Identity Resolution Daily

By the Infoglide Team

intelligent enterprise: They Better Get This MDM Program Right

“As reported in The New York Times and on the TSA Web site, the Secure Flight program will improve upon current practices in matching passenger identities to watch lists in many ways. At first glance, this appears to be a well thought-out program that conforms to several basic tenets of Master Data Management (in bold below), in this case for the ‘Customer’ entity.”

EHRWMS: Georgia’s Best EMR Used By Three of Top Ten Pediatricians

“Of approximately 100 respondents, 28 used an EMR, of which 40% used the EncounterPRO Pediatric EMR. There were only three other EMRs used more than once, and they were used by only 10%, 7%, and 7% of the survey respondents respectively.”

Government Executive: Enforcement agencies boost cooperation on drug investigations

“In addition, ICE agents for the first time will fully participate in the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force Fusion Center. The center allows participating federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, including DEA and the FBI, to share information and analytical resources to enhance their overall investigative capacity.”

SmartData Collective: The Data-Information Continuum

“Data could be considered a constant while information is a variable that redefines data for each specific use. Data is not truly a constant since it is constantly changing. However, information is still derived from data and many different derivations can be performed while data is in the same state (i.e. before it changes again).”

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By Dan Power, President and Founder, Hub Solution Designs

There definitely seems to be a trend lately with small companies in the master data management (MDM) and data quality space being purchased (as in the asset acquisition of Exeros by IBM) or partnering with larger firms (such as Silver Creek Systems’ OEM relationship with Oracle).

I think this is a good thing. Using the classic “build, buy or ally” strategy, it isn’t surprising that sometimes companies will conclude that it’s faster and/or cheaper to buy a technology, or partner with another company that has that technology, rather than build it themselves internally.

A lot of companies do tend to suffer from the “not invented here” syndrome, where anything not developed inside their four walls tends to be regarded with disdain. But that tendency leads to a much slower pace of innovation. In very competitive industries like enterprise software, getting there faster is a very definite advantage.

Since I’ve been working with the identity resolution experts at Infoglide, I’ve become much more aware of the role identity resolution technology plays in our daily lives. Every time you get on an airplane, file an insurance claim, apply for a job / mortgage / credit card, or even shop in a retail store or on a web site, your identity is probably being evaluated by an Identity Resolution Engine.

A lot of people in the MDM space refer to this as “matching”, but there’s considerably more to Identity Resolution than the sophisticated pattern matching that most MDM hub platforms use today. The more robust form – Identity Resolution – is mostly used currently for sophisticated applications like terrorist screening and anti-money laundering, where big consequences or big dollar amounts are at stake.

But that technology is gradually filtering down to more routine commercial applications like master data management for customers. The large MDM vendors like Oracle, IBM and SAP – and the smaller vendors like Siperian, Initiate Systems and D&B/Purisma – will follow the “build, buy or ally” pattern, with some opting to create their own more sophisticated Entity Resolution capabilities, some buying smaller firms who already have those advanced products, or perhaps partnering as a middle ground between building and buying.

Either way, this trend is good both for specialized companies like Infoglide and for the general public. We’ll all be a little safer getting on a plane, a little less likely to suffer from identity theft or confusion, and perhaps save a little money through reduced incidence of various types of fraud.

Full-fledged Identity Resolution is a capability that most MDM hubs should plan on adding in the next revision cycle or two, as MDM customers become more discriminating and more demanding of their hub’s ability to identify individuals and businesses from an ever-growing stream of data.

Dan Power is president of Hub Solution Designs, a consulting firm specializing in master data management and data governance. He writes a popular blog and a column for Information Management magazine, speaks frequently at technology conferences, and regularly advises clients on developing & implementing high impact MDM and data governance strategies.

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By the Infoglide Team

e-patients.net: Meaningful Use: The Elephant IS In The Room

“A recent NPR/Kaiser Family Foundation poll shows that the American public is surprisingly more positive about the potentials of EHRs than most professionals. People already are familiar with computerized information and accept its risks.”

