Ready for the next step?

Before exploring data and beginning work in IBM® SPSS® Modeler, be sure you have answered the following questions.

From a business perspective:

• What does your business hope to gain from this project?
• How will you define the successful completion of our efforts?
• Do you have the budget and resources needed to reach our goals?
• Do you have access to all the data needed for this project?
• Have you and your team discussed the risks and contingencies associated with this project?
• Do the results of your cost/benefit analysis make this project worthwhile?

After you've answered the above questions, did you translate those answers into a data mining goal?

From a data mining perspective:

• How specifically can data mining help you meet your business goals?
• Do you have an idea about which data mining techniques might produce the best results?
• How will you know when your results are accurate or effective enough? (Have we set a measurement of data mining success?)
• How will the modeling results be deployed? Have you considered deployment in your project plan?
• Does the project plan include all phases of CRISP-DM?
• Are risks and dependencies called out in the plan?

If you can answer "yes" to the above questions, then you're ready to take a closer look at the data.