3.Data Mining

What is it?

Mining data isn’t new but it’s becoming more universal because software to filter or analyse large volumes of data is becoming increasingly powerful. For example, around 2,000 résumés per day are sent to Fortune 500 companies in the US, with around 90% sent in by email or via company websites. As a result, companies are using word-scanning software to decide who’s worth seeing and who isn’t. Another example is Australia’s Centrelink, which uses what it calls a Job Seekers’ Classification Instrument to work out the probability that a claimant will become long-term unemployed and adjusts the help that’s made available to the claimant.

Opportunities:

Extracting information from large data sets or databases to create forecasts or predictions about future events or behaviour. Hence goods and services will be increasingly personalised to address the needs of micro-segments of the population.

Risks:

Data collected by one company or government department could be passed on to others without permission.