The Business Value of Text Mining

Sammanfattning: Text mining is an enabling technology that will come to change the process for how businesses derive insights & knowledge from the textual data available to them. The current literature has its focus set on the text mining algorithms and techniques, whereas the practical aspects of text mining are lacking. The efforts of this study aims at helping companies understand what the business value of text mining is with the help of a case study. Subsequently, an SMS-survey method was used to identify additional business areas where text mining could be used to derive business value from. A literature review was conducted to conceptualize the business value of text mining, thus a concept matrix was established. Here a business category and its relative: derived insights & knowledge, domain, and data source are specified. The concept matrix was from then on used to decide when information was of business value, to prove that text mining could be used to derive information of business value.Text mining analyses was conducted on traffic school data of survey feedback. The results were several patterns, where the business value was derived mainly for the categories of Quality Control & Quality Assurance. After comparing the results of the SMS-survey with the case study empiricism, some difficulties emerged in the categorization of derived information, implying the categories are required to become more specific and distinct. Furthermore, the concept matrix does not comprise all of the business categories that are sure to exist.