Identity Resolution Daily

By the Infoglide Team

CNSNews.com: New Regulations Outline Content, Transmission Standards for Every Americans’ Electronic Health Records

“The EHRs are designed to be digital replications of the hard-copy, paper health records commonly in use today. They are also engineered to be easily transferable among different doctors and hospitals so as to eliminate the creation of duplicate or disparate records among different health care providers, thus allowing any health care office to access a patient’s complete medical record at each visit.”

Washington Post: Firms slow to embrace cloud computing

“‘There’s an awful lot of talk about it and there is consumption of cloud,’ said Al Gillen, an analyst at IDC. But ‘organizations don’t simply make change because they can. There has to be good justification.’ Harry Weller, a general partner at New Enterprise Associates, said start-ups and new businesses will likely be among the first to move to the cloud. A need to hold down costs is often an overriding factor in their decision, he said.”

Detroit Free Press: Arrests made for Medicare fraud

“Many of the charges involved home health care companies that billed Medicare for equipment or treatment that many patients didn’t need or never received. In several cases, people who worked for the companies were paid to recruit patients to participate in the scheme. Some persuaded elderly people to sell their Medicare identification numbers, which were used to rip off the system.”

Liliendahl on Data Quality: Data Quality is an Ingredient, not an Entrée

“Fortunately it is more and more recognized that you don’t get success with Business Intelligence, Customer Relationship Management, Master Data Management, Service Oriented Architecture and many more disciplines without starting with improving your data quality. But it will be a big mistake to see Data Quality improvement as an entrée before the main course being BI, CRM, MDM, SOA or whatever is on the menu.”

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[Post from Infoglide] Customer Authentication and Identity Resolution

“The accepted meaning of ‘multi-factor authentication’ is employing at least two of the three standard factors used to authenticate identities:

1. something the user knows (e.g. , PIN or password)
2. something the user has (e.g., ATM or smart card)
3. something the user is (e.g., biometric such as fingerprint)

Building upon this well understood concept in the banking and financial services world, I’d like to describe how identity resolution technology extends and greatly enhances the value of authentication systems to the enterprise.”

LexisNexis Workers’ Compensation Law Community: NY: Owner of Manhattan Temp Agency Hit With $25M Comp Fraud

“Mr. Goldstein also failed to cooperate to allow NYSIF to audit the companies’ payrolls, wherein NYSIF would simply raise premium rates on the policies in effect. To avoid paying higher rates, Mr. Goldstein allowed NYSIF to cancel policies for non-payment, and repeated this pattern by allegedly obtaining other policies from NYSIF under false pretenses.”

CRMBuyer: The Big Business of Electronic Health Records, Part 2

“The federal EHR program authorized under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 consists of two parts. The first provides financial assistance through Medicare and Medicaid to healthcare providers who implement EHR systems. In the second phase, instead of receiving financial assistance, providers who fail to comply with EHR implementation requirements will be penalized by reductions in their Medicare or Medicaid reimbursements.”

Technology Review: TR10: Cloud Programming

“Today, many developers are converting existing programs to run on clouds, rather than creating new types of applications that could work nowhere else. And they are held back by difficulties in keeping track of data and getting reliable information about what’s going on across a cloud.”

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By Mike Shultz, Infoglide Software CEO

Andrew White of Gartner recently posed a question about whether master data management (MDM) is dead. He didn’t actually suggest that the demise of master data management is imminent. He was challenging whether our current terminology adequately clarifies the current reality about MDM and associated product areas.

Certainly the terms describing many markets and types of products are being associated with MDM. Jackie Roberts of DATAForge pointed out that the definition of MDM now seems to include “data integrity, data quality, entity resolution, matching, data integration, governance, metrics and analysis.”

While entity resolution was mentioned in her list, our obsessive focus on entity resolution (aka identity resolution) leads to the conclusion that, rather than being subsumed, its role is growing. Wayne Eckerson at TDWI seems to agree that identity resolution is a critical component of the recent MDM acquisitions. In his post about the acquisitions by Informatica and IBM of Siperian and Initiate Systems, respectively, he described the two transactions this way:

“You could say that Siperian is mostly MDM, but with identity resolution and other capabilities, whereas Initiate is mostly about identity resolution, but with MDM and other capabilities.”

