Identity Resolution Daily

Well, OK this post isn’t about the meanings of all data in retail, but there are a few specific ways that data is being used that have special relevance to us. Specifically, an article by Cathy Langley, director of loss prevention analytics for Rite Aid, about data-mining and exception reporting got us thinking about how crucial data is in the retail industry and, tragically, about how not everyone with a database (or databases) makes the most of the data they have.

The article appears in this month’s Loss Prevention Magazine and uses a great metaphor for data stores as haystacks in a field full of haystacks.

“The pieces of straw making up each stack are the thousands of transactions generated by that store each week. Now, picture yourself standing at the edge of that field, and you have been tasked with finding the ‘rotten’ straws of hay.”

Langley’s focus is mainly on transactional analysis, but it translates well into several fields (pardon the pun) of data mining, including identity resolution.

Like a transactional analysis system, a retail identity resolution system requires a very specific architecture. If the metaphor of the haystacks is applied to identity resolution, many of the haystacks are actually the same person trying to fraudulently pass themselves off as another person. The hard part is then resolving those multiple instances into one, accurate identity. Thus, navigating the field of identity data is pretty tricky. A good identity resolution system then has to get access to each data source, apply the right decision-enhancing analytic algorithms and combine results from multiple databases to arrive at a coherent and credible decision.

Then, of course, you have to protect the data and make sure it’s used correctly, but not everyone puts enough emphasis on that part. A post on InfoWorld (citing a study by the Ponemon Institute) says that

“57 percent of [649 IT workers] surveyed said they do not believe that their organizations have taken adequate measures to protect [data] against insider threats, with 55 percent of respondents indicating that their organizations are not doing enough to stop data loss in general.”

That means that while it’s a great thing for retailers to start making the best use of their datastores, they’ve also got to put up measures making sure that only the right people have access to the data.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 21st, 2007 at 2:55 pm and is filed under Retail Data, Security, Identity Resolution, Loss Prevention. 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.