The Human Element in Identity Resolution
By Robert Barker, Infoglide Senior VP and Chief Marketing Officer
We’ve written quite a few posts here on the subject of identity resolution’s application to a broad range of problems that include terrorism, insurance fraud, crime, lottery fraud, sexual predators, workers comp employer fraud, and retail returns fraud. What we haven’t discussed very much is the relationship between the technology and the human beings that employ it.
We software marketers are sometimes tempted to make it sound as though our products solve problems automatically. The truth is that identity resolution software performs tasks that humans could do, but it does them at a level of speed and precision that significantly enhances the results accomplished through those tasks. In order for the software to achieve excellent results, however, human judgment is required both in implementing the software and in applying the results.
The specifics of a particular problem differ markedly, and every solution is different. A person of interest in airline passenger screening has very different characteristics from a person of interest in workers compensation fraud, for example. Solutions differ even within a single problem domain, e.g. Nordstrom and Walmart have very different philosophies for merchandise returns.
In simpler data quality applications, default configurations can address many problems, but in identity resolution, a little tuning by experts greatly increases the solution’s value. A domain expert may not understand the technology, but they understand their problem, industry, application, and company. And because of their depth of understanding of their domain, they can tell great results from good results in a heartbeat.
For maximum benefit, human domain experts work with technology experts to tune the software during implementation to apply similar “judgment” as the experts themselves would use to resolve multiple identities, uncover hidden relationships, and minimize false positives and false negatives. Technology’s critical role is to automate the process of sifting through the data to find likely matches and non-obvious relationships and to prioritize the cases that require human intervention so that finite human resources can focus on the most important things first.
While it’s critical to have software that can produce results right “off the shelf,” it is the domain expertise coupled with the technology expertise that creates a solution that is perfectly matched to the needs of a particular industry, application, and company.
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February 23rd, 2009 at 5:02 pm
Agree with you 100% Bob.
I was chatting with Ed Alburn from DataDelta about this very subject this last Friday. His company evaluates data matching engines and data resolution solutions as a third party consultancy using advanced software he has developed throughout his 20y+ career at IBM and other enterprise software vendors and users. So many users tend to expect that the value is 100% in good or bad software automation and so many vendors promise these sorts of pies in the sky very easily. Ed reports that most of the time he manages to prove to his customers (data matching software users) that much of the work of automating their business processes needs to start among their own people (not the vendors) by asking them simple questions like: “what is a good match for this query?” and showing how different people, functions, divisions within their organizations have totally different answer to that question.
In fact, “single view” or master data is all about uncovering that conflict of views of data across the organization: a combination of different meanings, representations, and uses for the same data. The system can streamline the problem if knows where it lies. Software can then be configured and maintained with that knowledge from the start. Data governance and stewardship processes then need to be created to maintain that smooth ride to the never ending finish line.
Our job as software vendors is to make that possible by providing the engagement methodologies, the technical facilities, and the performance to make it all possible.