Identity resolution is becoming an integral part of many product areas. Within MDM itself, creating a single-entity view is best done with an identity resolution engine. Data mining is greatly enhanced by the addition of entity resolution. Dan Power of Hub Solution Designs wrote about how key identity resolution is to data matching. We’ve talked about how social CRM can resolve identities of individuals across multiple disparate data sources using identity resolution, as well as “rationalize multiple variations and errors and anomalies that block finding existing customers within their systems”.

Although identity resolution technology has been years in the making, it has only recently risen into the consciousness of most analysts and customers. Because of its ability to bring enhanced clarity to ambiguous data, advanced identity resolution is now beginning to have a significant impact across many data-centered disciplines.

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By Mike Shultz, Infoglide Software CEO

We’ve noted several times over the past couple of years how the market visibility of entity resolution has been evolving. Now the consolidation of the master data management (MDM) market is causing even more conjecture about the crucial role of this technology.

We’re continually on the lookout for the trends and opportunities that affect the identity resolution space. We’ve written about entity resolution moving into cloud computing, the growing use of entity resolution by state agencies, the crucial role that identity resolution plays in fusion centers, how it’s related to “social CRM”, and how it might be used in e-discovery.

A few days after IBM’s recent announcement about buying Initiate Systems and a little over a week after Informatica’s acquisition of Siperian, Wayne Eckerson at tdwi wrote an insightful article in which he noted that these acquisitions are about MDM, yet they are also about identity resolution:

“Siperian is well-known for its master data management (MDM) solution… Initiate, on the other hand, is well-known for its identity resolution hub… At this point, I need to cycle back to Siperian and point out that it, too, provides identity resolution capabilities. And I forgot to mention that Initiate also has some MDM capabilities. You could say that Siperian is mostly MDM, but with identity resolution and other capabilities, whereas Initiate is mostly about identity resolution, but with MDM and other capabilities.”

Considering IBM’s acquisition of Initiate Systems, along with Informatica’s purchase of Siperian shortly before that, plus its 2008 purchase of Identity Systems, it’s clear that IdentityResolutionDaily is going to have even more to write about this year than before!

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By John Talburt, PhD, CDMP, Director, UALR Laboratory for Advanced Research in Entity Resolution and Information Quality (ERIQ)

In the last post we looked at a formal model for describing entity-based integration. Now let’s turn our attention to how entity resolution (ER) systems are actually implemented.  One of the most important design decisions is whether the system will perform entity identity management.  Systems perform identity management when they create and store the attributes values for the identities that they process.  Identity management is necessary for systems that assign persistent entity identifiers, i.e. the system must give all of the references to the same entity the same identifier value from one resolution process to the next.

The most basic form of ER is the merge/purge process.  A merge/purge process reads a large batch of references and systematically makes pair-wise comparisons between them.  During the process, it assigns a group identifier to all of the references it determines to be for the same entity.  However, these identifiers are transient, only existing during the process of a particular batch of references since the end result is to create a single, merged record (called a “survivor” record) in place of each reference group.  The result is that references to the same entity occurring in two different merge/purge processes will likely be given different group identifiers from one process to the next.  For example, the references for John Doe in the first batch of references processed might given the group ID of 213, but references to the same John Doe in a batch of references processed the next day might be given a group ID of 634.  The merge/purge process can still correctly resolve the entity references in each batch, but the values of the group IDs don’t persist or carry over for the same entities from batch to batch.

Another characteristic of the merge/purge ER process is that it is designed to operate in batch mode.  However, there are transactional or “on-demand” versions of merge/purge that are sometimes referred to as heterogeneous database join systems.  Instead of combining all of the reference sources into a single file for batch processing, each reference source is loaded as a database table.  The application is connected to all of the source tables and has metadata that describes the structure of each reference source.  This allows a single query or “join request” to be submitted to the application, which then translates the request into an appropriate query for each source.  The individual query responses are collected and processed into a single view that is provided as the query result for the initial query.  Just as in the merge/purge process, the groups of references brought together for an entity (a query) are transient.  These types of query-based ER systems are common in law enforcement and other hypothesis testing applications.

