Identity Resolution Daily

Homeland Security Watch: Homeland Security & Technology Panel Event

“Greg Nojeim, Director of the Project on Freedom, Security, and Technology at the Center for Democracy and Technology offered insightful warnings about the unintended consequences of technology when it is not developed or deployed with privacy protections at the initial stages.”

b-eye.com - Business Intelligence Network - Blog: Jill Dyche: At Night She Sells Oranges: Sarah Mclachlan Eats Our Lunch

“You may have seen Baseline’s latest YouTube video, one of several in our ongoing Get in the Game series. To film it we took advantage of the actor’s strike in L.A. and ended up producing several videos on the cheap. We were pretty proud of our opportunism, which let us deliver a funny and tongue-in-cheek send-up of master data management. The video illustrates how customer identity resolution —a key part of the MDM stack—is a problem that can often be found in your own backyard, as it were.”

Fraud, Phishing and Financial Misdeeds: NRF Survey shows Organized Retail Crime activity is growing!

“When I stated that this activity hurts all of us, the reason is that retailers have to make up the $30 billion they are losing to this activity somewhere. This normally equates to higher prices, or in extreme circumstances (especially in tight economic times) cutting payroll. Simply stated, people might be losing their jobs because of this activity.”

Andy on Enterprise Software: Data Quality stories

“The most entertaining thing I saw was a presentation by a consultancy firm on some real-life data quality situations they had encountered at clients, showing just how tricky data quality algorithms can be.”

National Retail Federation: The Most Famous Sheriff You Never Heard Of: Sheriff Grady Judd of Florida’s Polk County Sheriff’s Office will speak about high-profile cases of organized retail crime

“Sheriff Judd and I have something in common—we truly believe in the value of educating the public about organized retail crime. During Sheriff Judd’s keynote at the opening session of the LP show, he will address the importance of partnering with local retailers and others in the private sector. He will also share his story about uncovering the organized retail crime ring and about how his team worked with local retailers to track the criminals.”

[Note: While not exactly on topic, we felt that anyone who reads or writes blogs should be aware of the following story.]
Concurring Opinions: The Associated Press, Copyright, and the Blogosphere

“The Associated Press, one of the nation’s largest news organizations, said that it will, for the first time, attempt to define clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt without infringing on The A.P.’s copyright.”

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[Post from Infoglide] Integrating Identity Resolution into MDM Solutions: Real-Time or Batch?

“Dan Power at Hub Solution Designs recently challenged ‘MDM project team leaders, program managers, and data champions’ to think about the importance of integration. In particular, he asks about MDM integration in three contexts: real-time, business modeling, and two-way hub communication.”

Jeff Jonas: Smart Systems Flip-Flop

“Certainty often shifts with observations over time. And this is good.”

DataFlux Community of Experts: Integration in a Big Way!

“I am so excited! I get to work on an integration project that is huge. I mean really, really big — and it affects an entire organization. . . . After the project plan is solidified, roles and responsibilities are identified. Now a role is not necessarily a person! For example, there could be a data architect, business architect, technical architect, and a business intelligence architect role. Are you confused? I was, until we dug into the responsibilities of each role.”

Evolution of Security: Why is ID Important for Security?

“Last week we announced on our Web site a plan to begin REQUIRING ID from travelers on June 21st. This plan includes enabling our officers to refuse entry into the area beyond the security checkpoint anyone that does not cooperate with us to establish his or her identity. The exclusive reason to do this is to ensure people are who they say they are and are not gaming the system by using a boarding pass in a fake name; a well-known endeavor of professionals and college kids alike that could potentially circumvent the no-fly list.”

b-eye.com - Business Intelligence Network: An Update on Knowledge Management in the Federal Government

“A survey of the attendees of this year’s Knowledge Management Conference reveals that knowledge management in the federal government is alive and well.”

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

Dan Power at Hub Solution Designs recently challenged “MDM project team leaders, program managers, and data champions” to think about the importance of integration. In particular, he asks about MDM integration in three contexts: real-time, business modeling, and two-way hub communication.

Additionally, Jill Dyché recently pointed out that Identity Resolution supports and enhances five of eight core MDM functions outlined in her book on CDI, and we agree wholeheartedly. Given that Identity Resolution (IR) is integral to MDM, we can ask the first of Dan’s integration question: how should IR be integrated with MDM? More specifically, should this integration be batch or real-time?

The answer is, of course, it depends. Instead of asking “what will we be giving up by not providing for any real-time capabilities?” maybe we should ask “is the value of the MDM application sufficiently enhanced to justify the incremental infrastructure cost of using real-time data sources?” Sometimes the answer is yes, and sometimes it’s no.

