“A recent post on McClatchy’s blog attributes growing insurance fraud to the recession: A recent survey of 37 state insurance-fraud bureaus by the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud found that the recession “appears to have had a significant impact on the incidence of fraud” last year. On average, the bureaus reported increases in case referrals and new investigations in all 15 categories of fraud the survey covers.”
“MDM has a ‘dirty little secret,’ too, according to Dyché… most DI or information-integration players tend to have ulterior motives when it comes to MDM. That’s something you almost certainly won’t hear them talking about. ‘[These] acquisition[s] … start to reveal the dirty little secret that vendors don’t want you to know about MDM: Once you invest in an MDM technology and on-board a system or two, you’re pretty much on the hook. It becomes foundational, not only from an IT perspective — as it continues to link data from heterogeneous systems — but from a business-enablement perspective,’ she concludes.”
“If we look at what data quality tools today actually do, they in fact mostly support you with automation of data profiling and data matching, which is probably only some of the data quality challenges you have.”
“Scott Stewart, vice president of tactical intelligence for Austin, Texas-based analysis firm Stratfor, says the killings might have been related to a recently announced U.S. plan to increase cooperation with Mexican law enforcement agencies. ‘We believe that it is likely related to a decision last month to start working more closely with the Mexican government by the Americans,” said Scott Stewart. “They were going to put some personnel into a joint fusion center in Juarez.’”
“The Coalition issued a statement supporting the bill, saying it would serve as a deterrent and a powerful incentive for medical providers to have strong compliance programs and to “play by the rules.” False claims acts help detect fraudulent schemes that otherwise might not ever be known because they allow insiders to blow the whistle and initiate civil actions.”
By John Talburt, PhD, CDMP, Director, UALR Laboratory for Advanced Research in Entity Resolution and Information Quality (ERIQ)
In the last post we examined how entity resolution (ER) systems are actually implemented, starting with the most basic merge/purge process and heterogeneous join systems. Both of these approaches focus on collecting equivalent references from among the sources provided, either as a large batch of references in a single file, or through queries against a federation of databases. The entity identities found by these ER systems are transient in the sense that they depend upon the sources input into the process. When different sources are provided, different identities will emerge.
On the other hand, there are ER systems that retain and manage identity information. By doing this they are able to “recognize” the same identity over time and assign that identity the same entity identifier (sometimes called “persistent identifiers” or “persistent links”). In Customer Data Integration (CDI) applications, these kinds of systems are sometimes called Customer Recognition Systems.
Two major types of ER systems perform identity management. The first type is the “identity resolution” system. It is most effective in situations where a fairly stable set of known identities of interest exists, such as the set of vendors or customers of a company, a set of products, or the students enrolled in a school. The attributes of these identities are pre-loaded into the system and assigned identifiers. When a reference is given to the system, it then decides whether the reference is to one of the known identities, and if so, returns the identifier of that identity.
Identity resolution systems can operate in either batch or transactional mode. In cases where there are a large number of pre-stored identities, the performance of batch operations can be improved through distributed processing where the identities are partitioned over multiple processors and resolved in parallel.
However, there are many situations where the identities are not necessarily known in advance, or in some cases the entities are known but simply not organized in such a way that they can be easily pre-loaded. For example, suppose two companies merge and each company has its own customer database. The customers are identified in different ways in each database, and furthermore, for the customers of one company, poor systems and practices prevent having any confidence that the master records are unduplicated across business lines or company locations.
The type of system often applied in these situations is an “identity capture” system. The identity capture architecture can be seen as a hybrid of merge/purge and identity resolution systems. It supports identity management and persistent identifiers, but without starting with a preloaded set of identities. In my next post, we’ll delve deeper into the identity capture process.
“Until now, Informatica’s MDM strategy has largely been peripheral. It had most of the tools (e.g., data integration, data quality, data profiling, and identity resolution) but tended to partner with bigger or best-of-breed players to promote MDM-oriented offerings or services… What’s risky about the acquisition of Siperian is that it imperils Informatica’s existing MDM partnerships (especially with Oracle Corp.) and compromises its neutrality pitch.”
“Fusion centers will conduct self-assessments, followed by a gap analysis and peer reviews, according to officials at the National Fusion Center Association, a new not-for-profit organization based in Alexandria, Va., that represents the 72 fusion centers. The assessments are meant to determine their progress in reaching baseline capabilities. Those capabilities were created by a federal advisory committee that also wrote the original guidelines for those centers.”