On the other hand, there are other ER architectures designed to retain and manage entity identity information.  By doing this they are able to “recognize” references to the same entity over time and assigned those references the same entity identifier, i.e. maintain persistent entity identifiers.  In CRM applications these kinds of systems are sometimes called Customer Recognition Systems.

There are two major types of ER system architectures that perform identity management - “identity resolution” systems and “identity capture” systems. In the next post, I will pick up here with a discussion of how these systems manage identity and maintain persistent entity identifiers.

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By Douglas Wood, Infoglide Senior Vice President

Much is happening these days in the Data Quality space.  Customers are embracing MDM strategies at a record pace, M&A activity has picked up from an industry perspective, and the various players in the data quality marketplace are expanding their offerings like never before.  It matters little if the objective is to vet fraud or to master data. The race to deliver the dream of an enterprise-wide single-entity-view (SEV) is on.  Gentlemen (and Danica Patrick)… start your engines!

The key word here, naturally, is ‘engines’.  An engine moves things forward, and performs considerably more than one basic task.  As has been well-documented here at IdentityResolutionDaily, a true identity resolution engine plays a vital part of any SEV initiative.  Technologies that can look at data across disparate silos and return results that point to both matches AND non-obvious relationships are in high demand…  and set to grow even further in 2010.  The simplicity of “yes it’s a match” or “no, it’s not a match” is no longer sufficient for most organizations as they seek the single-entity-view.  Remember, an entity is not merely made up of attributes… but also relationships.  A true ‘engine’ points to those relationships, and moves the entire data quality initiative forward.

An engine cares little what the car looks like, and ought to drive a multitude of vehicles.  Similarly, an identity resolution engine ought to be built to solve a multitude of problems.  SEV for exposing risk and fraud, SEV for Healthcare Patient Matching, SEV for Law Enforcement, SEV for customer relationship management, SEV for data disambiguation, SEV for house-holding, and so on and so on.  The engine should perform the same functions… while only the domain (or body type) changes.

It also occurs to us that the engine ought to be flexible in terms of what is mounted to the chassis – and how.  Do you want the 2.2L engine?  4 cylinder or 6 cylinder?  In the case of an identity resolution engine, customers ought to be able to pick how the functionality is delivered.  Full enterprise software license with professional services to build the car?  Done.  Functionality on demand a la Infoglide Software’s Identity Resolution as a Service (IRaaS ^TM) offering?  You got it.  A SEV appliance that sits behind a customer’s firewall to alleviate privacy-in-data concerns?  No problem.

The need for an SEV engine that provides a powerful library of matching and relationship capabilities, delivered in a variety of customer-friendly methods is now more critical than ever.  With the increase in activity lately around the MDM space, one thing is clear:  the race is most definitely on.

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[Post from Infoglide] Master Data Movement

“I read with interest yesterday’s article at SeekingAlpha which discusses rumors swirling around the MDM software industry.  According to the article, sources suggest that two deals are very near completion.  The first of those rumored transactions would see Informatica picking up MDM provider Siperian.  On the heels of their acquisitions of Identity Systems and AddressDoctor, the Siperian purchase could not be totally unexpected – but would most certainly create some ripple effect worth watching.”

[Post from Infoglide] Connecting the Dots: We May Be Closer Than We Think

“Paul Rosenzweig, former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy at the Department of Homeland Security, recently posted an intriguing piece on Harvard National Security Journal about connecting the dots regarding the Christmas Bomber. He makes a strong case that a decision to stop research on data analytic tools in 2003 has contributed to the problem analysts face today in making sense of the massive and manifold data sources they sift through.”

Forrester Blog: Introducing The MDM Market’s Newest 800lb Gorilla: Informatica Acquires Siperian!

“In the short term, I’m sure Informatica will be more than happy to continue to collect revenue from Oracle while keeping this partnership alive, but don’t expect future negotiated contracted terms to remain very reasonable as Informatica gains traction with its MDM strategy. No matter how often Oracle says how happy they are to maintain a friendly state of co-opetition with strategic partners, I don’t anticipate they will want to run the risk of a competitor pulling the rug out from under its aggressive MDM strategy.”

