Identity Resolution Daily

By the Infoglide Team

intelligent enterprise: They Better Get This MDM Program Right

“As reported in The New York Times and on the TSA Web site, the Secure Flight program will improve upon current practices in matching passenger identities to watch lists in many ways. At first glance, this appears to be a well thought-out program that conforms to several basic tenets of Master Data Management (in bold below), in this case for the ‘Customer’ entity.”

EHRWMS: Georgia’s Best EMR Used By Three of Top Ten Pediatricians

“Of approximately 100 respondents, 28 used an EMR, of which 40% used the EncounterPRO Pediatric EMR. There were only three other EMRs used more than once, and they were used by only 10%, 7%, and 7% of the survey respondents respectively.”

Government Executive: Enforcement agencies boost cooperation on drug investigations

“In addition, ICE agents for the first time will fully participate in the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force Fusion Center. The center allows participating federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, including DEA and the FBI, to share information and analytical resources to enhance their overall investigative capacity.”

SmartData Collective: The Data-Information Continuum

“Data could be considered a constant while information is a variable that redefines data for each specific use. Data is not truly a constant since it is constantly changing. However, information is still derived from data and many different derivations can be performed while data is in the same state (i.e. before it changes again).”

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By the Infoglide Team

Biz-Tech:Insurance fraud claims on the rise

“‘When someone commits insurance fraud they’re not just stealing from insurance companies,’ said Sanger. ‘They’re stealing from fellow customers.’ A recent study from the N.I.C.B. shows property/casualty insurance fraud costs Americans nearly $30 billion each year.”

PCWorld: Push For Electronic Medical Records Must Slow Down, For Security’s Sake

“‘I look forward to medical records going electronic,’ said Howard Schmidt, the former White House cybersecurity czar, ‘but I have a tremendous amount of concern about building a really, really good healthcare infrastructure… and then securing it later.’ Schmidt spoke with PCWorld at RSA 2009.”

IT-Director.com: A Bulldog Puppy Emerges

“Microsoft has moved further in its plans to introduce a master data management (MDM) capability into its product line. Microsoft had previously purchased Stratature, an MDM vendor known for its dimension management, and has used this as the basis for its MDM offering, previously known as Project Bulldog.”

Tampa Bay Online: TSA wants better picture of travelers

“With gender and birth information, the system, known as Secure Flight, will be better able to prevent misidentification of passengers who have names similar to individuals on the watch lists and better identify those who appear to pose a threat, the TSA said.”

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[Post from Infoglide] Entity Resolution vs. Entity Identification

“In entity resolution, as in any new research area, different authors or practitioners may use the same term but intend different meanings. You always have to be careful to understand exactly what a writer means when he or she uses a particular term.”

Ramon Chen: Shared Musings: Informatica acquires AddressDoctor GmbH - adds another MDM component

[Ramon Chen] “Outside of Informatica’s purchases, over the last few years there have been several purchases of supporting MDM products including IBM’s acquisition of Exeros, SAP buying Business Objects, who prior to that bought FirstLogic for $69M in 2006, IBM acquiring Ascential QualityStage and DataStage for $1.1B, D&B acquiring Purisma for $48M. This is a fast moving market and commodity components of the MDM lifecycle are being snapped up by the big boys faster than you can say Master D…”

Health Newstrack: Patients want computer consultations, electronic health record

“‘It seems that as the population ages and finds itself facing more illness and serious medical conditions, privacy of health information becomes much less important to patients than it is when they are healthy,’ she notes. ‘Patients are willing to trade some privacy in order to have records fully available in emergency settings and available to new caregivers as well as to multiple clinicians.’”

Information Week’s Analytics Blog: IT Fusion Centers

“The Fusion Center consolidates, analyzes, and distributes information through the many different organizations in order to enhance the ability to foresee and hopefully forestall terrorist activities. Many IT organizations are seeking to adopt the Fusion Center model as a means of obtaining a better overall view of their operations. They want to maximize resources and streamline operations just as their peers in the field of counterterrorism have done.”

Workers Comp Insider: Aging America: A Looming Catastrophe?

“The IAIABC Journal is published two times per year by the International Association of Industrial Accident Boards and Commissions (IAIABC), an association of government agencies that administer and regulate their jurisdiction’s workers’ compensation acts. It’s a peer-reviewed Journal, and one of a few remaining venues that publishes original research papers and in-depth treatment of workers compensation issues and opinions.”

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By the Infoglide Team

cnet news: What you need to know about e-health records

“Supporters say electronic medical records will boost the quality of medical care, reduce duplication of services, and limit errors, all of which could save money and lives. The National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine estimates that between 44,000 and 98,000 people in the United States die each year because of errors such as being prescribed medicine to which they are allergic.”

tricityherald.com: Travel restrictions to get tighter June 1

” Beginning June 1, travelers will need either a U.S. passport, a state-issued enhanced driver’s license, a U.S. passport card or a trusted traveler card to enter the country through land or seaports. Passports were made mandatory for air travel in 2007.”

