This is an often underestimated phase, and we should look at it carefully since its role is decisive for all of the remaining phases. Within the business understanding phase, we fundamentally answer the following two questions:

• What are the objectives of the business where the data mining problem is coming from?
• What are the data mining goals for this project?

Giving the wrong answer to either one of these two questions will result in producing results not relevant for the business, or not solving the data mining problem at its core.

The first step in this phase is understanding your client's needs and objectives, since those objectives will become the objectives of the project. Within this phase, we gather information through the means of interviews and technical literature, finally defining a project plan and clearly stating a data mining goal and how we plan to reach it.

The project plan should not be considered an unchangeable one, since the following phases will naturally tend to suggest new or more precise ways to reach the data mining goal, inevitably requiring you to get back to the plan and further develop it.

We also list within the project plan all relevant resources, both in terms of technical resources (hardware, software, and similar) and human resources.