Identity Resolution Daily

By Mike Shultz, Infoglide Software CEO

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.

Share This

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.”

Share This

[Post from Infoglide] Attacking Subscription Fraud with Identity Resolution

“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.”

ITBusinessEdge: Analyst: SAP Missed Out During Recent MDM Acquisition Spree

“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.”

Liliendahl On Data Quality: Data Quality Tools Revealed

“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.”

BeyeNETWORK: Master Data Management: Moving Forward…

“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?”

Share This

By the Infoglide Team

ovum: Informatica finally plugs MDM gap

“MDM now creates another competitive front for Informatica against rivals and complicates some partial relationships - notably Oracle, which includes Informatica’s identity resolution software as part of its Siebel Universal Customer Master (UCM) MDM engine, as well as some parts of its data quality software. Informatica also has OEM relationships with IBM and DataFlux for address cleansing that might need revisiting.”

ovum: IBM acquires Initiate Systems to strengthen healthcare solutions

“Being acquired by a large player such as IBM also raises the question of whether Initiate will be able to unfold its potential under the large IBM umbrella, or whether it will wither and sink into oblivion alongside the multitude of applications in IBM’s broad portfolio. This will be a test of how well IBM integrates small but high-performing companies.”

TMCnet Healthcare Technology: ECRI Guides Hospitals on Electronic Health Record Implementation

“Electronic health records, or ‘EHRs,’ are the future of medical record keeping. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or “ARRA,” includes incentive payments for hospitals that adopt an EHR, but the timetable for implementation is tight. To qualify for the full payment, hospitals will require proving ‘meaningful use’ by October 2012.”

2010 TDI Fraud Conference: Texas Workers’ Compensation Fraud

“Workers’ comp fraud indicators… Frequent additions and cancellations of coverage, especially if several business entities appear to be owned or controlled by the same person or group”

Share This

[Post from Infoglide] And Then There Were Two

“IBM announced today that it plans to buy MDM vendor Initiate Systems.  As hypothesized here in this blog last week, the move was not entirely unexpected, but on the heels of last week’s announcement by Informatica to purchase Siperian, it certainly creates yet another wave in the marketplace.  More moves are certain to take place as competing companies align – and realign – their Single Entity View (SEV) strategies.  The key to this realignment will be for current industry players to maximize their functionality beyond ‘playing with matches’.  That dated view of fuzzy matching is no longer enough.  Not for the large data quality vendors.  Certainly not for the customer.”

Information Week: Global CIO: IBM Data Strategy Is Flawed, Say Kalido And Informatica

“Noting that Initiate’s product is spefically designed to handle only certain types of data—customer data and product data—Kalido CEO Hewitt says, ‘Where they have struggled is in mastering multiple domains, even though they advertise their products as such. The problem is that as you add domains, the complexity of the data relationships expands exponentially. So one domain might have 100 relationships, two domains 300 relationships, 10 domains 3,000 relationships. So when one master data element changes, hundreds of relationships could change, which requires a governance process to manage it.’”

Columbia Daily Tribune: Networks advance child-trafficking investigation

“Watson called up a contact at the El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC), a fusion center that combines intelligence from federal law enforcement and state and military sources. Watson also called a friend at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and asked him to prepare a ’serious incident report.’ ICE mobilized an officer specializing in human trafficking within minutes, Watson said.”

ITBusinessEdge: How Big Deals Affect MDM Competitors, Customers

“But the general upheaval in MDM aside, the IBM deal is interesting in another way. IBM has downplayed this as an MDM acquisition, positioning it more as buying into two verticals, health care and a government. Gartner’s Andrew White writes that at one point during the briefing, IBM was asked what the Initiate acquisition meant for MDM. IBM responded it reflects a ‘verticalization of MDM.’ White writes that’s good news for health care customers, but ‘troubling for IBM MDM product strategy.’”

Share This

[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.”

Share This

[Post from Infoglide] The Other Half of Entity Resolution

“In a recent post, Jonathan McDonald quotes one definition of entity resolution: ‘According to Gartner, entity resolution is ‘the capability to resolve multiple labels for individuals, products or other noun classes of data into a single resolved entity when pseudonyms, alias names or other synonym-style constructs exist.’ …While the definition nicely captures the value of ‘first degree’ entity resolution, it falls short by omitting non-obvious relationship detection.”

iHealthBeat: Study: U.S. Lags Behind Many Other Countries in EHR Use

“The study found that 46% of U.S. physicians use electronic health records, up from 28% in 2006. The researchers found that 99% of doctors in the Netherlands use EHRs. Australia, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden and the U.K. also reported EHR adoption rates of 94% or higher. “

data quality PRO: Profit by Data Quality Best Practices

“Insurers use data to manage litigation, detect fraudulent claims and limit financial exposure to claims through reinsurance, but this practice works only when the data is credible. It is no overstatement that sound, profitable property / casualty operations begin – and end – with quality data.”