“Recent significant cases resulting in millions of dollars in savings to NYSIF have included claimants who receive benefits while operating businesses or remain employed in other capacities, the most prevalent type of workers’ comp. fraud. Other cases involve premium fraud, the most costly type, in construction, asbestos abatement and other contracting, including investigations in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Labor, the U.S. Postal Inspector, and local labor racketeering bureaus. Still other cases involve fraudulent provider billing.”
“The DHS has also tested mobile identification systems and created an information sharing plan with the Department of Justice which allows officials to search for criminal records. Art Macius, chief of staff at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) added that organizations such as his and the DHS must also share information with their international counterparts. This international cooperation includes efforts such as cargo screening for commercial aircraft though efforts such as the Secure Flight program. Macius said that by this spring, the program will work with U.S. airlines to screen baggage and air cargo, and that the coverage will extend to international carriers by the end of the year.”
“Andrew White of Gartner recently posed a question about whether master data management (MDM) is dead. He didn’t actually suggest that the demise of master data management is imminent. He was challenging whether our current terminology adequately clarifies the current reality about MDM and associated product areas.”
[Jill Dyche] “Last year, Informatica’s MDM story verged on the schizophrenic as the company simultaneously advocated a “roll your own” approach to MDM using various software components while at the same time making investments in both Siperian and rival Initiate Systems. Siperian fills in some significant voids in Informatica’s MDM capabilities, most notably hierarchy management and transaction integration—updating the golden record in real time.”
“What is Secure Flight and what does it do? Secure Flight is a behind the scenes program that streamlines the watch list matching process. It will improve the travel experience for all passengers, including those who have been misidentified in the past.”
“First is the classic ‘entity resolution‘ challenge. Information about any individual is likely going to be scattered across a range of databases. While one database may contain a red-flag item — a pending drug charge or a secondary connection to a known terrorist — another database may not. The challenge is bringing this information together to create a single record — a ’single version of the truth’ — about an individual or entity.”
Andrew White of Gartner recently posed a question about whether master data management (MDM) is dead. He didn’t actually suggest that the demise of master data management is imminent. He was challenging whether our current terminology adequately clarifies the current reality about MDM and associated product areas.
Certainly the terms describing many markets and types of products are being associated with MDM. Jackie Roberts of DATAForge pointed out that the definition of MDM now seems to include “data integrity, data quality, entity resolution, matching, data integration, governance, metrics and analysis.”
While entity resolution was mentioned in her list, our obsessive focus on entity resolution (aka identity resolution) leads to the conclusion that, rather than being subsumed, its role is growing. Wayne Eckerson at TDWI seems to agree that identity resolution is a critical component of the recent MDM acquisitions. In his post about the acquisitions by Informatica and IBM of Siperian and Initiate Systems, respectively, he described the two transactions this way:
“You could say that Siperian is mostly MDM, but with identity resolution and other capabilities, whereas Initiate is mostly about identity resolution, but with MDM and other capabilities.”
Identity resolution is becoming an integral part of many product areas. Within MDM itself, creating a single-entity view is best done with an identity resolution engine. Data mining is greatly enhanced by the addition of entity resolution. Dan Power of Hub Solution Designs wrote about how key identity resolution is to data matching. We’ve talked about how social CRM can resolve identities of individuals across multiple disparate data sources using identity resolution, as well as “rationalize multiple variations and errors and anomalies that block finding existing customers within their systems”.
Although identity resolution technology has been years in the making, it has only recently risen into the consciousness of most analysts and customers. Because of its ability to bring enhanced clarity to ambiguous data, advanced identity resolution is now beginning to have a significant impact across many data-centered disciplines.
[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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“In March 2006, the Communications Fraud Control Association (CFCA) estimated that annual global fraud losses in the telecom sector were between $54 billion and $60 billion, and the losses continue to be substantial. Many types of fraud have been identified, but by far the most prevalent is subscription fraud.”
“SAP, on the other hand, has had a lot of issues in the past couple of years. They haven’t made a direct MDM acquisition since they acquired A2i years and years ago, which was a PIM vendor and they’ve just been working off of that architecture and been trying to improve it.”
“Data matching is the ability to compare records that are not exactly the same but are so similar that we may conclude, that they represent the same real world object.”