Let’s consider two examples in the area of fraud detection. In a bank or retail setting, discovering a hidden relationship between two fraudulent people and keeping a fraudulent transaction from being consummated may save thousands of dollars in apprehension costs over catching it a day later, so a real-time approach is easily justified. On the other hand, in a case like insider securities trading, the acts are not preventable and the data connecting someone “in the know” with the person who makes a transaction based on a tip persists forever and can be caught and prosecuted months after it occurs.

Regardless of whether real-time or batch integration is selected, having multiple modes of integration available to match project requirements is important. In some cases, simple point-to-point XML data exchange may be enough, but in others it can be imperative that IR decisions be smoothly integrated into existing business processes. That may require using BPM, queuing, web services and other broadly supported methods of integration, again depending on the specific application context.

The takeaway: it’s essential to include multiple integration capabilities among the criteria you use in evaluating Identity Resolution technology.

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Hi-Tech-Blog: “Shoplifting Ring Pocketed Millions”

“A joint task force of federal agents and San Jose police officers arrested 17 alleged members of organized crime families for their suspected involvement in a shoplifting ring. Authorities say that the Le and Vo crime families employed hundreds of shoplifters to steal from retail stores.”

b-eye.com - Business Intelligence Network - Blog: David Loshin: Microsoft to Purchase Zoomix?

“Just heard through the rumor mill that Microsoft is ‘thinking about acquiring Zoomix.’“

CNBC: Retail Theft Up But Is Bad Economy The Cause?

“A record number of retailers–85%–say that they’ve been victims of organized retail crime in the past 12 months. That’s up 6% since 2007. . . . According to the NRF, nearly two-thirds (63%) of retailers experienced an increase in online resale of stolen items or ‘e-fencing’ during the past 12 months. Maybe this illegal online market is booming because consumers are now comfortable with buying from eBay or unknown merchants if the price is right.”

PogoWasRight.org: Your Papers Please: TSA outlaws ID-less flight

“In a major change of policy, the Transportation Security Administration has announced that passengers refusing to show ID will no longer be able to fly.”

Hub Solution Designs: Importance of Integration to MDM

“While integration doesn’t always have to be real-time, if you find yourself thinking solely in a batch-oriented mode, take a step back and ask yourself, ‘what will we be giving up by not providing for any real-time capabilities?’”

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[Post from Infoglide] That’s the Ticket: Addressing a Different Kind of Lottery Fraud

“Type ‘lottery fraud’ into Google, and you get lots of returns warning about the dangers of Nigerian lottery scams and other phishing attacks on unsuspecting, and/or perhaps overly optimistic, consumers. But there are less well known types of lottery fraud also being perpetrated, and some of them hurt consumers as well.”

b-eye.com - Business Intelligence Network - Blog: Jill Dyche: Doublin’ Down at the Data Governance Conference

“In a prior blog I bemoaned having to miss Informatica World in Vegas this week. (Regular readers of the Jillblog know that what happens in Vegas gets blogged about almost immediately.) But I feel much better now, since the Wilshire Data Governance Conference in San Francisco has already exceeded my expectations.”

Washington Business Journal: Retail survey reveals growing theft problems

“Retailers are battling an increase of organized retail crime, according to the National Retail Federation’s (NRF) 2008 Organized Retail Crime report published Wednesday.”

Informatica: Data Quality - Ensuring Trust in Your Data

“TDWI once published a study that poor data quality was costing companies an estimated $600B annually in the US alone. And yet, industry analysts estimate the data quality tools market to be between $300-400M annually. The demand for better data quality is clearly there, but the size of the data quality tools market does not appear to reflect that same demand. Could it be that traditional Data Quality tools are not delivering enough value for customers?”

PogoWasRight.org: Few Canadians are ‘very confident’ their personal data is safe with retailers, banks and governments

“Of the three types of organizations, Canadian retailers fared the worst, with less than one per cent (O.5 per cent) of consumers saying they are very confident retailers can protect their customers’ on-line personal and private information.”

Andy on Enterprise Software: The dust clears (a bit)

“I have wondered for some time about Informatica’s intentions in the MDM space. There had been some market rumours about them possibly buying Siperian, but it seems as if their not so secret meetings with Siperian were actually to form a partnership, which was just announced.”

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DailyRecord.co.uk: Insurance firms cracking down on fraud

“With fraudulent claims on the up, companies are cracking down on false claims. According to RSA, data from any false policy claim will now be shared with other companies through the Insurance Fraud Bureau (IFB). John Beadle, RSA’s counter fraud manager, said: ‘The reality is that insurance fraud adds a significant amount to overall claim costs and it’s the honest policyholders who are the true victims. ‘Fraud adds five per cent onto their insurance bills.”

