Identity Resolution Daily

[Post from Infoglide] Gentlemen, Start Your Engines (and don’t play with those matches)

“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!”

legal blog: Top 10 Fraud Cases for 2009

“A New York man has been sentenced to serve four years in prison after failing to pay $1.6 million in workers’ compensation premiums. Chong-mun Chae, of South Korea, owned an asbestos removal company but falsely claimed that he had only one employee and that it was a secretary. He avoided being caught earlier by changing the name of his company several times.”

Software Insider: News Analysis: Siperian Acquisition Vaults Informatica Into An MDM Leadership Position

“The Bottom Line For Vendors - Acquisition of Siperian Hastens MDM Market Consolidation… Expect more acquisitions to occur as the market consolidates.  Potential acquirers include EMC, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP.” 

BioPrepWatch.com: Security stepped up at Super Bowl

“A separate Fusion Center will be run by the Miami-Dade Police Department to disseminate intelligence and other information to other South Florida police and government agencies. We collect intelligence from all over the world and then we disseminate it, so that everyone knows what’s going on,” William Maddalena, a Miami FBI official in charge of special events, told The Washington Post. “We’ll have daily briefings to put out the latest information we have.”

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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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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 the Infoglide Team

Liliendahl on Data Quality: Create Table Homo_Sapiens

“Identity Resolution is about the same but  – if a distinction is considered to exist – uses a wider range of data, rules and functionality to relate collected data rows to real world entities. In my eyes exploiting external reference data will add considerable efficiency in the years to come within deduplication / identity resolution.”

OmniMD: Clock starts ticking on meaningful use comments

“The clock starts ticking today on a two-month window in which the public can comment on the Health & Human Service Department’s “meaningful use” proposal, a set of rules outlining how providers can qualify for incentives for using electronic health records.”

Beyond Search: Startling Fact: Size of Cloud Computing Market

“The global cloud computing market is expected to grow at a compounded annual rate of 28 percent from $47 billion in 2008 to $126 billion by 2012, according to IBM based on various market estimates.’

National Underwriter: Fraud Increases In ’09; Bureau Budgets Tighten 

“The Coalition interviewed 37 fraud bureaus during the first three weeks of Oct. 2009 for its survey, titled ‘The Economy and Fraud Fighting on the State Level.’ The bureau directors were asked for their views on trends in 15 areas of fraud, which include staged auto accidents, auto give-ups, padding auto and homeowner claims, arson, and workers’ compensation fraud by both workers and employers.”

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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

San Francisco Examiner: San Francisco workers’ compensation claims seize millions

“The city and county of San Francisco employs approximately 26,000 people, and 3,406 workers’ comp claims were filed last fiscal year — which ended June 30 — costing The City $41.85 million. The payouts were 8 percent less than the previous year, in which $45.5 million was spent on compensation. This year, city officials say they aim to reduce claims by 5 percent as a projected budget deficit of $522.2 million looms.”

ICIQ 2010: 15th International Conference on Information Quality

“The International Conference on Information Quality (ICIQ) attracts researchers and practitioners from the academic, public and private sectors. Originally held on the MIT Campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the 2010 conference will be hosted by the Donaghey College of Engineering and Information Technology at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR), the first university to offer graduate degree programs in information quality.”

WIRED: FBI: 19,000 Matches to Terrorist Screening List in 2009

“A subset of this list, the No Fly list, includes people considered a threat to aviation or national security and contains about 3,400 names, of which about 170 are U.S. persons. The list is used, among other things, to screen visa applicants and gun buyers as well as suspects stopped by local police. It’s also used by airport security personnel to single out some travelers for extra screening or interrogation.”

ChannelWeb: The 10 Biggest Cloud Computing Stories Of 2009

“Even as some pundits continued to debate the definition of cloud computing, virtually every IT hardware, software and service company sought to define (and in many cases redefine) itself as a cloud-computing vendor. That’s not surprising, perhaps, when Gartner puts the 2009 market for cloud computing services at $56.3 billion, growing to $150.1 billion by 2013.”

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[Post from Infoglide] State Agencies Adopting Entity Resolution

“Significant opportunities to apply identity resolution and entity analytics exist at the state level. State agencies interact with citizens and corporations across many domains, including collection of tax revenues (e.g. oil and gas – I’m from Texas!), licenses (e.g. motor vehicles, hunting, fishing), housing programs, lotteries, child protective services, health care, workers’ compensation, the court system, law enforcement, and homeland security.”

thestar.com: Store owner guilty in $5.75M lottery fraud

“A former convenience store owner has pleaded guilty to defrauding the Ontario Lottery Corporation after misrepresenting a winning ticket worth $5.75 million as his own.”

