Business Intelligence and Mining: Implementation Issues and Propositions to Address Them

The capacity for extensive data collection has transformed many industries in recent years, including mining. Yet, this wealth of data presents a new challenge: how to make sense of it. While industries such as retail have successfully incorporated off-the-shelf business intelligence platforms, mining has struggled. Historically, these solutions have proved ineffective at handling the types of data required for mining analytics, such as the large degree of geospatial records. Likewise, visualization components of these solutions lacked turnkey dashboards practical for mining, particularly in terms of mapping and location reporting. Custom configuration of these systems greatly increased their demand on resources and added a further barrier to their implementation. This paper discusses the issues interfering with the adoption of business intelligence by the mining industry. Then, it proposes parameters for a mining-specific solution designed to reduce configuration time, demands on technical support, and logistical hurdles involved with integrating business intelligence into mining.