By Douglas Wood, Infoglide SVP of Sales and Services
I noted with interest the August 31 announcement that IBM is buying UK based i2 Inc. I was in my hotel room when I read the announcement, attending the International Association of Financial Crimes Investigators (IAFCI) conference in Charlotte. I was actually so surprised that I dropped one of my shoes onto the floor as I was hurrying out of the hotel room.
Perhaps I should not have been so shocked, though. It was clear to me that the 2009 COPLINK/i2 ‘merger’ never quite developed the way either party had intended, and that neither entity was working particularly well with the other. Looks like IBM saw the same thing and swooped in to put the pieces together. Good play on their part.
With loads of customers in several countries, i2 is a large provider of intelligence analytics for crime and fraud prevention serving the banking, defense, health care, insurance, law enforcement, national security and retail markets. I suspect that IBM’s plans will include integrating the i2 and COPLINK platforms into the overall Infosphere portfolio, particularly the Identity Insights solution formerly known as Entity Analytics Solution (EAS). With a new base of customers in which to up-sell software and services, IBM looks well positioned to take on SAS and other behemoth players in the fraud analytics business. Or are they?
I don’t expect SAS to sit on its hands. They never do. Although more traditionally thought of as a NIH shop, I would expect some rapid bulking up on their part. And what of HP? The acquisition of Autonomy was interesting to say the least. I find it hard to believe they are going to stop there. Even BAE Systems is ready with their recent purchase of Detica/Norkom and the Netreveal platform.
In the meantime, startups such as Palantir Technologies and Infoglide Software continue to make major strides in building our respective next-gen technologies and customer bases. I am particularly proud of our Identity Resolution Engine product and MinorMonitor offerings. The former provides cross database single-request fuzzy searching, social link discovery, anonymous resolution for data privacy and real time red flag analytics for commercial and government clients. MinorMonitor is our free web tool that – using the same core technology used to keep terrorists off of airplanes - alerts parents on what their children are being exposed to on Facebook.
The possibilities are endless heading into the fourth quarter. What’s going to happen next? I’m not sure. I expect that other shoe to drop sooner rather than later, though.
“Strategic decisions about cloud computing should both draw upon and inform the EA. An organization must have a mature and well formed understanding of its architecture components (e.g., business processes, services, applications and data) to make meaningful decisions related to cloud computing, such as whether a move to the cloud is advantageous, what services most lend themselves to a cloud deployment, and what cloud deployment model (e.g., private, public) makes the most sense. There are three key roles for EA in facilitating cloud computing strategy and planning…”
“‘Medicaid cheaters rob taxpayers, hurt needy patients and push medical costs higher for all of us,’ Cooper said in a statement. ‘We’re stopping the waste and abuse and making violators pay.’ During the federal fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the Medicaid Investigations Unit of the state Attorney General’s Office won 22 criminal convictions and negotiated 18 civil settlements worth $53.5 million.”
“Under Secure Flight, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) prescreens passenger name, date of birth and gender against terrorist watchlists before passengers receive their boarding passes. In addition to facilitating secure travel for all passengers, the program helps prevent the misidentification of passengers who have names similar to individuals on government watchlists. Prior to Secure Flight, airlines held responsibility for checking passengers against watchlists.”
“We talked a week ago about the rapidly emerging market space called Big Data. One statistic that opened my eyes is Gartner’s prediction that the volume of new data generated by enterprises will grow by 650% in the next five years, and 80% of that will be unstructured data! The 451Group’s definition of Big Data describes a growing need for non-traditional processes that can treat massive amounts of data as a whole, thereby making it impossible to use many traditional tools and techniques.”
“These tools will integrate many of the agency’s pilot programs into the National Fraud Prevention Program and complement the work of the joint HHS and Department of Justice Health Care Fraud Prevention and Enforcement Action Team (HEAT). ‘Preventing fraud is more effective than the old ‘pay and chase’ model of fighting fraud after a sham provider has been paid and disappeared,” CMS administrator Donald Berwick said in a statement. “By using new predictive modeling analytic tools we are better able to expand our efforts to save the millions — and possibly billions — of dollars wasted on waste, fraud, and abuse.’”
