Today’s business environment with ever increasing competition and constant pressure from customers, suppliers, and society for new and improved products and services as well as higher profits force organizations to find new ways of competing. Companies use Business Intelligence applications to analyze existing data for better and more informed decisions. Previous research in the US indicates that data mining, a more advanced toolset for data analytics, is being used to a large extent. The diffusion and use of data mining in large companies in Sweden is questioned. It seems like advanced analytics has not yet been fully explored by Swedish companies, who instead are in the initial stage for such investments even though they have become aware of its potential. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the data mining maturity in Sweden, using the three chosen hypotheses discussed below, to be able to generate descriptive and explanatory knowledge. It is also an attempt to predict future trends and investments in data mining tools over the next four years. A deductive approach using qualitative methods was used with an online survey, based on three hypotheses. The survey was conducted with a random sample of 95 companies out of a total population of 868 of large companies in Sweden with more than 250 employees. The hypotheses were statistically proven using two z tests and a chi-square test in order to be rejected or not rejected. A qualitative analysis of open-ended questions was conducted as well as an interpretative analysis of the holistic conclusions of the hypotheses. The results indicated that less than 30 percent of large companies in Sweden use data mining tools. Although, there was a great interest in data mining tools and more than 50 percent of these companies plan on investing in these tools within the next four years, which indicates that the size of the data mining market will double in size. Fur...