DMReview.com: Quality Control - Sanjay Rao transforms Identity Systems’ focus from identity matching to data quality

“With backgrounds in both finance and software engineering, Rao immediately took over as general manager at the identity matching pure-play, making him the highest-ranking person with direct hands on the company. As the inside and outside face of the organization, Rao has since overseen eight quarters of strong growth, including almost doubled revenue and profitability. Most lately, Rao has spearheaded Identity Systems’ push into the broader data quality market, as he recently explained to DM Review Editorial Director Jim Ericson.”

b-eye.com - Business Intelligence Network - Blog: Claudia Imhoff: First Steps in Operational BI

“Operational BI is becoming quite the buzz today. There are countless articles, tips, vendors with operational BI offerings, case studies, etc., available today. Yet, I still get asked the very basic question of how do you get started. What are the first steps? Well, here are my thoughts on how to get started…”

ITWeb: Informatica reports record first quarter results

“Significant milestones achieved since January 2008 include: * Announced definitive agreement to acquire Identity Systems, a pioneer in identity resolution and matching technology.”

CIO - Blog: Why Storage and Data Management Will Kick Your Butt

“So what say these IT professions? The ‘Crunch Time’ study concludes that most IT organizations ‘are not equipped to handle periods of intense data flow,’ despite the majority of respondents saying they know that the data tsunamis are coming in the next year.”

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

In this series of posts on Mistaken Identity Resolution we have compared identity resolution with other market spaces that it’s sometimes confused with, such as Master Data Management (MDM), data integration, and data warehousing. With Informatica’s recent acquisition of Identity Systems, now’s a good time to address the confusion between identity resolution and data quality.

A Gartner study done several years ago estimated that poor quality customer data costs U.S. businesses an estimated $611 billion dollars a year. So obviously data quality is a very important component of data management.

Data quality is defined by Whatis.com as “the reliability and effectiveness of data… maintaining data quality requires going through the data periodically and scrubbing it. Typically this involves updating it, standardizing it, and de-duplicating records to create a single view of the data, even if it is stored in multiple disparate systems.”

Identity resolution is defined by wikipedia as the process that “analyzes all of the information relating to individuals and/or entities from multiple sources of data, and then applies likelihood and probability scoring to determine which identities are a match and what, if any, non-obvious relationships exist between those identities.”

So while both data quality and identity resolution seek to create a unified view of the data and determine which entities are the same, identity resolution takes the process further by also determining which entities are related.

While both technologies can de-dupe data records, identity resolution adds powerful matching functions to data quality, so numerous patterns that otherwise would go undetected are uncovered quickly and accurately. These data patterns include multi-cultural name and address matching, character insertions/deletions, nicknames, abbreviations, transpositions, repetitions, etc. And perhaps the most valuable reason for incorporating identity resolution into data quality is being able to automate the decision process and integrate it into existing business processes. Specific rules can be applied to the intelligence gathered from search, relationship, and identity results, and an explicit action executed based on business requirements.

Perhaps instead of asking how data quality and identity resolution differ, the better question to ask is, “Are you risking poor data quality if identity resolution is absent?”

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Note: There will be no post on Monday as we will be observing Memorial Day. Enjoy your holiday weekend, and we hope to ’see’ you back here on Wednesday.

[Post from Infoglide] Partners in Crime Fighting

“eBay and other online auction services have taken some heat from retailers and Congress because organized retail crime rings and other shoplifters are using these types of services for e-fencing. It’s a bit of a dilemma for these sites because if they do the right thing, and reduce e-fencing on their sites, they lose revenue, which is certainly something no business, public or private, wants to do.”

The 451 Group (requires free registration): An MDM acquisition: the next deal for Informatica?

“Through a combination of homegrown and acquired software, Informatica now has all the requisite pieces for a complete MDM offering – data access, data analysis and profiling, data correction, cleansing, data transformation and now identity management – but not an actual MDM platform itself. It therefore seems logical to us that once the company has digested Identity, a deal scheduled to close in May, it will start eyeing an MDM target to provide a complete offering.”

WKYC.com: Shoplifting: A $40 billion enterprise

“A National Retail Federation study indicates 75 percent of businesses have found their shoplifted items for sale on the internet. . . . Bokovitz said increased incidents of shoplifting are directly related to the state legislature’s decision to drop progressive sentencing on theft related crimes. The penalties for shoplifting no longer increase with the number of times you commit the crime. So who really pays the price? ‘Me and you, the consumer, everybody who plays by the rules because our costs just went up,’ Bokovitz said.”

Netrics HD: The Monk Factor

“It’s great to see that simply collecting customer data is no longer good enough - the data needs to be usable to benefit the business. ‘Refining customer data quality and access to customer data have emerged as two of the top marketing investment priorities of b-to-b CMOs this year. Half of b-to-b marketers plan to put more resources against creating marketing databases, cleaning up customer data, improving sales force automation and CRM integration, according to Forrester Research in its “B2B CMO Investment Priorities for 2008” report.’”

