“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?’”
“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.”
“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.”
“The EHRs are designed to be digital replications of the hard-copy, paper health records commonly in use today. They are also engineered to be easily transferable among different doctors and hospitals so as to eliminate the creation of duplicate or disparate records among different health care providers, thus allowing any health care office to access a patient’s complete medical record at each visit.”
“‘There’s an awful lot of talk about it and there is consumption of cloud,’ said Al Gillen, an analyst at IDC. But ‘organizations don’t simply make change because they can. There has to be good justification.’ Harry Weller, a general partner at New Enterprise Associates, said start-ups and new businesses will likely be among the first to move to the cloud. A need to hold down costs is often an overriding factor in their decision, he said.”
“I don’t think anyone knows what product is the best match engine, because I don’t think that all match engines have been benchmarked with a representative set of data.”
“It’s important to realize that SOA is really a rather loose collection of best practices. It’s not necessarily a well-defined list where you have some checklist of things to do SOA and if you miss one, you’re not doing SOA. What’s happening is architecture teams are incorporating SOA best practices into various other initiatives.”
“The U.S. Transportation Security Administration is on track to assume watchlist matching from all U.S. carriers by the end of May, only slightly behind its March 31 U.S. implementation target for the Secure Flight passenger prescreening system, according to a U.S. Government Accountability Office report. The Secure Flight program also calls for TSA to assume watchlist matching from foreign carriers, and the agency already is working with 19 airlines outside the United States to do so. Five of those carriers are fully functional within the program, and an additional 14 are testing, GAO reported.”
“Currently 80 to 90 percent of all medical records are stored on paper. The goal is that have an electronic health record for everyone in the U.S. by 2014. Electronic health records are expected to greatly reduce the number of medical errors, which is significant. Each year in the United States, as many as 100,000 people die in hospitals because of such errors. That’s the equivalent of one major airline crash every single day of every single year.”
“Investing in business intelligence is important for a company now more than ever, agreed Bill Barberg, president of Insightformation and an expert in Balanced Scorecard methodology. Sound business intelligence helps companies make fact-based decisions as they try to navigate in today’s stormy economy, he told CRM Buyer. “Business intelligence can help companies make much better decisions,’ he said.”
“In Part 3, you will continue your adventures by using a combination of field values and field formats to begin your analysis of the following fields: Birth Date, Telephone Number and E-mail Address.”
“Increasingly, organizations are designing SOA into the MDM architecture from the beginning, says Dan Power, president and founder of consulting firm Hub Solution Designs Inc. in Hingham, Mass. This creates challenges in meshing the real-time realities with the need to keep the data accurate.”
“Linda Kloss, AHIMA CEO, said many vendors have not focused on developing legally defensible EHR systems. In addition, health care providers have not created a demand for such functionality.”
“Let’s face it - There are technology limitations. Operational BI (Lack of real-time data access), Guided analytics (Lack of comprehensive business metadata), Information as a Service (Lack of SOA based BI architecture) are some of those technology limitations that come to my mind.”
“Some 72 percent of respondents said they have seen an increase in organized retail crime (ORC), and 52 percent said they had experienced a rise in financial fraud. Paul Jones, vice president of asset protection for RILA, noted that the increase in ORC should set off alarms not only within the retail community, but also within the business and law enforcement community. Organized retail crime typically involves organized groups of criminals operating shoplifting rings which have networks to fence their stolen goods, which may also appear on Internet auction sites like eBay, as well as at flea markets.”
“So now is the time to examine your driver’s license or passport to see that your first name, middle initial (if you use one), and last name appeared exactly the same across all of your identification. If you need a new photo for your driver’s license, now is the time to get it. Being consistent with your name also means that all of your bookings - including air, hotel, and car rental - must be consistent.”
[Jim Harris] “Enterprise Data World is the business world’s most comprehensive vendor-neutral educational event about data and information management. This year’s program was bigger than ever before, with more sessions, more case studies, and more can’t-miss content.”
“In my March 25, 2009 post “The Myth of Matching,” I discussed the confusion between entity resolution and matching as in record de-duplication. Matching is a necessary part of entity resolution, but it is not sufficient.”
“‘I think we will see a growing number of applications that use data from the public Web as background knowledge to offer better search capabilities and to augment local content with additional content from the Web of Data.’”
“‘Many of these were the types of cases where the lottery investigator would need to ‘make the case,’ ‘ the report said. ‘Most of the time they didn’t even try.’ The report also said that even when the lottery discovered cases of fraud or theft by retailers, the retailer wasn’t held accountable.”
“We don’t have to choose between security and liberty. In order to be effective, intelligence activities need to be narrowly focused on real threats, tightly regulated and closely monitored.”
“Sometimes, the business comes forward and says “we’ve got to have the single view of the customer”. Sometimes, IT sees it as a way to become more agile and to reduce system maintenance costs. It is pretty clear, though, that MDM initiatives are more likely to succeed when they’re driven by the business, even if it may have been originally initiated by IT.”
“In a previous post I talked about the two sides of entity resolution - locating and merging. Before continuing the discussion on entity extraction, let’s briefly revisit the issue of merging, in particular the popular misconception that matching or record de-duplication is the same as entity resolution. Matching is a necessary part of entity resolution, but it is not sufficient.”
“The additions to the Transportation Security Administration’s ‘cleared list’ reflect an influx of requests from people asking to be removed from the watch list. The watch list database has expanded 32% since 2007, to more than 1 million entries. The cleared list has grown because about 99% of the fliers seeking to be removed from the watch list were never on it…”
“SOA in and of itself holds little value to an organization unless it provides the capability to open up information to the enterprise. As is the case with SOA, successful MDM is a silo-breaker, invoking collaboration across the enterprise. MDM helps assure that the information populating SOA-based services is accurate, timely, and consistent.”
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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