The KDD Movement

Remember when so many corporations got behind the Total Quality Management crusade? "The Japanese are kicking out butts." Nowadays, you never hear about TQM. About five years ago, TQM evolved into things going by the names of Evidence-based Decision Making or Data-driven Management. A tipping point is occurring as smart, progressive organizations are now jumping all over Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) thanks to the affordability of multi-core processors, robust data warehouses, next-gen data mining tools, and the latest release of PMML (Predictive Model Markup Language). Basically, KDD is where one piece of data combines with other related data to form a new data element which then intelligently finds with even more data to produce previously unseen information of high value.

The big deal is that companies can more easily and cost-effectively do what superpowers like Amazon, Google, IBM, and Apple have been doing - identifying and creating customers, markets, and internal efficiencies (TQM on steroids). You're going to see a lot more of KDD this year, but my guess is its name will, like TQM, evolve into something with a bit more buzz.