PogoWasRight.org: DHS to monitor access to IT systems

“Government employees, contractors and consultants with access to Homeland Security Department computer systems are among those whose names and personal information will be kept in a newly created database, according to a notice posted in the Federal Register.”

DMReview: Master Data Management and Service-Oriented Architecture

“One of the many ‘hidden benefits’ of a successful master data management (MDM) strategy is the contribution it can make to your enterprise’s move toward a service-oriented architecture (SOA).”

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[Post from Infoglide] When Your Business Knowledge of Identity Theft Gets Personal

“Identity theft is a scary aspect in both the business world and your own personal life. When those two worlds blend and it touches your child, the knowledge you’ve gained about fraud risk becomes the foremost thought in your mind, and you automatically fear the worst-case scenario.”

Yahoo! Finance: Informatica’s Acquisition of Nokia’s Identity Systems Completed

“Nokia (NYSE: NOK - News) and Informatica Corporation (NASDAQ: INFA - News) today announced that Informatica, the leading independent provider of data integration software, has completed the acquisition of Identity Systems, which was initially announced on April 17, 2008.”

The Wall Street Journal: Getting in Line: Fliers Self-Sort At Security

“In an effort to ease traveler anxiety and maybe even improve airport security, the Transportation Security Administration is rolling out a new setup where fliers are asked to self-segregate into different screening lanes depending on their security prowess. There are lanes for ‘Expert Travelers,’ who know the drill cold; ‘Casual Travelers,’ who run the airport gauntlet infrequently; and people with small children or special needs who move slowly through screening.”

The 451 Group (free registration required): Informatica buys itself a new identity with its $85m purchase of Identity Systems

“Rumors have continued to swirl around Informatica (Nasdaq: INFA) as a candidate ripe for acquisition. But the company’s announcement on April 17 to buy Identity Systems, a Nokia (NYSE: NOK) subsidiary, to expand its data integration portfolio places it more in the acquirer camp than the target camp – at least for now. . . . Infoglide Software is probably the best known of the independent players in the identity resolution sector, which has clearly consolidated a great deal over the past few years. Could Infoglide now be a target for acquisition from a vendor with fervent ambitions in data integration, MDM and BI such as Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) or SAS Institute?”

Save Borrow Spend: Many Brits do not think fraud is wrong, research suggests

“A total of 1.2 million Brits do not think it is wrong to tell a lie when making an insurance claim, according to a new study from RSA.”

OnStrategies Perspectives: Not Your Father’s Data Cleansing

“Admittedly, you could do a more primitive form of the same task with a traditional name/address verification tool; however getting rough matches is not the same thing as providing authoritative answers when you deal with names that are common, such as Smith or Jones in North America, or for that matter Bin Laden in the Mideast. Similarly, having versions of name/address verification tools in different languages isn’t new either. But again, this all child’s play compared to the challenge of verifying identity, which requires pattern matching that also accounts for context, not to mention real-time search capabilities (most data quality tools have traditionally been batch-driven). Demand for identity verification capabilities is obvious, given the plagues of identity theft, financial fraud, and world terrorism, not to mention more positive goals such as providing real-time credit verifications or managing patient electronic health records for care that may be delivered through multiple entities.”

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

Writing about Informatica’s acquisition of Identity Systems, industry expert Jill Dyche offers a great perspective on MDM. This author of a number of very useful books on MDM, CRM, and data warehousing shared in a recent post that she sees the acquisition by Informatica as a good one for the company and the industry.

We recently talked about Identity Resolution’s relationship to BI and MDM. Jill mentions that Identity Resolution addresses or enhances five of eight core MDM functions identified in a CDI book she recently co-authored:

• A single point of data retrieval
• Consistent value representation
• An accurate and repeatable means of matching and merging data
• A repository of clean, reliable data
• Support of multiple data sources

When you first encounter the concept of Identity Resolution (also known as Entity Resolution and Analysis), it’s tempting to reduce it to matching similar names for de-duping. While Jill’s list includes that function and more, I’d add some that aren’t on her list. While similarity (or fuzzy) matching is the basic level of functionality needed to resolve identities, integrating three additional functions significantly enhances Identity Resolution’s value in managing corporate performance.

First, detecting hidden relationships to find out “who’s who and who knows whom” can really boost the value of the results. Now to really exploit the full power of Identity Resolution, add two more ingredients: first, a decisioning function that determines what the resolved identities and hidden relationships mean, and then a business processing function that links those decisions into existing business processes.

It’s heartening to see that Informatica’s acquisition of Identity Systems is increasing awareness and discussion of Identity Resolution. There’s a growing realization that it’s not just a “nice” feature but has become a mandatory feature of any good MDM solution.

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