#3: If Only Data Quality Were That Simple
By Robert Barker, Infoglide Senior Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer
Our previous post was a response to Phillip Howard at Bloor who recently raised questions about data quality solutions in a series of posts. One final point he made raises an issue that deserves an extended comment.
On this point Philip says “where I think there may be a significant difference between products is in their ability to discover relationships. However, I will not comment on this now as I am conducting research into this issue and plan to publish a detailed report in the New Year.” This brief comment highlights what I believe is a rapidly emerging market.
Discovering hidden relationships is a crucial part of a market known by various aliases: entity resolution and analysis, entity analytics, and our favorite of course, identity resolution. Regardless of the name you use, identity resolution problems have distinct characteristics not adequately addressed by existing solutions for data quality (DQ). Neither are they addressed by customer relationship management (CRM), master data management (MDM), or business intelligence (BI).
Identity resolution solutions focus on horizontal need: identifying bad actors in multiple industries. They require at a minimum the following capabilities:
1. Identity matching through an extensive library of attribute-specific analytics
2. Relationship detection and resolution resolution
3. Decisioning that leverages industry-standard and other rules-based systems
4. Seamless integration with existing business processes via web services and APIs.
Until recently, identity resolution problems were overlooked, addressed by custom in-house applications, or served by cobbling together products from adjacent and overlapping markets. As the identity resolution market has emerged, vendors from these adjacent markets have tried to address the needs with existing products, but customers quickly learn that these products lack the combination of integrated capabilities needed to adequately this unique problem area.
Identity resolution has a similar relationship to each of the 4 adjacent areas mentioned above. Each area causes the creation of data sources that can be consumed by identity resolution solutions, while the addition of identity resolution technology enhances the accuracy of DQ, BI, CRM, and MDM.
Here’s a chart that seeks to clarify these relationships and to characterize the strengths and weaknesses of the adjacent products when applied to identity resolution problems. The adjacent products simply can’t address identity resolution well because they were built for a different purpose. Do you agree?
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