News8Austin: Community forum poses questions about Fusion Center

“According to department officials, sharing information with neighboring jurisdictions as well as state and federal agencies ensures that crime history and other information is shared outside the city limits. The department said it the center will be one that ‘analyzes information in order to best detect, respond and hopefully prevent criminal and terrorist activity — as well as other public safety hazards.’”

Ramon Chen: Informatica + Siperian Acquisition = Premier MDM Platform

“As expected, Informatica has announced that it has acquired Siperian (disclosure, my former company) for $130M… If predictions are correct, this will be a relative ‘bargain’ when compared with the upcoming IBM and Initiate Systems tie up which is expected to be 4 to 5x Initiate’s $90M annual revenues.”

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[Post from Infoglide] Data Fatigue

“Four years ago this week, a small aircraft lifted off from Watson Island in Miami. It was the plane’s 39,743rd flight. And as the tiny craft first vented white smoke and then lost its right wing in an explosion, it became clear that this was its last. All twenty people in the Grumman G73-T, including three infants, perished. The National Transportation Safety Board later determined that the culprit was metal fatigue.”

ovum: BI, EPM and EDW trends to watch out for in 2010

“For the mid-market and those new to BI, open source and BI software as a service (SaaS) will offer attractive alternatives. In the case of BI SaaS, increasing deployments of enterprise applications in the cloud by SMEs will act as a further driver for take-up of this option.”

destinationCRM.com: Electronic Health Records Get a Check-Up

“Hildreth references a 2009 New England Journal of Medicine survey indicating that close to 4 percent of physicians have a fully functional EHR system. About 13 percent of physicians’ offices have a basic EHR system in the works. Many organizations, Hildreth says, currently have bits and pieces of EHR, but not the full thing.”

insurancenewsnet.com: Hard-up Investigators Battle Against Rise In Comp Fraud

“While prosecution of various forms of insurance fraud is affected by budget constraints, the prosecution of underreporting of workers comp premiums by unscrupulous employers, or their outright failure to purchase the mandated coverage, may take the biggest hit, depending on each state’s priorities, Mr. Jay said.”

intelligent enterprise: Survey: BI Still Hindered By Technical Problems

“Specifically, the 2009 survey found that 29% of BI deployments were slightly successful and 47% were moderately successful. Only 21% of the respondents rated their deployments very successful.’A number of technical factors continue to contribute to — or hinder — stronger BI impact,’ the report said. ‘Data quality, reliability of the BI system and access to relevant data are the most important technical factors.’”

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[Post from Infoglide] Social CRM, CDI, and Identity Resolution

“In her well-read book on CDI, Jill Dyché offers a definition of CDI that also seems to describe social CRM. Try reading her definition of CDI, replacing ‘CDI’ with ’social CRM’: CDI is a set of procedures, controls, skills and automation that standardize and integrate customer data originating from multiple sources.”

Concord Monitor: Don’t play games when giving your name

“What do they want? Your date of birth, your gender and your middle initial. This information will be relayed to the TSA, and the TSA will match the information against information maintained by the Terrorist Screening Center (an arm of the FBI that gathers and consolidates watch lists). The theory is that a 12-year-old boy named John X. Doe can more easily be separated from John Z. Doe, who happens to be a 37-year-old man with a history of making bombs, if additional information is collected during the booking process. Once TSA has cleared you, you’ll be issued a boarding pass.”

pressdemocrat.com: Achieving paperless health care

“Medical record-keeping, until recently, relied on rooms full of paper files that were easily misplaced and filled with hurried, handwritten entries that could be hard to read. Electronic records hold orderly, keyboard-entered data that never leaves a hard drive and have the potential to move seamlessly from a primary care provider’s office to an emergency room or specialist’s suite.”

ebizQ: MDM Becoming More Critical in Light of Cloud Computing

[David Linthicum] “We’re moving from complex federated on-premise systems, to complex federated on-premise and cloud-delivered systems.   Typically, we’re moving in these new directions without regard for an underlying strategy around MDM, or other data management issues for that matter.”

