Identity Resolution Daily

By Robert Barker, Infoglide Senior Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer

Thus far this series of posts on “Mistaken Identity Resolution” has contrasted Identity Resolution with Master Data Management (MDM) and Data Integration. What about one of the more established data concepts - data warehouses? How are they different? And how do they work together? If at all?

The differences are pretty simple. In 1990 Bill Inmon defined a data warehouse as “a subject-oriented, integrated, time-variant and non-volatile collection of data in support of management’s decision making process.” What was a new concept in 1990 has passed through Gartner’s hype cycle to become an expected component of IT infrastructure for most large- and many medium-sized organizations. Data is transferred into a data warehouse and is expected to reside there indefinitely (and without changing) to support mostly analytical, but increasingly operational, activities. So a data warehouse is a repository for data. Identity resolution technologies are software that operate on data.

So is the relationship between identity resolution and warehousing complementary, beneficial, or problematic? At times the presence of a well-managed data warehouse can ease the identity resolution process by providing one reliable data source that can be similarity searched with other “dirtier” data sources. At other times, the cleansing methodology that is often used to prepare data for warehousing is problematic because it can hide or even obliterate data variances caused by fraudsters. These data variances are exactly what identity resolution uses to resolve multiple identities into one and uncover hidden relationships.

To further confuse the matter, in certain cases, identity resolution technologies like our Identity Resolution Engine(tm) (IRE) operate on data in remote, disparate databases, acting as a virtual data warehouse by combining data “on the fly.” In other cases, IRE works perfectly well on existing data warehouses.

So the answer to our previous question about identity resolution and data warehouses is the famous one you often get from consultants: “it depends.” However, by carefully determining the right points in existing processes to implement identity resolution, data warehousing and identity resolution can be both complementary to each other and beneficial to existing systems.

Make sense? Or maybe not? Let us know what you think.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 at 4:37 pm and is filed under Data Management, Mistaken Identity Resolution, Business Intelligence, Entity Resolution and Analysis, Identity Resolution. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.