New York Times on Analytical Software

The New Times has a good article today covering data mining and analytical software.   The title is "Reaping Results: Data Mining Goes Mainstream" and the article describes how police departments and large corporations and using data mining techniques.  The article mentions a number of large corporations including WalMart, Kohl's, Harrah's, Whirlpool and Capital One.  A good summary quote from the article:

"Faster and cheaper computing and ample sources of information in digital form — plucked from enterprise resource planning systems, point-of-sale devices and Web sites — mean that most companies now have the tools to do the kind of competitive analytics that only a relative handful of elite companies could do in the past."

Just as more large corporations can now take advantage of sophisticated data mining techniques, so can small businesses.  In the next installment of the of the Intuit/IFTF Future of Small Business forecast report (due out in June), we talk about how analytic software and data mining will be increasingly important to small businesses.