What about those Data Mining techniques, like the kth-nearest. They are very powerful to classify customers. These are the basics, each IT company like Google, Amazon, etc will use their own home-brew heuristic techniques to mine their own/and from the outside, customer data so as to further know their customers so as to increase sales or to become more efficient in running their operations. the ones who develop a better algorithm will mean lower cost and higher sales. it is the same for general retailers, but they are kind of behind, but is equally important to them.
How about the article(s) on Big Data and Business Analytics? Business Analytics applied on these Big Data is the latest business strategy. does your organization utilize any of these concepts, if not, could/should they?