Las Vegas Sun: Fusion center’s attention on prevention

“The trio appeared to be doing the kind of photographic surveillance terrorists might do before they strike a target, the officers concluded. So they contacted the Southern Nevada Counter-Terrorism Center. The center is run by Metro Police and houses investigators and analysts from local, state and federal law enforcement agencies in Southern Nevada.”

Destination CRM Blog: Tom Siebel Sends His Regrets

“Our customer data is now more siloed than it ever was, it doesn’t match, and the owners of the respective systems that process it don’t talk to each other much. The single version of the truth has eluded us. We’re still trying to sell customers products they already have.”

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[Post from Infoglide] Identity Resolution Featured in IAIABC Journal

“If you’re not familiar with the International Association of Industrial Accident Boards & Commissions (IAIABC), it’s a very active non-profit organization of government agencies that administer workers’ compensation programs in the U.S., Canada, and other countries. In addition to sponsoring a large number of industry events including conferences and training seminars, they publish an excellent journal twice yearly that provides educational articles about education, research, and management of workers’ compensation issues.”

Boston Globe: Electronic health records raise doubt

“Personal health records, such as those offered by Google Health, are a promising tool for patients’ empowerment - but inaccuracies could be “a huge problem,” said Dr. Paul Tang, the chief medical information officer for the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, who chairs a health technology panel for the National Quality Forum.”

ITBusinessEdge: Master Data Management Can Pay off During M&As

“When companies begin mergers and acquisitions, the focus is always on the financial aspects of the deal first. Bloor Research found that 79 percent of M&A activity ignores IT integration outright. So, for many IT deparments, the real work begins after the ink has dried – a situation that some IT experts believe could contribute to the ridiculously high failure rate of M&As.”

Arizona Republic: Police agencies tout enhanced cooperation

“Just when it seemed there could be no good news about border security, law-enforcement agencies at a national conference in Phoenix engaged in a virtual group hug Wednesday, declaring that they’ve become a team.”

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[Post from Infoglide] The Growing Role of Identity Resolution in MDM

“There definitely seems to be a trend lately with small companies in the master data management (MDM) and data quality space being purchased (as in the asset acquisition of Exeros by IBM) or partnering with larger firms (such as Silver Creek Systems’ OEM relationship with Oracle).”

The CotoBlogzz: Four Charged With $12+ Million Tax Fraud

“In order to maintain insurance coverage, SCIF requires an annual audit of insured businesses. The defendants are accused of refusing to allow these annual audits, resulting in cancelation of their insurance policy. Over the course of eight years, the defendants are accused of opening eight policies with SCIF using different business names for Democo in order to avoid the audits.”

BeyeNETWORK: Mastering Data Management in Health and Life Sciences

“Think of MDM as a way to manage reference data so that it can help us understand the context of our transactions. Using Ralph Kimball’s terminology, MDM helps us contextualize our facts with dimensions. MDM helps us by providing processes for how we collect, summarize and cleanse our data to ensure consistency and appropriate governance in the ongoing maintenance and use of this data.”

Arkansas News: Arkansas lottery retailers to be policed for fraud, officials say

“Dateline NBC reported recently that insider wins are common in the U.S. as well. According to the report, individual retailers in California, New Jersey and New York have cashed in hundreds of tickets apiece for winnings ranging from $160,000 to $500,000. In Illinois, four employees at one store and five of their relatives cashed 556 tickets for more than $1.6 million.”

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By Dan Power, President and Founder, Hub Solution Designs

There definitely seems to be a trend lately with small companies in the master data management (MDM) and data quality space being purchased (as in the asset acquisition of Exeros by IBM) or partnering with larger firms (such as Silver Creek Systems’ OEM relationship with Oracle).

I think this is a good thing. Using the classic “build, buy or ally” strategy, it isn’t surprising that sometimes companies will conclude that it’s faster and/or cheaper to buy a technology, or partner with another company that has that technology, rather than build it themselves internally.

A lot of companies do tend to suffer from the “not invented here” syndrome, where anything not developed inside their four walls tends to be regarded with disdain. But that tendency leads to a much slower pace of innovation. In very competitive industries like enterprise software, getting there faster is a very definite advantage.

Since I’ve been working with the identity resolution experts at Infoglide, I’ve become much more aware of the role identity resolution technology plays in our daily lives. Every time you get on an airplane, file an insurance claim, apply for a job / mortgage / credit card, or even shop in a retail store or on a web site, your identity is probably being evaluated by an Identity Resolution Engine.

A lot of people in the MDM space refer to this as “matching”, but there’s considerably more to Identity Resolution than the sophisticated pattern matching that most MDM hub platforms use today. The more robust form – Identity Resolution – is mostly used currently for sophisticated applications like terrorist screening and anti-money laundering, where big consequences or big dollar amounts are at stake.

But that technology is gradually filtering down to more routine commercial applications like master data management for customers. The large MDM vendors like Oracle, IBM and SAP – and the smaller vendors like Siperian, Initiate Systems and D&B/Purisma – will follow the “build, buy or ally” pattern, with some opting to create their own more sophisticated Entity Resolution capabilities, some buying smaller firms who already have those advanced products, or perhaps partnering as a middle ground between building and buying.

