Identity Resolution Daily

By Robert Barker, Infoglide Senior Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer

Not long ago, Knowledge Integrity president, David Loshin, suggested that you have to spend considerable effort to standardize attributes of entities in order to exploit identity resolution effectively. He went on to explain multiple types of name standardizations to demonstrate just how complex the process can be.

Staying with the well understood example he used, let’s consider the complexity associated with names. Standardizing names is often more problematic than say, U.S. street addresses, since there’s no authoritative reference like the USPS database of deliverable addresses to check against. As David points out, name structures are inconsistent and undependable. Here are more examples:

• Standardizing doesn’t account for nicknames, e.g. is Jack = John or Jackson?
• Standardizing doesn’t account for typos: Is ‘Jak’ = Jack or Jake?
• Standardizing doesn’t help in a full text context. Try scanning for a guy named “Ira Roth” in a database of financial transactions.
• A naming trend in the 90s was to create non-traditional spellings of traditional names, e.g. “Erica” became “Aarika”.

While standardizing certain attributes helps, a full implementation of identity resolution overcomes the remaining inconsistencies. Definitely required are multiple analytics to handle David’s name examples as well as the additional ones outlined above, but analytics for a multitude of other attribute types present in the data are also needed (e.g. a license plate algorithm that scores a “B” as similar to the number “13”).

By harnessing the power of comprehensive identity resolution software, you can leverage multiple identity attributes, beyond just names and addresses. Then, basing decisions on algorithmically generated confidence scores of similarity and equality, the seemingly impossible complexity and variations in identity data can be exploited to increase the accuracy and value of your key applications.

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[Post from Infoglide] Mind Over Data: Faster Returns from Master Data Management

“Andy Hayler recently commented on the ’scale of the problem that Master Data Management (MDM) is attacking.’”

tdwi: New Frontiers in Identity Resolution

“Identity resolution—the process of determining which data representations refer to the same entity—traditionally focused on matching name and address records from company systems. But today’s businesses face a new set of challenges:”

b-eye.com - Business Intelligence Network: Solution Spotlight

“Robert Barker explains how Infoglide Software is used to uncover risk, fraud, and conflicts of interest and is also a useful tool within MDM applications including product information management, customer data integration (CDI), and data quality.”

The Forrester Blog for Information and Knowledge Management Professionals: Informatica Enters Identity Resolution Market — Is MDM Next?

“Now if I were Oracle, I would ask why I didn’t snatch up this relatively inexpensive company first and embed these capabilities permanently into my planned MDM fusion strategy. The coopetition between Oracle and Informatica has been fairly amicable, but that could change very quickly if Informatica voids Identity System’s OEM agreement with Oracle and enters the MDM market with a competing solution. Stay tuned — this could get interesting.”

CheckMEND blog: ‘E-fencing on eBay – lets enforce the check before you buy!

“E-fencing is increasing everyday, according to CNBC, with the help of faceless online auction sites such as eBay and we need to really start looking into ways to overcome these issues.”

destinationCRM.com: DataFlux Has the Edge in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant on Data Quality Tools

“Business Objects, IBM, Informatica, and Harte-Hanks’ Trillium Software join the SAS Institute unit in the top box.”

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We’re celebrating the holiday and will be back on Monday. Have a fun, safe Fourth!

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By Robert Barker, Infoglide Senior Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer

Andy Hayler recently commented on the “scale of the problem that Master Data Management (MDM) is attacking.” He specifically cited a survey of IT leaders recently conducted by Information Difference and reported on by ITPro that indicates a majority of senior IT executives believe their data quality is poor, yet many believe the sheer number of data sources they have to deal with is a big obstacle. In fact, “13 percent of companies had over 100 systems storing customer data, while 11 percent had over 100 systems storing product data.”

Imperfect data can be so daunting that it leads to paralysis. Maybe the bigger obstacle is not the number of data sources – it’s the mindset. Contrary to common belief, complete cleansing and integration of all data into a warehouse is not mandatory before you can gain value from MDM. Cleansing and combining data no longer has to be the first step in MDM. Newer technology exists that not only reaps value from un-cleansed data but has the ability to create a virtual data warehouse that allows an organization to access all its data in real time.

Identity resolution technology can search across multiple, disparate databases to find associated records without needing to merge and purge. And a sophisticated identity resolution solution can do this in real time without performance issues. Additionally, identity resolution is not “one size fits all” but supports flexible and highly configurable solutions that work with data in specific domains.

The task of cleaning and combining over 100 sources of data seems overwhelming, which is probably why those companies still have scores of data sources. Identity resolution addresses this issue directly.

Using the right technology before applying ETL processes, you can incorporate identity resolution into existing applications in order to combine similar identities, find hidden relationships, and enhance automated decision-making. Demonstrating ROI early will lead to continuing organizational support for additional MDM projects.

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