Identity Resolution Daily

[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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By Douglas Wood, Infoglide Senior Vice President

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.

The first thing that springs to mind is what Oracle would intend to do with Informatica.  A long-time business partner of Oracle, strengthened through the 2008 purchase of Identity Systems, Informatica could now only be classified as a true and direct competitor to Oracle.  Can Oracle continue to OEM technology (SSA Name3, for example) from what would instantly become a major competitor?  Sleeping with the enemy is one thing… leaving money on the nightstand afterwards is another thing altogether!  It will be interesting to see what happens here, to say the least.

The other rumored acquisition is that of Initiate Systems by IBM.  Thought to be roughly twice the size of Siperian, Initiate would tend to give further credibility to IBM’s vast – and growing – presence in the Health Care industry, where Initiate has become a recognized industry leader.  What muddies the waters, however, would be the question of what IBM would intend to do with Initiate’s entity resolution engine.  In a nutshell, Initiate has been one of two software vendors doing an excellent job of providing technologies applicable for both MDM and fraud/risk related implementations.  Infoglide Software Corporation is the other.

Marketed in an eerily similar fashion to Infoglide’s earlier-released Identity Resolution Engine (is imitation the most sincere form of flattery?), Initiate’s offering in this identity resolution space could become short-lived given IBM’s large and ongoing investment in InfoSphere Identity Insight Solutions (formerly Entity Analytics Solutions).  How soon that would happen, of course, is anyone’s guess.

One thing is certain, however: the need for technology that is applicable to both MDM initiatives and that exposes risk and fraud through matching and linking of entities is very real and growing.  How the other major industry players react – should either or both of these rumors become reality – will define the industry for years to come.

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By Brian Calvert, Infoglide Senior Software Architect

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.

Metal fatigue, or more generally “material fatigue”, is a well-understood concept in the “real” non-digital world. Over time, materials like metal begin to fail through deterioration induced by various kinds of stress. The individual stresses are less than the strength of the material. But they weaken it, and can eventually overcome it. Left unchecked, material fatigue can lead to failure of parts, and the consequences can be devastating, like the crash of Chalk’s Ocean Airways Flight 101 on December 19, 2005.

In working with clients and observing the challenges they face, the concept of “data fatigue” has crept into our conversations. The idea is that a company’s data – about customers, vendors, employees, products, whatever – wears out over time due to entropy. Yes, you’re right, bits don’t start disappearing randomly, but changes to the data do introduce ambiguity and errors over time: people marry, products are retired, companies change offices, assumptions change.

Large manufactured objects are made up of thousands of individual parts. Data are the key “parts” of information systems, and we’re not the first in pointing out the critical nature of maintaining data quality. What’s novel is the idea of instituting a continuous refresh of organizational data: resolving, enriching, and augmenting corporate data beyond everyday transactional updates.

In fact, you can view the transactions as stressors that introduce ambiguities, conflicts and errors. Many methods of fighting “data fatigue” may already be in place – e.g., pre-transaction editing and verification, and periodic data cleansing – yet corporate data continues to deteriorate over time because these methods usually focus on single data sources.

In a world where the efficiency and margins of an organization can be profoundly affected by the accuracy of its data, threats to the accuracy and currency of that data must be countered.

Performing this refresh manually is a daunting task even for a smaller organization. But for hundreds of thousands or even millions of records it is impractical to do by hand. Automated solutions become necessary, and technologies like entity resolution can create a continual data refresh cycle.

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By the Infoglide Team

Topeka Capital-Journal: Five arrests in lottery fraud

“In this investigation, agents presented unsigned winning lottery tickets to retailers. The clerks were required to advise customers they had won a prize and instruct each they had to redeem winnings at lottery headquarters. In six instances, the clerks withheld information about the winning ticket but later tried to redeem the prize personally or with help of an accomplice.”

New York Times: Computerized Health Records

“Most other countries have much more use of electronic health records than we do. For example, the Danes have virtually 100 percent of physicians using electronic health records. In Britain, virtually 100 percent of primary care physicians use them. In Australia, Sweden, Norway, virtually 100 percent. In many, many other Western countries, the electronic record is virtually ubiquitous.”

ebizQ: Eight Reasons Why Data-Centricity Is The Future Of Business

“Unfortunately less well known, Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) is, however, likely the most strategic aspect of creating business value over the network, more than SaaS and possibly even more than PaaS. Creating a best-of-breed set of data, wrapping a business model around it (advertising, metering, internal chargebacks, build a network effect, etc), defining an SLA, and opening it up internally or to the world is how to both generate consumption as well as becoming in itself the new lock-in.”

reviewjournal.com: A fusion of crime fighters 

“The fusion center concept, which was developed by the federal government after the 9/11 attacks, is grounded in the idea that information flow between police agencies is key to stopping terrorism. But in Las Vegas and elsewhere, the concept has evolved to include a broader ‘all crimes, all hazards’ approach.”