Homeland Security: I&A Reconceived: Defining a Homeland Security Intelligence Role

“There are currently 72 fusion centers up and running around the country (a substantial increase from 38 centers in 2006).  I&A has deployed 39 intelligence officers to fusion centers nationwide, with another five in pre-deployment training and nearly 20 in various stages of administrative processing.  I&A will deploy a total of 70 officers by the end of FY 2010, and will complete installation of the Homeland Secure Data Network (HSDN), which allows the federal government to share Secret-level intelligence and information with state and local partners, at all 72 fusion centers.”

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By the Infoglide Team

[Post from Infoglide] Social CRM, CDI, and Identity Resolution

“In her well-read book on CDI, Jill Dyché offers a definition of CDI that also seems to describe social CRM. Try reading her definition of CDI, replacing ‘CDI’ with ’social CRM’:  CDI is a set of procedures, controls, skills and automation that standardize and integrate customer data originating from multiple sources(1).”

Charleston Daily Mail: Former owner of WVa trucking company sentenced

“Leonard Cline formerly owned H & H Trucking. The insurance commissioner says he defrauded the old state workers’ compensation system of more than $500,000 in unpaid premiums, penalties and claims for benefits over about 10 years.”

WTVQ: Eight People Indicted for Insurance Fraud

“The US attorney’s office says the suspects intentionally damaged insured automobiles owned by other conspirators then filed claims.”

KansasCity.com: Push for electronic medical records picks up steam

“With or without health care reform this year, electronic medical records are picking up steam. Recent technological advances are easing the transition for doctors and hospitals, and there’s the little matter of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act. The act, part of last spring’s stimulus package, included billions of dollars to ‘advance the use of health information technology.’ There’s plenty of advancing to do, with one group estimating that less than half the hospitals and only one in five physicians are equipped to fully use electronic records. ‘The United States is far more advanced in grocery store technology than in medical records technology,’ said Steve Lieber, president and chief executive officer of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society in Chicago.”

pnj.com: Man charged with workers’ comp fraud

“Florida Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink announced the arrest today in a news release. In the release, Sink said her Division of Insurance Fraud said Soto is charged with falsifying employment numbers with the intent of avoiding higher workers’ compensation premium payments.”

Federal News Radio: Update: Identity management in the Obama administration

“The alphabet soup of identity management programs from the Bush administration — HSPD-12, TWIC, Real ID, and many more — have gotten little attention publicly during the first nine months of the Obama presidency. But that doesn’t mean identity management has been ignored totally, says one senior administration official.”

London Evening Standard: Lloyd’s chief warns of more insurance fraud

“Lloyd’s of London’s chief executive Richard Ward today warned the deep recession would increase the number of fraudulent claims being made against the insurance market.”

Computerworld: Laptop searches at airports infrequent, DHS privacy report says

“The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s annual privacy report card revealed more details on the agency’s  controversial policy involving searches of electronic devices at U.S. borders. . . . For instance, numbers released in the report indicate that warrantless searches of electronic devices at U.S. borders are occurring less frequently than some privacy and civil rights advocates might have feared. Of the more than 144 million travelers that arrived at U.S. ports of entry between Oct. 1, 2008 and May 5, 2009, searches of electronic media were conducted on 1,947 of them, the DHS said.Of this number, 696 searches were performed on laptop computers, the DHS said. Even here, not all of the laptops received an ‘in-depth’ search of the device, the report states. A search sometimes may have been as simple as turning on a device to ensure that it was what it purported to be. U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents conducted ‘in-depth’ searches on 40 laptops, but the report did not describe what an in-depth search entailed. . . . The report chronicled similar efforts to monitor the privacy implications of a range of projects that privacy groups are also watching. Examples include  Einstein 2.0 network monitoring technology that improves the ability of federal agencies to detect and respond to threats, and the  Real ID identity credentialing program. The DHS’s terror watch list program, its numerous  data mining projects  and the secure flight initiative were also mentioned in the report.”

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