Federal News Radio: What airline passengers need to know about TSA’s Secure Flight program

“The information is then used ‘behind the scenes’ to match against the No-Fly list. ‘It’s a behind the scenes process,’ said Leyh. ‘If you get to the airport and you have your boarding pass, the Secure Flight part of it, and the watch list matching part of it, is over. It’s done with.’”

information management: Inefficiency as a Standard in Product Information Management

“Managing product information across a large organization consists of much more than making sure prices and descriptions are accurate and consistent. Large manufacturers and retailers employ teams of people tasked with the job of cross checking product data. While the deployment of these teams is a good idea in theory, the process is loaded with inefficiency and errors are all but guaranteed.”

Share This

By Robert Barker, Infoglide Senior VP & Chief Marketing Officer

In a recent post, Jonathan McDonald quotes one definition of entity resolution:

According to Gartner, entity resolution is “the capability to resolve multiple labels for individuals, products or other noun classes of data into a single resolved entity when pseudonyms, alias names or other synonym-style constructs exist. This is especially true in cases wherein there exists intentional falsification of information or the creation of false identities. While most prevalent in detecting perpetrators of criminal or illegal activity, more-commercial applications exist as well.

While the definition nicely captures the value of “first degree” entity resolution, it falls short by omitting non-obvious relationship detection.

Basic entity resolution determines “who’s who” by sifting through massive amounts of noun/attribute data in multiple disparate data sources. Cutting through ambiguity caused by missing attributes, pseudonyms, aliases, and obvious efforts to deceive, it mines and resolves the essential elements of identity to form an unambiguous picture that greatly enhances business decisions and reduces risk.

However, in many application domains, pinpointing “who knows whom” is equally valuable. In detecting insider trading, for example, it’s important to resolve identity information to achieve an unambiguous picture of a person of interest, but to expose fraudulent activity, it’s critical to identify second and third degree linkages between suspects and their friends, relatives, and business associates.

More examples abound. In insurance, fraudsters change roles each time they stage a car accident and also intentionally modify their identities in accident reports. Fraudulent employers who want to reduce their workers’ compensation premiums will close their company and start a new one with modified identities of corporate officers. In retail, non-receipted returns of merchandise are often linked to store employees and the customers they enlist to act as their confederates. The list goes on and on.

In each case, entity resolution finds hidden connections by evaluating multiple ambiguous attributes with the same algorithms used to resolve identities. A retail employee who takes a customer’s winning lottery ticket (while telling the customer he didn’t win!) can be traced through address and phone information to other suspiciously connected people, e.g. frequent lottery winners and lottery commission employees.

With apologies to the experts at Gartner, here’s a suggested addition to the definition that acknowledges the other half of entity resolution:

The capability to (a) resolve multiple labels for individuals, products or other noun classes of data into a single resolved entity when ambiguity from pseudonyms, alias names or other synonym-style constructs exists, and (b) to expose hidden connections between entities that are two or more degrees of separation apart. This is especially true in cases where there exists intentional falsification of information or the creation of false identities. While most prevalent in detecting perpetrators of criminal or illegal activity, more-commercial applications exist as well.

Share This

[Post from Infoglide] iPhones, Identity Resolution, and Cloud Computing

“A personal favorite saying for years has been “invention is the mother of necessity” (a twist on the original saying, of course). It aptly conveys what has driven the high tech industry for the last several decades. Principles like Moore’s Law and its equivalent for the internet have created unanticipated waves of computing and networking power. All that available power has released the combined creativity of tens of thousands of engineers and marketers who dreamed up ways of interacting and managing our lives and businesses that were inconceivable 30 years ago…”

Liliendahl on Data Quality: Match Destinations

“When matching party data – names and addresses – very often it is not just only about hitting similar records, but also about performing some form of transformation with the data before, during and after the hitting.”

Tech Law Notes: Health IT & Open Source

“Repeatedly, I hear the refrain that this stimulus money is going to go to systems that can be put to a “meaningful use,” and that is going to exclude rogue open source Health IT developers from being funded, squelching innovation in the market place.  I imagine that complying with the security regulations under HIPAA probably hinder innovation, too, but they increase the reliability of the system vendors that remain in the market place and reduce the risk to the data of patients that might be in their computer systems.”

The Data Doghouse: People, Process & Politics: Integration Portfolio

“Existing IT projects may be under the label of: Corporate Performance Management (CPM), Master Data Management (MDM), Customer Data Integration (CDI), Product Information Management (PIM), Enterprise Information Management (EIM), Data Warehousing (DW) and Business Intelligence (BI).”

Share This