mails. Nevertheless, we know this happens every day because the employers want to make sure their employees are not screwing off and wasting company time. Every CFO knows that productivity in the workplace, or office environment is paramount to profits. Now then, I have another question, one that you have not considered yet regarding this issue.

My question is this; what if your employer was snooping your e-mails and looking for ideas which you had when corresponding with various vendors, customers, or other employees? That is to say what if your employer had an algorithm, which searched for keywords in e-mail correspondence that could give them insight into innovative ways to modify their products or services? Would you as employee be upset about something like that?

In other words, they are not looking to get you in trouble, rather they are looking for ideas and innovations which will help the company do better in the marketplace, become more efficient, and help the company achieve its quarterly objectives, while increasing shareholders equity.

There was an interesting article posted in MIT's Technology Review titled "Extracting Business Ideas from IT Logs Software finds hidden business insights in Web and phone logs, e-mail, and network traffic," posted on Friday, February 11, 2011 by Tom Simonite.

Indeed, I find this very interesting because as the coordinator for a think tank which operates on the Internet, it always occurred to me that perhaps we should have an algorithm that searches through all the e-mails to find the smartest humans amongst us, and perhaps hire them to help with legislative, judicial, military, and executive decisions in the government.

What if businesses, corporations, universities, nonprofits, and government agencies started doing this with all their employees? And what if Google came up with a similar system to find innovative ideas, would anyone really want their data anonymized in that case? Chances are they wouldn't, chances are they would like to participate in such a program, and perhaps in the future get paid for their ideas, or get a small stipend, royalty, or kudos for their innovative ideas and concepts.

It's not that I wish to suggest that we should by spying on the American people, but since we already are (NSA) and I think everyone knows that, maybe we should start looking for the good guys, as well as the bad guys? Indeed, I hope you will take this thought on a philosophical basis, and please consider what I've said here today.


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Preference to Offshore Document Data Entry Services

A number or business organizations if different industries are seeking competent and precise document data entry services to maintain their business records safe for future references. Document data entry has advanced as a quickly developing and active industry structure almost accept in all major companies of the world. The companies doing businesses these days are undergoing rapid changes and therefore the need for services is becoming all the more crucial.

To get success you need to accomplish more understanding about the market, your business, clients as well as the prevailing factors that influence your business. A considerable amount of document is in one or the other way included in this entire process. These services is helpful in taking crucial decisions for the organization. It also provides you a standard in understanding the current and future business status of your company.

In this information age data-entry from documents and data conversion have become important elements for most business houses. The requirement for document services has reached zenith since companies work on processes like business merger and acquisitions, as well as new technology developments. In such scenarios having access to the right kind of data at the right time is very crucial and that is why companies opt for reliable services.

These services covers a range of professional business oriented activities such as document plus image processing to image editing as well as catalog processing. A few noteworthy examples of from documents include: PDF document indexing, insurance claim entry, online data capture as well as creating new databases. These services are important in industries like insurance companies, banks, government departments and airlines.

Companies such as Offshore and outsource and others offer an entire gamut of first rate data services. Actually, getting services from documents offshore to developing yet competent countries like India has made the process highly economical plus quality driven too.

Business giants around the world have realized multiple advantages associated in Offshore-Data-Entry. Companies not only prosper because of quality services but are also benefited because of better turn around time, maintaining confidentiality of data as well as economic rates.

Though the company works in all form of documents, there are few below mentioned areas where it specializes:

• Document data entry
• Document data entry conversion
• Document data processing
• Document data capture services
• Web data extraction
• Document scanning indexing

Since reputable companies like Offshore Data-Entry hire only well qualified and trained candidates work satisfaction is guaranteed. There are several steps involved in the quality check (QC) process and therefore accuracy level is maintained to 99.995% ensuring that the end result is delivered to the client far beyond his expectation.



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What is Data Mining?

Data mining is the process in which there is analysis of data forming different angles and perspectives and summarizing the same data into the relevant information. This kind of information could be utilized to increase the revenue, cutting the costs or both.

Software is mainly used for analyzing data and also assists in accumulation of data for the different sources and categorize and summarize the given data into some useful form.

Though the data mining is new term, the software used for mining the data was previously used. With the constant upgradations of the software and the processing power, the market tools, data mining software has increased in its accuracy. Formerly, this data mining was widely used by the businessmen for the market research and the analysis. There were few companies that used the computers to examine through the column of the supermarket data.

The data mining is the technique of running the data through the sophisticated algorithms for discovering the meaningful correlations and patterns that would have otherwise remained hidden. It is very helpful, since it aids in understanding the techniques and methods of business and you can accordingly apply your own intelligence fitting in the current market trend. Even the future performances get enhanced by the predictive analysis.

Business Intelligence operations occur in the background. Users of the mining operation can just see the end result. The users are in apposition to get the results through the mails and can also go through the recommendation through web pages and emails.

The data mining process indicates the invention of trends and tactics. The moment you discover and understand the market trends, you have the knowledge of which article is sold more and which article is sold with the other one. This kind of tend has an enormous impact on business organization. In this manner, the business gets enhanced as the market gets analyzed in a perfect manner. Due to these correlations, the performance of business organization increases to a lot of extent.

Mining gives a chance or opportunity to enhance the future performance of the business organization. There is a common philosophical phrase that, 'he who does not learn from the history is destined to repeat the same'. Therefore, if these predictions are done with the help and assistance of the historical information (data), then you can get sufficient data for improvising the products of the business organization.