“Concerns that internal initiatives, and the CIO’s clout, will be gutted and most funds redirected to the cloud are overstated–for now. But we are at an inflection point: IT has money to spend, but it can’t be allocated using the same old budget process that’s kept us in a rut of dedicating a third or more of our resources to keeping the lights on. Business leaders have little patience for high-priced, long-term IT slogs. They’ve seen massive 18-month projects fail and experienced success with lightweight software-as-a-service offerings. CIOs must look at each expenditure and think, ‘Will this buy us flexibility and advance the business?’”
Early this year, Gartner suggested that a “data deluge” has begun. In his recent Dataspora Blog post about “Big Data” and what it means, author Michael Driscoll presents a unique and interesting perspective on the massive amounts of data being generated and stored. According to The 451 Group’s definition,
“Big data is a term applied to data sets that are large, complex and dynamic (or a combination thereof) and for which there is a requirement to capture, manage and process the data set in its entirety, such that it is not possible to process the data using traditional software tools and analytic techniques within tolerable time frames.”
While the term “Big Data” continues to evolve, no one argues that there are unique problems associated with capturing and using it, and part of the challenge derives from the multiple disparate sources of data.
Source: Avanade Global Survey: The Business Impact of Big Data, November 2010
“The era of Big Data has only just begun. In the latest edition of Database Trends & Applications, I provided a series of predictions about the year ahead, with an emphasis on data management. Here are 10 of them…”
“The segment of the cloud Salesforce leads, SaaS (software as a service), has grown from a tiny sliver of the enterprise software market just a few years ago to 10 percent in 2009, according to Gartner, which predicts that slice will expand to 16 percent by 2014. Even more dramatic is the firm’s projection that 85 percent of all new software will be delivered as a service by 2010.”
“In 2005 the United Kingdom embarked on the largest investment ($18 billion) in health information technology in the world. Yet despite expectations that the system would increase efficiency and reduce medical errors, their efforts neither improved health nor saved money — in fact in some cases, they may have led to patient harm. Britain’s government-run medical system is obviously different from our complex public-private insurance system.”
“‘This is where Secure Flight, the government-run program that is now vetting passengers before they receive their boarding passes, comes in. It replaces a more ad hoc system run by the carriers. ‘Prior to Secure Flight, the airlines themselves were responsible for matching all of their passengers against the watch lists, so each airline had their own system for doing that,’ said Greg Soule, a spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration. ‘Secure Flight takes the passenger watch list matching process away from the airlines and puts it all in one program under TSA, so it is a more consistent process across the board.’”
“Even if EHRs reduce the risk of errors overall, they may produce entirely new ones, Edward Fotsch, CEO of PDR Network, which will provide network operations for the new reporting system, tells the Health Blog. For example, EHRs may cut the risk of failing to alert a patient to an abnormal test result, but confusing user interfaces may produce their own mistakes and need tinkering.”
“Even with these differences, a human can rapidly determine that they refer to the same individual for two reasons. The first is that the values that differ across the pair of records are not too different from each other, and the second is that there seems to be enough support from across each pair of attributes to assert some degree of similarity.”
“Today, everything seems to be moving into the cloud. In 2005, investment in cloud computing was about $26 million. But in 2009, the investment grew to $370 million, more than 10 times of what was invested in 2005.”
“Some of the nation’s largest banks are exiting or scaling back their dealings with foreign embassies and missions in the U.S. because of the burden of complying with money-laundering regulations… ‘It’s a commercial decision, but clearly it has ramifications for diplomatic relations,’ said Mark Toner, acting deputy spokesman for the State Department. ‘We want these foreign missions to be able to carry out their normal diplomatic functions here in the U.S.’”
“There are an estimated 50 million patient records, with 20 to 200 records per patient, resulting in billions of individual pieces of information, all of which need entity resolution: in other words, which records belong to her, him or somebody else.”
