Data Mining - Redefining the Boundaries

Ever since its emergence as a new field, Data Mining has been described as a confluence of different disciplines primarily database systems, statistics, machine learning and information science. Strategic Management, an emerging discipline of management sciences, focuses on setting mission, vision, goals and objectives, analyzing internal and external organizational environments, making strategic decisions and taking actions to implement the designed strategy. In this paper, we have revealed that the whole data mining process forms a part of strategic analysis phase of strategic management. We have mapped the data mining activities to the strategic analysis phase from both the conceptual as well as the practical perspectives. We have found that if data mining is used for conducting environmental analysis, much better results could be yielded by helping the managers to formulate target-oriented strategies more efficiently and effectively. Thus, the boundaries of this emerging field - Data Mining - have been redefined using the essence and the key attributes of strategic management.