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Technology writer Chris Calnan’s story opened with a comment about Infoglide that nicely sums up the evolution of the broader market for identity resolution and entity analytics: “The market may have finally caught up with Infoglide Software Corp.’s technology.”

While identity resolution technology has evolved rapidly over the past decade, its market visibility only emerged fairly recently. It was barely two years ago in mid-2007 when Gartner analyst Mark Beyer dubbed it “entity resolution and analysis” and pointed out that it “was previously an obscure, but gradually developing, technology that has come to the forefront as a result of world events and market forces.” Gartner singled it out as an “On the Rise” technology within operational business intelligence.

That first Gartner “hype cycle” showed entity resolution and analysis entering at the earliest stage. A year later in mid-2008, a broader report on data management  depicted it significantly higher on the curve in the opinion of the Gartner analyst team. In both reports, its estimated time to “mainstream adoption” was 2-5 years, the second fastest category.

At the end of 2008, noted consultant and speaker Jill Dyché of Baseline Consulting issued her predictions for 2009. Along with predictions about SaaS, data governance, BI, and MDM, she said that “Identity Resolution will get its due.” Rob Karel of Forrester had written several months before about Informatica’s acquisition of one of the two closest Infoglide competitors (IBM EAS being the other one). Identity Systems was acquired from Nokia for $85 million.

As we progressed further into 2009, the most meaningful indicator of identity resolution’s growing importance surfaced: an escalating identification with the space by other companies. IBM, Infoglide, and Informatica were joined by Initiate Systems, Intelligent Search, and Netrics, each of whom began incorporating messaging around identity and entity resolution.

For our customers and for us, this is all good news.  Our evolving space becoming better known and more highly valued will provide more alternatives for customers while increasing our own visibility. The future of identity resolution looks bright, and we all win.

[Distributed earlier this week in our quarterly publication, Identity Resolution Quarterly]

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[Post from Infoglide] Enriching E-discovery Results with Identity Resolution

“Civil lawsuits often result in discovery orders from the court to produce every shred of possibly relevant internal communication. The need to comprehend patterns across the resulting vast amount of aggregated data is critical. To help organizations respond to these demands, powerful e-discovery software systems (e.g., see StoredIQ) create data topology maps that identify the relationships between active sources of multiple forms of electronically stored information (ESI).”

USA Players: Lottery Winner Demands Payment After Crooked Clerk Pilfers Ticket 

“Pankaj Joshi, the accused, was an employee at the convenience store in which Willis purchased his tickets. Joshi had allegedly told Willis that the ticket that he presumed was worth millions was worth only $2 dollars, which Joshi presumably paid to Willis. Joshi was charged with lottery fraud, and it is suspected that he took the winnings and fled to his homeland of Nepal.”

For more, see “Lottery Fraud by Retailers Is an Identity Resolution Problem“

The Daily Texan: Civil liberties groups voice ‘fusion center’ apprehension

“It will be funded initially by U.S. Department of Homeland Security grants and will then become self-sustaining, using personnel already within APD’s budget. ‘It is really important for law enforcement to be able to share information in a timely fashion, because when you share information, you can solve crimes quicker and, in some cases, prevent another serial offense from happening,’ Carter said. Carter said Central Texas agencies possess large amounts of lawfully collected information, but separate information systems hinder the sharing of information.”

BeyeNETWORK: Master Data Management Checklist #5: Data Quality Mechanics

[David Loshin] “The ability to use the traditional data quality toolset of data parsing, standardization and matching enables the development of a “customer master,” “product master,” “security master,” etc. that becomes the master entity index to be used for ongoing identity resolution and elimination of duplicate entries.”

Airlines and Destinations: Passenger Info Required at Booking under TSA’s Secure Flight Program

“When making a flight booking, each passenger must declare their full name just as it appears in their passport, as well as their gender and date of birth. The airline sends the information to the TSA 72 hours before the flight departure time. The TSA compares the information with watch lists with the purpose of identifying suspected terrorists, preventing access to flights by passengers prohibited from flying, and identifying individuals for whom an enhanced security check should be performed.”

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By the Infoglide Team

information management: Multi-Entity MDM Enablement

“Most efforts, however, are executed in surroundings inhibited by existing infrastructure (legacy applications, tools, hardware and integration), dispersed organizational structures and suboptimal processes. This reality introduces challenges in architecting and deploying efficient and effective multi-entity MDM solutions.”