“Last night the largest Medicare fraud operation yet discovered was in the headlines: ‘A vast network of Armenian gangsters and their associates used phantom health care clinics and other means to try to cheat Medicare out of $163 million, the largest fraud by one criminal enterprise in the program’s history, U.S. authorities said Wednesday. Federal prosecutors in New York and elsewhere charged 73 people.’”
“After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the U.S. government encouraged and funded a proliferation of domestic counterterrorism centers, commonly referred to as state and local homeland security fusion centers. Although 72 centers now exist, only 28 have privacy and civil liberties plans approved by the Homeland Security Department, National Journal has learned.”
“Worldwide Cloud Computing market is continuing to grow at a rapid rate and it is expected to cross US$ 25 Billion by the end of 2013. The different segments of the Cloud Computing market (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS) show different maturities and adoption levels. The various segments within the SaaS market will grow at a different rate.”
“Secure Flight watch list matching takes a matter of seconds to complete, and providing this data enables passengers to print their boarding passes at home or at an airline kiosk, TSA notes. The November 1 deadline marks the end of the year-long grace period for airlines to clear out their systems of older reservations made before Secure Flight requirements took effect in October 2009. After November 1, 2010, Secure Flight will not conduct watch list matching or approve the issuance of a boarding pass by an airline if complete passenger data is not submitted, the TSA says.”
“There is undoubtedly a direct connection between health care fraud and health care quality. Consider the Kansas physician convicted of health care fraud linked to the death of patient. He had been running a ‘pill mill’ in a small town, which led to more than 100 overdoses and at least 68 deaths. All the while, he submitted millions of dollars in false claims to government programs and private insurers.”
“The information will be required on third-party online booking sites and with travel agents as well as directly through the airlines, according to TSA. David Castelveter, spokesman for the Air Transport Association, said airlines have updated their reservation systems as needed since TSA started requiring airlines to collect the data a year ago. He said compliance on the part of passengers is necessary for their ease of travel.”
“One of the ways DHS is approaching this threat is by beefing up the country’s network of fusion centers — groups that fuse local law enforcement work with national-level intelligence.”
“Cloud computing became the hot topic of discussion when the recession hit and companies had to tighen up their budgets. They could no longer afford expensive servers, clunky software, and entire IT teams to manage this infrastructure. Cost constraints led decision makers to open their minds to cloud computing. At this time, cloud computing was a fairly new concept and term, which led to many raised eyebrows and question marks. However, as companies slowly adopted cloud services, many others began to understand its purpose and benefits.”
“To help organizations comply with privacy laws, the Anti-Fraud Solution Suite can be configured to return only the calculated probability of a match, instead of the actual data associated with that match, or can return only partial data depending on the authorization level and country of the end user. ‘Many companies don’t realize they already have the data to solve the puzzle,’ said Mike Betron, director of marketing. ‘They are doing business with people that, if they had a full view of that person, they would never even let them in the door. But their fraud operations are segmented, and their data is dispersed throughout the organization. One hand doesn’t know what the other is doing. One line of business is about to sign a customer that is committing fraud to another line of business. Major financial institutions are losing millions of dollars because they don’t have a clear picture of their customers, vendors, partners, and employees.’”
“Cloud computing, sometimes known as software-as-a-service (SaaS) is the driving force of the Web 2.0 revolution. Small businesses are faced with the challenge of growing fast while staying lean and efficient. Most are constrained by financials, leaving them high and dry if they don’t know how to scale with a limited budget. Thankfully for them, cloud computing brings them powerful benefits to grow with little to no capital outlay.”
“After the terrorist attacks on 9/11, a number of comprehensive reviews of why the attack happened and why we were not prepared were conducted. Deficiencies and gaps identified by the 9/11 Commission appointed by the president stressed the importance of state and local law enforcement in sharing information and intelligence relative to terrorist activity. As a result, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Department of Justice encouraged states to develop fusion centers. A fusion center is a collaborative effort of two or more agencies that provide resources, expertise and information with the goal of maximizing the ability to detect, prevent, investigate and respond to criminal and terrorism activity.”
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...
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