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did not
communicate the insights
derived to key constituents, (3) the results
don't agree with institutional truths
, and (4) the project never had a
sponsor
and champion
. The main conclusion of Coppock's analysis is that, similar to
an IS, the leadership, communication skills and understanding of the culture
of the organization are not less important than the traditionally emphasized
technological job of turning data into insights.
Hermiz [18] communicated his beliefs that there are four critical success
factors for DM projects (1) having a clearly articulated business problem that
needs to be solved and for which DM is a proper tool; (2) insuring that the
problem being pursued is supported by the right type of data of su
cient qual-
ity and in su
cient quantity for DM; (3) recognizing that DM is a process
with many components and dependencies - the entire project cannot be “man-
aged” in the traditional sense of the business word; (4) planning to learn from
the DM process regardless of the outcome, and clearly understanding, that
there is no guarantee that any given DM project will be successful. Thus it
seems possible that there are also some DMS specific questions that have not
maybe been considered from those viewpoints in the IS discipline.
Lin in Wu et al. [40] notices that in fact there have been no major impacts
of DM on the business world echoed. However, even reporting of existing
success stories is important. Giraud-Carrier [15] reported 136 success stories
of DM, covering nine business areas with 30 DM tools or DM vendors referred.
Unfortunately, there was no deep analysis provided that would summarize or
discover the main success factors and the research should be continued.
4.2 The DMS Artifact Development Environment
If a stated research problem includes a verb like introduce, improve, maintain,
cease, extend, correct, adjust, enhance and so on, the study likely belongs to
the area of constructive research. These are the kind of actions that researchers
in the area of DM perform, when they are developing new theories and their
applications as new artifacts to the use of persons and organizations. When a
researcher him/herself is acting also as a change agent developing the artifact
to an organization he is applying the action research approach.
But how to conceive, construct, and implement an artifact? It is obvious
that in order to construct a good artifact background knowledge is needed
both about the artifact's components, that are the basic data mining tech-
niques in the DM context and about components' cooperation, that are com-
monly selection and combination techniques in the DM context. Beside this
the developer needs to have enough background knowledge about the human
and organizational environment where the artifact is going to be applied. As
discussed in Sect. 3 the design science approach is the one concentrating on
this kind of research questions. Both these: the action research and design
science approach to artifact creation and the evaluation process [24] are pre-
sented in Fig. 9.