Either way, this trend is good both for specialized companies like Infoglide and for the general public. We’ll all be a little safer getting on a plane, a little less likely to suffer from identity theft or confusion, and perhaps save a little money through reduced incidence of various types of fraud.

Full-fledged Identity Resolution is a capability that most MDM hubs should plan on adding in the next revision cycle or two, as MDM customers become more discriminating and more demanding of their hub’s ability to identify individuals and businesses from an ever-growing stream of data.

Dan Power is president of Hub Solution Designs, a consulting firm specializing in master data management and data governance. He writes a popular blog and a column for Information Management magazine, speaks frequently at technology conferences, and regularly advises clients on developing & implementing high impact MDM and data governance strategies.

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By the Infoglide Team

e-patients.net: Meaningful Use: The Elephant IS In The Room

“A recent NPR/Kaiser Family Foundation poll shows that the American public is surprisingly more positive about the potentials of EHRs than most professionals. People already are familiar with computerized information and accept its risks.”

IT-Director.com: Trends in Master Data Management

“The interesting question is how much pressure this puts on the other MDM players with data quality solutions (like Dataflux and SAP/Business Objects) to build out their data profiling capabilities into the area of data discovery.”

NationalSecurity.org: MYTHBUSTER: TSA’S WATCH LIST IS MORE THAN 1 MILLION PEOPLE STRONG

“There are less than 400,000 individuals on the consolidated terrorist watch list and less than 50,000 individuals on the no-fly and selectee lists. Individuals on the no-fly and selectee lists are identified by law enforcement and intelligence partners as legitimate threats to transportation requiring either additional screening or prohibition from boarding an aircraft.”

OCDQ Blog: TDWI World Conference Chicago 2009

“TDWI World Conference Chicago 2009 was held May 3-8 in Chicago, Illinois at the Hyatt Regency Hotel and was a tremendous success.  I attended as a Data Quality Journalist for the International Association for Information and Data Quality (IAIDQ). I used Twitter to provide live reporting from the conference.  Here are my notes from the courses I attended…”

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[Post from Infoglide] Let’s Be Reasonable

“A recent post, ‘Terrorist Watchlist, Troubling Flaws Revealed’, starts out by making a valid point. If the terrorist watchlist is flawed, then the name matching results against such a list will be flawed. The author then goes on to reach related conclusions through rationalization rather than reasoning.”

Acxiom: Prognostications for the New Year 

“Identity resolution will get its due. Sure, you can call it infrastructure. Processing and rules intensive, customer identity resolution has been relegated to the underlying algorithms of third-party data providers, MDM, and data quality vendors. However, companies are recognizing that they may have unique customer data-matching needs-a bank we work with has more than 50 definitions of a household-and they’ll be looking at smarter, more specialized ways to automate them.”

Dallas Morning News: Dallas Police Department’s Fusion Center outsmarts criminals

“Chief David Kunkle, who championed the unit’s formation in January 2007, refers to it as the “brains” of a department that reported a 10 percent drop in crime last year and a nearly 19 percent decline in the first quarter of this year.”

datanomic: Fractured approaches to Sanctions Screening put UK Companies at risk, says new FSA report

“‘The use of multiple identities is common in the criminal world and Al-Qaeda’s own training manual requires its operatives to use false identities to hide their terrorist activities. Exploiting variations of a criminal’s real name is, perhaps, the simplest way of acquiring a new identity. Typical approaches are to use name variations or switching the order of names,’ added Pearson. ‘Other data, such as dates of birth are often manipulated simply by transposing digits.’”

Cloud Computing Journal: Experian QAS Launches QAS Pro On Demand

“‘By offering address verification in a SaaS model, we are enabling organizations of all sizes to maintain accurate contact data in a cost-effective platform,’ said Joel Curry, chief operating officer, Experian QAS. ‘As businesses change over time, our new infrastructure is able to adapt to shifting demands.’

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[Post from Infoglide] Stuck in the Middle

“‘Clowns to the left of me, Jokers to the right, Here I am, stuck in the middle with you.’ One reason Identity Resolution Daily began two years ago was to create a venue to address privacy/security controversies.”

Business Week: California couple charged with big insurance fraud

“Prosecutors said the pair defrauded the State Compensation Insurance Fund, California’s biggest workers’ compensation insurer, of $38 million between 2000 and 2008 — the largest in state history.”

OCDQ Blog: El Festival Del IDQ Bloggers

“Welcome to the April 2009 issue of El Festival del IDQ Bloggers, which is a blog carnival for information/data quality bloggers being run as part of the celebration of the five year anniversary of the International Association for Information and Data Quality (IAIDQ).”

Business Insurance: ‘Questionable’ claims on the rise: NICB

“A down economy and mounting unemployment level is causing some people to look at insurance fraud as a possible way to make money by taking advantage of a situation, according to the NICB. The report, released Tuesday, is an analysis of questionable claims submitted by more than 1,000 NICB member companies in the first quarter of 2009 versus the same period a year ago.”

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