Identity Resolution Daily

By the Infoglide Team

Forrester Blog: TIBCO jumps onto MDM M&A train with acquisition of data matching vendor Netrics

[Rob Karel] “Netrics seemed the most likely target for Oracle to replace Identity Systems with its small footprint and relatively low acquisition cost, but now with Netrics off the market, Oracle should consider other matching vendors such as S3 Matching Technologies, Syslore or identity resolution/matching vendor Infoglide Software.”

msnbc: What is TSA’s Secure Flight Program?

“Secure Flight launched in August, is currently in a phase-in stage, and is intended to be fully in place by November 2010 for all flights leaving from and/or arriving in the U.S. Essentially, the airlines and booking engines will collect your full name, gender and birth date when you book your flight and send that info to the TSA, which will then compare the information against the no-fly list. The name you give when you book must synch up with your full name as shown on the government-issued ID you use when checking in for your flight.”

Michael Power: Can Governments Force Patient Data into EHRs?

“As a brief and somewhat simplistic aside, ‘electronic health record’ is a term often incorrectly used to describe both EHRs and EMRs. There is a distinction between the two and it is an important one. Hospitals and physicians use EMRs. EMRs, along with other databases, are expected to feed into a longitudinal ‘virtual’ patient record which is to be accessible across providers and institutions and which is properly referred to as the EHR.”

Security Management: Terror Threat Tracking System Shares Thousands of Tips from Locals, FBI Says

“The eGuardian system is one of the core technological elements of the Information Sharing Environment (ISE) established by congressional mandate in response to the intelligence failures that preceded the 9-11 attacks. In a typical scenario, a law enforcement agency will either generate its own SAR or field one from the public.”

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[Post from Infoglide] Garbage In, Garbage Out? Not Necessarily.

“One of the oldest phrases in computer science seems to still be in vogue. ‘Garbage in, garbage out’ (GIGO) is a term coined during the early days of the computing industry. It pointed out that the value of computer systems of the day were entirely dependent upon their input data. No amount of processing power could produce a right answer from bad data. Fast forward many decades…”

Formtek: Technology: Data Consistency via Master Data Management

“The concept of MDM is a good one, and many companies have piloted MDM projects over the last few years.  Now research firm Baseline Consulting  says that many companies are beginning to move beyond their MDM pilot systems.  Baseline Consulting co-founder Jill Dyche said that ‘the fact that data quality, data governance, and data enrichment processes may accompany an MDM initiative make it all the more attractive as an enterprise solution.’”

HSToday: DHS Intelligence Needs More Oversight

“The success of the fusion center program,” said the report, “ is dependent on the infrastructure that enables state and local fusion centers to have access to each other’s information as well as to the appropriate federal databases. The fusion center program and the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Report Initiative (NSI) rely on the concept of shared space architecture, where the fusion centers replicate data from their systems to an external server under their control, making the decision on what to share totally under their control.”

HealthITExchange: EHR implementation a foregone conclusion, ONC says

“No matter how the rules shake out, EHR implementation in the United States is a foregone conclusion, Blumenthal said. He sees the skills of collecting, using, searching and sharing health data electronically becoming part of the assumed professional skill set for health care providers, just as using a stethoscope is now. In the next five to 10 years, hospitals will use their robust EHR systems to recruit physicians; solo physicians who succeed in implementing EHR will sell their practices more easily when the time comes, but solo physicians still using paper will not be able to sell their practices at all.”

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By Douglas Wood, Infoglide Senior Vice President

One of the oldest phrases in computer science seems to still be in vogue. “Garbage in, garbage out” (GIGO) is a term coined during the early days of the computing industry. It pointed out that the value of computer systems of the day were entirely dependent upon their input data. No amount of processing power could produce a right answer from bad data.

Fast forward many decades. The same phrase is still used today to emphasize the importance of data quality in many application areas (e.g., healthcare). While high quality data remains important, two factors influence me to say that GIGO is not the absolute rule that it once was: (1) advancements in the evolution of software and hardware technology, and (2) the emergence of whole classes of new applications targeting fraud detection.

What happens when the quality of data is “enhanced”? Processes like data transformation, data cleansing, and de-duplication filter out information that is unnecessary and confusing. Names, addresses, and other attributes are standardized. Duplicate records are deleted. Links to “bad” data are broken. Master records, aka “golden records”, are created for use by multiple systems.

While this has great value for traditional systems, it can devastate fraud detection efforts. For example, discovering and evaluating multiple addresses during fraud analysis is crucial in finding and prosecuting perpetrators of fraud. Or conversely, standardizing multiple forms and instances of someone’s name held in multiple data sources may remove vital clues and break a forensic chain of evidence.  We sometimes refer to the result as data deterioration.

So “garbage in, garbage out” is still an operative phrase for most software systems, but for entity resolution, we’ve found repeatedly that “one man’s garbage is another man’s treasure.”

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By the Infoglide Team

IT-Director.com: The Informatica Event

[Philip Howard] “To begin with, the company talked about its acquisition of Siperian. I have already commented on this but one point that emerged at the conference was the way that Informatica describes Siperian as infrastructure MDM as opposed to application MDM. This is a hitherto unrecognised distinction (with respect to terminology) in the MDM market. Informatica distinguishes the former from the latter by saying that infrastructure MDM is domain and data model independent.”

Workforce Management: Medical Clinic Owners Plead No Contest to $60 Million Workers’ Compensation Fraud

“Investigators alleged that the pair purchased thousands of workers’ compensation client referrals from an attorney television advertising service. Clients were then sent to doctors who had a relationship with Premier, which would handle billing and collection work in return for a 50 percent fee for money they collected. Clients were then sent to attorneys who had a business relationship with Fish and Bacino, investigators allege. ‘Getting kickbacks for referring medical payments is illegal and drives up the costs in the system,’ California Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner said in a statement.”

SignalScape: DC Police Chief Cathy Lanier Describes How Technology Is Changing Police Work in the Capitol

“The MPD also established a fusion center, which is responsible for the national capitol region. From a homeland security perspective, Chief Lanier said that the center collects and stores crime and terror alerts into a data warehouse.”

Injured Workers’ Law Firm Blog: Insurance Fraud Is a Huge Crime

“The fraudulent claims that can be made through insurance companies are categorized as being soft or hard. Soft fraud is the most common type of fraud and usually takes place when someone exaggerates a claim being made. Hard fraud takes place when someone deliberately plans a deceptive act such as a collision or the theft of their vehicle.”

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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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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 Infoglide

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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