IT-Director.com: Trends in Master Data Management

“The interesting question is how much pressure this puts on the other MDM players with data quality solutions (like Dataflux and SAP/Business Objects) to build out their data profiling capabilities into the area of data discovery.”

NationalSecurity.org: MYTHBUSTER: TSA’S WATCH LIST IS MORE THAN 1 MILLION PEOPLE STRONG

“There are less than 400,000 individuals on the consolidated terrorist watch list and less than 50,000 individuals on the no-fly and selectee lists. Individuals on the no-fly and selectee lists are identified by law enforcement and intelligence partners as legitimate threats to transportation requiring either additional screening or prohibition from boarding an aircraft.”

OCDQ Blog: TDWI World Conference Chicago 2009

“TDWI World Conference Chicago 2009 was held May 3-8 in Chicago, Illinois at the Hyatt Regency Hotel and was a tremendous success.  I attended as a Data Quality Journalist for the International Association for Information and Data Quality (IAIDQ). I used Twitter to provide live reporting from the conference.  Here are my notes from the courses I attended…”

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[Post from Infoglide] Let’s Be Reasonable

“A recent post, ‘Terrorist Watchlist, Troubling Flaws Revealed’, starts out by making a valid point. If the terrorist watchlist is flawed, then the name matching results against such a list will be flawed. The author then goes on to reach related conclusions through rationalization rather than reasoning.”

Acxiom: Prognostications for the New Year 

“Identity resolution will get its due. Sure, you can call it infrastructure. Processing and rules intensive, customer identity resolution has been relegated to the underlying algorithms of third-party data providers, MDM, and data quality vendors. However, companies are recognizing that they may have unique customer data-matching needs-a bank we work with has more than 50 definitions of a household-and they’ll be looking at smarter, more specialized ways to automate them.”

Dallas Morning News: Dallas Police Department’s Fusion Center outsmarts criminals

“Chief David Kunkle, who championed the unit’s formation in January 2007, refers to it as the “brains” of a department that reported a 10 percent drop in crime last year and a nearly 19 percent decline in the first quarter of this year.”

datanomic: Fractured approaches to Sanctions Screening put UK Companies at risk, says new FSA report

“‘The use of multiple identities is common in the criminal world and Al-Qaeda’s own training manual requires its operatives to use false identities to hide their terrorist activities. Exploiting variations of a criminal’s real name is, perhaps, the simplest way of acquiring a new identity. Typical approaches are to use name variations or switching the order of names,’ added Pearson. ‘Other data, such as dates of birth are often manipulated simply by transposing digits.’”

Cloud Computing Journal: Experian QAS Launches QAS Pro On Demand

“‘By offering address verification in a SaaS model, we are enabling organizations of all sizes to maintain accurate contact data in a cost-effective platform,’ said Joel Curry, chief operating officer, Experian QAS. ‘As businesses change over time, our new infrastructure is able to adapt to shifting demands.’

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[Post from Infoglide] Stuck in the Middle

“‘Clowns to the left of me, Jokers to the right, Here I am, stuck in the middle with you.’ One reason Identity Resolution Daily began two years ago was to create a venue to address privacy/security controversies.”

Business Week: California couple charged with big insurance fraud

“Prosecutors said the pair defrauded the State Compensation Insurance Fund, California’s biggest workers’ compensation insurer, of $38 million between 2000 and 2008 — the largest in state history.”

OCDQ Blog: El Festival Del IDQ Bloggers

“Welcome to the April 2009 issue of El Festival del IDQ Bloggers, which is a blog carnival for information/data quality bloggers being run as part of the celebration of the five year anniversary of the International Association for Information and Data Quality (IAIDQ).”

