Data Finds Data in Real-Time Entity Resolution
By Robert Barker, Infoglide Senior VP & Chief Marketing Officer
Jeff Jonas of IBM recently quoted from a chapter called “Data Finds Data” that he co-wrote for a book entitled Beautiful Data: The Stories Behind Elegant Data Solutions, and I was impressed by how well this passage describes the effective use of entity resolution software (e.g., IRE 2.2):
With each new transaction an organization learns something. It is at the moment something is learned that there exists an opportunity, in fact an obligation, to make some sense of what this new piece of data means and respond appropriately. For example, does the address change on the customer record now reveal that this customer is connected to one of your top 50 customers? If an organization cannot evaluate how new data points relate to its historical data holding in real time, the organization will miss opportunities for action.
Most existing entity resolution solutions take full advantage of the technology’s ability to resolve multiple identities into one, and the true innovators also make the most of its capacity for finding hidden, non-obvious relationships. Clearly, corporate decision-making improves greatly when such enhanced information is available in reports, but the ultimate value of entity resolution is realized when it’s applied in real time.
Many organizations maintain massive amounts of online data. They can enhance their existing systems by incorporating identity resolution in the form of software as a service (SaaS). Using the address change example, a web service call from an existing address change function would invoke an identity resolution service to discover second- and third-level relationships based on the new address. Discovery of a new relationship could trigger an alert to the appropriate person in the business unit who monitors activity in the system.
Although entity resolution technology has been evolving for years, it’s still a new concept for most organizations. We’ve begun to discover how using entity resolution can dramatically improve operational decision-making, but there are many undiscovered opportunities still waiting to be exploited.
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