Keynote Paper: Data Mining Researcher, Who is Your Customer? Some Issues Inspired by the Information Systems Field

Abstract

Data mining as an applied research field is still causing great expectations among organizations which want to raise the utility they are getting from their huge databases and data warehouses. There exist too few success stories about organizations having managed to satisfy even some of those expectations. This situation is very similar to the one inside the information systems (IS) field, especially earlier but even currently. The recent lively debate about the identity of the IS discipline included also the analysis concerning the customers of IS research. Inspired by IS researchers' insights related to the topic, we ask the question "who is our customer?" as data mining researchers. With this we want to raise to discussion the border that limits the topics 'acceptable' to work with as a data mining researcher. We suggest in this paper that the border should be transferred more clearly towards the direction so that beside the technical concerns also at least some user- and organization-related research questions are included