BAM INTEL: BAM’s Thinking on the New DHS Standards

“Public Fusion Centers must be seen by citizens and policy-makers to play a direct role in the response to disasters as well as intelligence gathering. They cannot remain in the intelligence-sharing role only and not take some of the spotlight when their good work prevents or lessens the impact of America’s next disaster.”

newsday.com: OPINION: Revolution right in your doctor’s hand

“For doctors and their patients (in other words, all of us), the electronic health record is a far more revolutionary idea than those that brought us the ability to download a song, post a video online or read and send e-mails when you’re on a camping trip. While those other innovations indirectly enhance the quality of life, they are designed for entertainment or business purposes. The EHR directly improves quality of life because the end result of its design is better health.”

SmartData Collective: Data May Require Unique Data Quality Processes

“All data quality projects can appear the same from afar but ultimately can be as different as stars and planets. One of the biggest ways they vary is in the data itself and whether it is chiefly made up of name and address data or some other type of data.”

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By Robert Barker, Infoglide Senior VP & Chief Marketing Officer

A continual theme at IdentityResolutionDaily is maintaining the privacy and confidentiality of data at all times. Two recent posts concerned fusion centers and citizen profiling, but the same issues apply to virtually any application of entity resolution technology. The fact is that, in some cases, anonymous identity resolution is a requirement for more sensitive identity resolution implementations.

The strong emphasis in data management for the last decade or so has been to implement data warehouses, data marts, and master data management. When bundled with associated processes like data extraction, transformation, and cleansing, these methods have been widely accepted as the best approach to solve any data problem. Here at IdentityResolutionDaily, we tend to talk about this over-handling of data as “data deterioration.”

A more basic approach is simply working with data sources undisturbed in their native environments. New principles suggest that you should perform scoring analyses as close to the source as possible. By exploiting existing security layers already in place, the need to add new layers of security is obviated.

Of course, for key sources of operational data, existing IT policies may deny direct access. In other cases, it may be necessary or preferable to move data for other reasons. For example, achieving desired performance parameters may dictate working with an extracted subset of the data rather than the entire data store.

The point I’m making is not to forbid moving data or creating data marts under any circumstances. Rather, I’m suggesting that the most rational approach is the following:

1. Develop solutions that adapt easily to multiple, disparate, remote data sources.
2. Default to leaving data where it lives whenever and wherever possible.
3. Provide the appropriate levels of entity anonymity within the solution and with the least possible intrusion to the enterprise.

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By the Infoglide Team

information management: Multidomain Master Data Management for Business Success

“All data that flows through an enterprise can be categorized into six different types: who, what, when, where, how and why. Master data is about who, what, when and where. ‘Who’ data is about the parties of interest that matter most to a business or organization including stakeholders, benefactors, customers, suppliers, owners, providers, partners, etc.”

HSToday: DHS Highlights Intelligence Improvements in Report Marking 9/11 Report Anniversary

“To date, 72 fusion centers have been designated throughout the country, with DHS having provided more than $340 million from fiscal years 2004-2009 to state and local governments to support these centers. DHS also deployed the Homeland Security Data Network to 29 fusion centers, which allows the federal government to share information and intelligence with states and provides fusion center staff access to the most current terrorism-related information.”

The Healthcare IT Guy: Guest Article: Why Doctors Hate Electronic Medical Records

“The fact is that doctors love high-tech. They have reason to hate EMRs but not computers and iPhones.”

DecisionStats: Interview Jim Harris Data Quality Expert OCDQ Blog

“Jim Harris - ‘I know that Gartner has reported that 25% of critical data within large businesses is somehow inaccurate or incomplete and that 50% of implementations fail due to lack of attention to data quality issues.’”

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By the Infoglide Team

CiOZone: Ask the CIO: What’s your data management strategy?

“Undoubtedly, the recession has interrupted—or scaled back—some MDM-related work. But as Aaron Zornes said during an interview just before the July 4th holiday, ‘It’s not as if projects like risk management or Anti-Money Laundering, or Know Your Customer can wait until the economy improves.’ Some work just has to go forward—rain, shine, or economic downturn.”

Insurance Journal: California Efforts To Reduce Prison Budget Would Hurt Fraud Fighting

“‘Taking the power out of the hands of the public prosecutor to charge someone with a felony crime will have a serious impact on public safety. Insurance fraud is a serious crime that demands serious consequences,’ the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud, National Insurance Crime Bureau, National Health Care Anti-Fraud Association and the International Association of Special Investigation Units said in a joint letter to Schwarzenegger.”

mydesert.com: 6 accused of trying to steal winning lottery tickets in Coachella Valley

“Undercover investigators posing as customers handed clerks decoy winning tickets and asked if they had won, Jeandron said. Some of the clerks told the investigators that their ticket was not a winner, but then went on to file a claim with the Lottery to collect the winnings.”

HISTALK: Monday Morning Update 7/13/09

“I don’t have access to the full text of the article, but I truly believe that once the pain of getting EMRs running as data collection appliances is over (meaning we’ve got data collection clerks known as doctors and nurses in place, which is the ‘pain’ part), the benefit will be incredible.”

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