Data Mining Lessons Learned in the Federal Government

Introduction

Data mining has been a successful approach for improving the level of business intelligence and knowledge management throughout an organization. This article identifies lessons learned from data mining projects within the federal government including military services. These lessons learned were derived from the following project experiences:

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  Defense Medical Logistics Support System Data Warehouse Program

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  Department of Defense (DoD) Defense Financial and Accounting Service (DFAS) “Operation Mongoose”

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  DoD Computerized Executive Information System (CEIS)

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  Department of Homeland Security’s Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement (ADVISE) Program

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  Department of Transportation (DOT) Executive Reporting Framework System

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  Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Aircraft Accident Data Mining Project

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  General Accountability Office (GAO) Data Mining of DoD Purchase and Travel Card Programs

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  U.S. Coast Guard Executive Information System

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  Veteran Administrations (VA) Demographics System

Main Thrust

Each lesson learned (indicated in boldface) is listed below. Following each practice is a description of illustrative project or projects (indicated in italics), which support the lesson learned.