“So now that MDM has been around for a while, and the master data terminology has drifted into our standard vocabulary, it might be worth stepping back and asking a different question: Is MDM the revolutionary approach to organizational data consolidation and enterprise information management or is it devolving into yet another (of many) data management tools?”
“The Dallas police has a high tech fusion center that monitors potential threats in Dallas. They helped foil the plot when a man was planning on blowing up the Bank of America building… Four years ago, Dallas Police put alert on Kimberly Al-Homsi because she was scouting runways at Love Field. On Saturday, she was arrested allegedly with pipe bombs in her car.”
“When a recruiter and/or a hiring manager finds someone for a job position it is basically done by getting in a number of candidates and then choose the best fit among them. This of course don’t make up for, that there may be someone better fit among all those people that were not among the candidates. We have the same problem in data matching when we are deduplicating, consolidating or matching for other purposes.”
“Proposals in Obama’s new proposal with a strong I.T. flavor include… Adopt real-time analysis of claims and payments data to identify waste, fraud and abuse in public health programs… Establish a CMS/IRS data-matching program to match information on entities that have evaded filing taxes against provider billing data to better detect fraudulent providers.”
“IBM owes it to its customers to explain if, when and how it plans to rationalize and integrate the overlapping MDM and data quality technology, said Ivan Chong, executive vice-president of the Redwood City, Calif.-based company’s data quality product division. ‘If I were them, I would have the impression that IBM is repurposing the technology for something completely different,’ said Chong.”
“Of the more than 300 law enforcement agencies in Florida, 105 — including the Lee and Charlotte county sheriffs’ offices — are currently sharing information on FINDER. Another 41 are currently utilizing the database, but aren’t sharing information. ‘The more departments we can get involved, the better,’ Weschler said. In the coming months, the Southwest Florida regional fusion center is slated to be operational. As an information hub, the center will gather, digest and compare data from across 10 Southwest Florida counties and 72 other fusion centers in the United States.”
“But as Abbasi and his team at Informatica continue to grow faster than most software companies, and as CIOs continue to realize how valuable Informatica’s data-integration and data-quality tools can be, and as it grows and expands into new areas such as MDM via its Siperian acquisition, Informatica’s value to those big software companies is soaring.”
“‘It’s just a blatant attempt to obtain benefits and money,’ Cosson said. ‘If someone files a false claim or is working while receiving benefits, ultimately that results in a loss of revenue for the insurance company and if they lose revenues, they have to raise rates and then the premiums clearly go up for legitimate businesses all over Colorado.’ The Coalition Against Insurance Fraud says that all insurance fraud costs every family $1,000 a year in higher premiums and it makes goods and services more expensive.”
“In the last post we looked at a formal model for describing entity-based integration. Now let’s turn our attention to how entity resolution (ER) systems are actually implemented. One of the most important design decisions is whether the system will perform entity identity management. Systems perform identity management when they create and store the attributes values for the identities that they process.”
“The two acquisitions focus the spotlight on two of the hottest functions today, in terms of user organizations adopting them, namely: MDM and identity resolution. More than ever, organizations need trusted data, in support of regulatory reporting, compliance, business intelligence, analytics, operational excellence, and other data-driven requirements. MDM and identity resolution are key enablers for these requirements, so it’s no surprise that two leading vendors have chosen to acquire these at this time.”
“Serrao says that in the time he has spent in a dozen different fusion centers in the United States — coupled with his own background in law enforcement — he’s gleaned several ‘best practices’ for consideration. Ideally, he says, leadership should ’set a specific strategic mission before the center is even built. Everything else follows. Determine the role of the center and whether strategic intelligence analysis will be part of the mix. Then, it will be easier to define what processes will be developed, what reporting mechanisms are needed, what technology is appropriate, and what types of personnel are needed.’”
“The state of Kansas has been conducting sting operations to prevent this kind of theft by lottery terminal clerks. Law enforcement agents fanned out across the state and presented ‘winning’ tickets at several retail lottery outlets. In five separate cases clerks told the agents the tickets were worthless and then tried to redeem the ‘winning’ lottery tickets. The undercover investigation led to charges of attempted theft and computer crime against five people across the state.”
Infoglide Software provides entity resolution and analysis solutions for retail, banking, insurance, government, and law enforcement. Without the need for data cleansing or warehousing, Infoglide Software's Identity Resolution Engine™ (IRE) analyzes all of the information relating to individuals and/or entities from multiple sources of data and then applies...
Subscribe to this blog