Business Insurance: ‘Questionable’ claims on the rise: NICB

“A down economy and mounting unemployment level is causing some people to look at insurance fraud as a possible way to make money by taking advantage of a situation, according to the NICB. The report, released Tuesday, is an analysis of questionable claims submitted by more than 1,000 NICB member companies in the first quarter of 2009 versus the same period a year ago.”

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By the Infoglide Team

New York Times: Name Not on Our List? Change It, China Says

“By some estimates, 100 surnames cover 85 percent of China’s citizens. Laobaixing, or “old hundred names,” is a colloquial term for the masses. By contrast, 70,000 surnames cover 90 percent of Americans. The number of Chinese family names in use has tended to shrink as China’s population has grown, a winnowing of surnames that has occurred in many cultures over time.”

OCDQ Blog: All I Really Need To Know About Data Quality I Learned In Kindergarten

“When you present the business case for your data quality initiative to executive management and other corporate stakeholders, remember the lessons of show and tell.  Poor data quality is not a theoretical problem - it is a real business problem that negatively impacts the quality of decision critical enterprise information.”

BTNonline: Secure Flight Roils Booking Tech

“To facilitate the implementation of Secure Flight’s new data requirements for the travel industry, officials from the International Air Transport Association and Department of Homeland Security this year decided to use passenger data fields already used to transmit visa and passport information. TSA noted those IATA standards go into effect May 1.”

Security Systems News: Retail industry to ’speak with a single voice’

“There will now be a single entity both helping to establish best practices for loss prevention and lobbying state and federal government in regard to major security issues like organized retail crime.”

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[Post from Infoglide] Solving the False Negative Problem

“In my March 25, 2009 post “The Myth of Matching,” I discussed the confusion between entity resolution and matching as in record de-duplication.  Matching is a necessary part of entity resolution, but it is not sufficient.”

Semantic Web Company: Chris Bizer: Within the corporate market, there is interest in using Linked Data as a lightweight, pay-as-you-go data integration technology

“‘I think we will see a growing number of applications that use data from the public Web as background knowledge to offer better search capabilities and to augment local content with additional content from the Web of Data.’”

TheStreet.com: Ombudsman: Iowa Lottery should focus on fraud

“‘Many of these were the types of cases where the lottery investigator would need to ‘make the case,’ ‘ the report said. ‘Most of the time they didn’t even try.’ The report also said that even when the lottery discovered cases of fraud or theft by retailers, the retailer wasn’t held accountable.”

Security Management: Fusion Center Dialogue Continues

“We don’t have to choose between security and liberty. In order to be effective, intelligence activities need to be narrowly focused on real threats, tightly regulated and closely monitored.”

data quality pro: Expert Interview With Dan Power of Hub Solution Designs Inc.

“Sometimes, the business comes forward and says “we’ve got to have the single view of the customer”. Sometimes, IT sees it as a way to become more agile and to reduce system maintenance costs. It is pretty clear, though, that MDM initiatives are more likely to succeed when they’re driven by the business, even if it may have been originally initiated by IT.”

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By the Infoglide Team

Los Angeles Times: L.A. County reserve deputy is accused of fraud at his security firm

“Jane Robison, a spokeswoman for Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley, said the men created a shell company, International Armored Solutions Inc., to hide the true number of employees at the security firm to avoid paying higher workers’ compensation insurance premiums to the State Compensation Insurance Fund.”

ArticleRooms.com: The Benefits of Master Data Management

“Next, Master Data Management can also help prevent fraud. With the passing of Sarbanes-Oxley which holds executives of public companies accountable for their financial statement, these executives have now placed pressure on the organization to get things right.”

Greene County Daily World: Looking back: Area schools safer because of Columbine shooting incident

“Fusion centers are central locations where local, state and federal officials work to receive, integrate and analyze intelligence. The ultimate goal of a fusion center is to provide a mechanism where law enforcement, public safety, and private partners can come together with a common purpose and improve the ability to safeguard our homeland and prevent criminal activity.”