ZDNet: Cloud computing, so much more than multi-tenancy

“The trouble with talking about multi-tenancy itself is that it draws you into an abstract debate with conventional software vendors over the relative merits of alternative deployment platforms for a given application. This immediately brings the debate onto their home ground — a place where applications are discrete, deployments happen as a batch process and you have to get the system up-and-running before you even start thinking about meeting the business requirement. That’s not where the cloud is at.”

Liliendahl on Data Quality: Phony Phones and Real Numbers

“There are plenty of data quality issues related to phone numbers in party master data. Despite that a phone number should be far less fuzzy than names and addresses I have spend lots of time having fun with these calling digits.”

UALR: UALR Joins National Identity Management Center

“Dr. John R. Talburt, the Acxiom Chair of Information Quality at UALR, is an expert in the fields of information quality and entity resolution and will represent UALR at the center. ‘Dr. Talburt is a widely recognized, well-respected expert in the field of information quality and identity resolution. His vast knowledge in these areas of identity management will be an incredible asset for CAIMR and the research we are undertaking this coming year,’ said Dr. Gary R. Gordon, CAIMR’s executive director.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: Infoglide Corporation maintains a partnership with Dr. Talburt and his Laboratory for Advanced Research in Entity Resolution and Information Quality (ERIQ). The Lab conducts research addressing important problems related to entity resolution and information quality.

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By the Infoglide Team

Insurance Journal: Dallas-Area Employer Ordered to Repay Nearly $1M to Texas Mutual

“Texas Mutual Insurance Company reports that Donna Iverson, owner of C&D Business Services Inc., and Carol Wiesman pleaded guilty to workers’ compensation fraud-related charges. The 299th District Court in Austin sentenced Iverson and Wiesman to 10 years’ deferred adjudication and ordered them to repay $949,702 to Texas Mutual. Iverson and Wiesman were involved in a scheme from April 2003 through March 2006 to conceal business relationships and payroll records from Texas Mutual for C&D Business Services Inc. and C&D Services.”

CMAJ: Canadian physicians playing “catch-up” in adopting electronic medical records

“The Survey of Primary Care Physicians In Eleven Countries, 2009: Perspectives On Care, Costs, And Experiences found that only 37% of Canadian family physician respondents used electronic medical records in their practices, the lowest rate among the countries surveyed.”

public intelligence: Intelligence Fusion Centers

“These entities work under the auspices of local law enforcement, often integrating with the state’s police force, Department of Justice, or Office of Emergency Management… The following list is believed to be accurate at this time.”

Liliendahl on Data Quality: Santa Quality

“Santa Claus versus Saint Nicholas is an example of the use of nicknames which is a main issue in name matching in many cultures. It’s also important to observe that the German and Danish name is one word versus two words in English and French. Many company names and other names in respective languages shares the same linguistic characteristic.”

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[Post from Infoglide] Fusion Centers: Enthusiasm and Apprehension

“Identity resolution is a vital technology for law enforcement fusion centers, and we’ve often followed developments with links to stories in this area. When overlapping and adjacent jurisdictions share data with each other, uncovering hidden identities and linkages greatly accelerates the detection of criminal activity. This map shows current and planned deployments of state and local fusion centers.”

dataqualityPRO: Data Quality Blog Roundup - November 2009 Edition

“These three posts formed an excellent blogging debate between Jim Harris, Henrik Liliendahl Sørensen and Charles Blyth on the subject of Single Version of the Truth, a common term in our profession - but what exactly does it mean?”

USAToday: Opposing view: Program keeps fliers safe

“Initially, the Secure Flight program was part of a larger debate about how to identify terrorists consistently while maintaining the privacy of fliers in the post-9/11 world. Once watch list matching was determined to be the correct mechanism, TSA designed the program with privacy and security embedded into its foundation. Secure Flight now uses advanced watch list matching technology and has taken the time to get it right.”

The EHR Effect: 8 Health Stocks Set to Benefit in 2010

“In addition, with some EMR/EHR providers offering as Software As A Service solution (SaaS), the initial fears of implementation costs and backup/disaster recovery planning can be significantly decreased. These SaaS providers have already worked through those issues, and through a web interface, can offer full functionality.”

Business Intelligence News: Master Data Management: Building a Foundation for Success

“Complexity occurs when the subject details being mastered have more variables, and variables that can be vague—such as a person. In the instances of complex subject areas, mastering the reference value requires more sophisticated analysis [i.e. identity resolution] of the numerous attributes associated with the individual reference value such as their name or address.”

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