Gentlemen, Start Your Engines (and don’t play with those matches)
By Douglas Wood, Infoglide Senior Vice President
Much is happening these days in the Data Quality space. Customers are embracing MDM strategies at a record pace, M&A activity has picked up from an industry perspective, and the various players in the data quality marketplace are expanding their offerings like never before. It matters little if the objective is to vet fraud or to master data. The race to deliver the dream of an enterprise-wide single-entity-view (SEV) is on. Gentlemen (and Danica Patrick)… start your engines!
The key word here, naturally, is ‘engines’. An engine moves things forward, and performs considerably more than one basic task. As has been well-documented here at IdentityResolutionDaily, a true identity resolution engine plays a vital part of any SEV initiative. Technologies that can look at data across disparate silos and return results that point to both matches AND non-obvious relationships are in high demand… and set to grow even further in 2010. The simplicity of “yes it’s a match” or “no, it’s not a match” is no longer sufficient for most organizations as they seek the single-entity-view. Remember, an entity is not merely made up of attributes… but also relationships. A true ‘engine’ points to those relationships, and moves the entire data quality initiative forward.
An engine cares little what the car looks like, and ought to drive a multitude of vehicles. Similarly, an identity resolution engine ought to be built to solve a multitude of problems. SEV for exposing risk and fraud, SEV for Healthcare Patient Matching, SEV for Law Enforcement, SEV for customer relationship management, SEV for data disambiguation, SEV for house-holding, and so on and so on. The engine should perform the same functions… while only the domain (or body type) changes.
It also occurs to us that the engine ought to be flexible in terms of what is mounted to the chassis – and how. Do you want the 2.2L engine? 4 cylinder or 6 cylinder? In the case of an identity resolution engine, customers ought to be able to pick how the functionality is delivered. Full enterprise software license with professional services to build the car? Done. Functionality on demand a la Infoglide Software’s Identity Resolution as a Service (IRaaS TM) offering? You got it. A SEV appliance that sits behind a customer’s firewall to alleviate privacy-in-data concerns? No problem.
The need for an SEV engine that provides a powerful library of matching and relationship capabilities, delivered in a variety of customer-friendly methods is now more critical than ever. With the increase in activity lately around the MDM space, one thing is clear: the race is most definitely on.
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