Databases today can range in size into the terabytes — more than 1,000,000,000,000 bytes of data. Within these masses of data lies hidden information of strategic importance. Innovative organizations worldwide are already using data mining to locate and appeal to higher-value customers, reconfigure their product offerings to increase sales and minimize losses due to error or fraud. Data mining is a process that uses a variety of data analysis tools to discover patterns and relationships in data that may be used to make valid predictions. THE DATA MINING PROCESS, collecting, exploring, and selecting the right data is critically important. However, data description alone cannot provide an action plan.