Mining enables the embedding of the recommendations in the applications. Simple summary statements and the proposals can be displayed within the operational applications. Data mining also needs powerful machines. The algorithms might be applied to a Java or a Dataset code for using the same. Data mining is very useful for knowing the trends and making future predictions based on the predictive analysis. It also helps in cost cutting and increase in the revenue of the business organization


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How Your Online Information is Stolen - The Art of Web Scraping and Data Harvesting

Web scraping, also known as web/internet harvesting involves the use of a computer program which is able to extract data from another program's display output. The main difference between standard parsing and web scraping is that in it, the output being scraped is meant for display to its human viewers instead of simply input to another program.

Therefore, it isn't generally document or structured for practical parsing. Generally web scraping will require that binary data be ignored - this usually means multimedia data or images - and then formatting the pieces that will confuse the desired goal - the text data. This means that in actually, optical character recognition software is a form of visual web scraper.

Usually a transfer of data occurring between two programs would utilize data structures designed to be processed automatically by computers, saving people from having to do this tedious job themselves. This usually involves formats and protocols with rigid structures that are therefore easy to parse, well documented, compact, and function to minimize duplication and ambiguity. In fact, they are so "computer-based" that they are generally not even readable by humans.

If human readability is desired, then the only automated way to accomplish this kind of a data transfer is by way of web scraping. At first, this was practiced in order to read the text data from the display screen of a computer. It was usually accomplished by reading the memory of the terminal via its auxiliary port, or through a connection between one computer's output port and another computer's input port.

It has therefore become a kind of way to parse the HTML text of web pages. The web scraping program is designed to process the text data that is of interest to the human reader, while identifying and removing any unwanted data, images, and formatting for the web design.

Though web scraping is often done for ethical reasons, it is frequently performed in order to swipe the data of "value" from another person or organization's website in order to apply it to someone else's - or to sabotage the original text altogether. Many efforts are now being put into place by webmasters in order to prevent this form of theft and vandalism.



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Business Intelligence Data Mining

Data mining can be technically defined as the automated extraction of hidden information from large databases for predictive analysis. In other words, it is the retrieval of useful information from large masses of data, which is also presented in an analyzed form for specific decision-making.

Data mining requires the use of mathematical algorithms and statistical techniques integrated with software tools. The final product is an easy-to-use software package that can be used even by non-mathematicians to effectively analyze the data they have. Data Mining is used in several applications like market research, consumer behavior, direct marketing, bioinformatics, genetics, text analysis, fraud detection, web site personalization, e-commerce, healthcare, customer relationship management, financial services and telecommunications.

Business intelligence data mining is used in market research, industry research, and for competitor analysis. It has applications in major industries like direct marketing, e-commerce, customer relationship management, healthcare, the oil and gas industry, scientific tests, genetics, telecommunications, financial services and utilities. BI uses various technologies like data mining, scorecarding, data warehouses, text mining, decision support systems, executive information systems, management information systems and geographic information systems for analyzing useful information for business decision making.

Business intelligence is a broader arena of decision-making that uses data mining as one of the tools. In fact, the use of data mining in BI makes the data more relevant in application. There are several kinds of data mining: text mining, web mining, social networks data mining, relational databases, pictorial data mining, audio data mining and video data mining, that are all used in business intelligence applications.

Some data mining tools used in BI are: decision trees, information gain, probability, probability density functions, Gaussians, maximum likelihood estimation, Gaussian Baves classification, cross-validation, neural networks, instance-based learning /case-based/ memory-based/non-parametric, regression algorithms, Bayesian networks, Gaussian mixture models, K-means and hierarchical clustering, Markov models and so on.


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Benefits and Advantages of Data Mining

One definition given to data mining is the categorization of information according to the needs and preferences of the user. In data mining, you try to find patterns within a big volume of available data. It is a potent and popular technology for different industries. Data mining can even be compared to the difficult task of looking for a needle in the haystack. The greatest challenge is not obtaining information but uncovering connections and information that have not been known in the past.

Yet, data mining tools can only be utilized efficiently provided you possess huge amounts of information in repository. Almost all of corporate organizations already hold this information. One good example is the list of potential clients for marketing purposes. These are the consumers to whom you can sell commodities or services. You have greater chances of generating more revenues if you know these potential customers in the inventory and determine consumption behavior. There are benefits that you need to know regarding data mining.

    Data mining is not only for entrepreneurs. The process is cut out for analysis as well and can be employed by government agencies, non-profit organizations, and basketball teams. In short, the data must be made more specific and refined according to the needs of the group concerned.

    This unique method can be used along with demographics. Data mining combined with demographics enables enterprises to pursue the advertising strategy for specific segments of customers. That form of advertising that is related directly to behavior.

    It has a flexible nature and can be used by business organizations that focus on the needs of customers. Data mining is one of the more relevant services because of the fast-paced and instant access to information together with techniques in economic processing.

However, you need to prepare ahead of time the data used for mining. It is essential to understand the principles of clustering and segmentation. These two elements play a vital part in marketing campaigns and customer interface. These components encompass the purchasing conduct of consumers over a particular duration. You will be able to separate your customers into categories based on the earnings brought to your company. It is possible to determine the income that these customers will generate and retention opportunities. Simply remember that nearly all profit-oriented entities will desire to maintain high-value and low-risk clients. The target is to ensure that these customers keep on buying for the long-term.


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