Understanding the Potential of Data Mining in Botswana

Botswana is a rapidly developing country, with many new organizations establishing presence every year. With this growth in number and size of organizations comes the generations of large amounts of organizational data. These organisations are faced with the challenge to analyze this data effectively and efficiently in order to gain important strategic advantage and competitive edge over their rivals. However, the huge amount of data available has surpassed human cognitive and analytical abilities. Hence strategists and decision makers require effective and efficient data analysis software in order to undertake thorough analysis on the data to reveal knowledge structures that can guide businesses and decision-making processes. On one hand, IT infrastructure is also growing very fast, coupled with advances in both computer hardware and software including scalable algorithms and data extraction tools. One such technology is data mining which is, as defined by Giudici, a process of selection, exploration and modeling of large databases in order to discover models and patterns that are unknown a priori. Data mining tools are used to explore summaries, comparison, analysis, forecast, estimate of the data. In this paper we explore how organizations in Botswana can take advantage of data mining if they are not already doing so. We envisage how they could realise potential usefulness of data mining in transforming raw data into valuable information. We highlight key data mining technologies that could be useful and use some of these technologies to process organizational data in an experiment using data mining software. Through the experiment we demonstrate the value of this critical technology. We also present case studies of companies in other countries that have benefitted from data mining. KeywordsData Mining, ICT for Development, Botswana African Journal of Computing & ICT Reference Format: George Anderson, Audrey N. Masizana-Katongo & Dimane Mpoeleng (2013 Understanding the Potential of Data Mining in Botswana. Afr J. of Comp & ICTs. Vol 6, No. 1. Pp 33-42.