SmartDataCollective: Enterprise Data World 2009

[Jim Harris] “Enterprise Data World is the business world’s most comprehensive vendor-neutral educational event about data and information management.  This year’s program was bigger than ever before, with more sessions, more case studies, and more can’t-miss content.”

All About B2B: PAXLST and CUSRES – How EDI keeps our planes safe from Terrorists

“Through government ownership, the risk of security breaches is minimized and a higher level of consistency can be enforced across airlines.  In the first phase of the program, TSA will perform screening of only US domestic flights.  In future versions of the program, monitoring will expand to include international flights as well.”

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

Judging from recent remarks by Dr. Leonard Schaefer and Edward Lull Jr., the need for identity resolution is heightened by the turbulent economic circumstances of the “interesting times” we find ourselves living in.  While specifically referring to name analytics in a recent article in Bank Systems and Technology, the point applies equally to the identity resolution solutions which encompass name analytics. The authors state that:

As big enterprise applications such as CRM are no longer the center of the IT universe, more attention is being focused on the information itself. Banks today have now become more reliant on customer information—independent of applications and business processes to make faster and smarter business decisions in response to changing market conditions.

They go on to detail four factors in international financial service organizations that drive the use of new software technologies to resolve identities using name information: compliance, customer data consolidation and quality, CRM assets review, and continuity of service.

Compliance – Key banking initiatives are anti-money laundering (AML) and know-your-customer (KYC) compliance that seek to prevent money that flows into financial institutions from ending up in the hands of prohibited groups.

Customer data consolidation and quality – The prevalence of large mergers between multi-national banks is driving requirements for name-validation “at the moment of capture” to prevent bad data from entering business systems.

CRM assets review – Combining millions of accounts from more than one bank risks overwhelming existing CRM systems, so resolving identities early in the process can mitigate the risk of future problems.

Continuity of service – Not anticipating the impact of merging large customer databases can interrupt customer service, leading to negative consequences from customer dissatisfaction all the way to losing large blocks of customers.

In Identity Resolution Daily, we’ve often written about the growing market requirement for sophisticated identity resolution technology, and we like to share relevant information from other sources. The referenced article is worth the read.

As always, let us hear your thoughts and comments.

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By the Infoglide Team

Contact Center Solutions: Master Data Management: The Importance of Relationship Management

“Businesses are looking for ways to understand family and partnership relationships to correctly determine who their best customers are, how to estimate the risk-adjusted values of customer relationships, and what the organization should offer to attract new customers and retain their best existing customers. Government agencies want to gain a deeper understanding of relationships between suspects and criminal organizations to prevent terrorist threats, money laundering and other criminal activities or unwanted events.”

Security Debrief: Secure Flight is a Milestone Achievement

“With the advent of Secure Flight, we witness an important new tool in the fight to protect our commercial aviation system while at the same time we have reduced costs to the private sector and defeated battalions of lawyers who would gladly have prevented Secure Flight from coming on line.”

data quality PRO: Identifying Duplicate Customers (Part 5)

“In this article, the fifth and final part in the series, we will discuss topics related to duplicate consolidation, including techniques for creating a “best of breed” representative record for duplicates, physical removal vs. logical linkage, and consolidation vs. cross population.”

Security Management

“Robert Riegle, director of the state and local program office of DHS’ Office of Intelligence and Analysis, said that all DHS intelligence and analysis staff assigned to state fusion centers are trained in privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties issues. He also noted that DHS has made recommendations to fusion centers to promote transparency and privacy protections among its staff.”

cbs6albany.com: Hudson Falls skydiver charged with bilking workers’ comp

“According to the State Insurance Department, the back injury that supposedly prevented Jacob Bancroft from working apparently didn’t keep him from jumping out of airplanes. The 28-year-old Hudson Falls resident has been charged with illegally collecting $83,000 in workers’ compensation benefits for a back injury he said he suffered while working as a press operator.”

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