Identity Resolution Daily

[Post from Infoglide] Healthcare Identity Resolution Confusion

“Confusion about medical records can lead to chaos. We’ve all heard horror stories about hospital tragedies caused by misidentification of a patient, such as applying an unnecessary surgery. It’s hard to overemphasize the importance of correct, unambiguous information in the practice of medicine. Knowing as much as possible about a patient enables a practitioner to reach a correct diagnosis and the proper treatment regimen in the least amount of time.”

NewsandSentinel.com: Local officials do their part to fight terrorism

“Tom Campbell, a consultant on terrorist issues who has worked with Sandy in the past, has been in the field of counter-terrorism for 14 years. We do not profile based on ethnicity and race, what we do is profile behavior,” said Campbell. “Terrorism is evolutionary. Terrorists are always changing their behavior, appearances and tactics. What we try to do to prevent terrorism is focus on the behavior. That’s how we disrupt it before it happens. The emphasis is on prevention.”

intelligent enterprise: Predicting BI Highlights for 2010

“Cloud computing and SaaS will become less niche as both BI heavy weights and vertically-focused vendors recognize that the infrastructure side of BI offers little competitive advantage; instead, it’s the time-to-value and agility. IT owners who don’t want to give up any control are in for a bruising.”

ISRIA: Testimony of Secretary Napolitano before the Senate Committee on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, “Intelligence Reform: The Lessons and Implications of the Christmas Day Attack”

“DHS uses TSDB data, managed by the Terrorist Screening Center that is administered by the FBI, to determine who may board, who requires further screening and investigation, who should not be admitted, or who should be referred to appropriate law enforcement personnel. Specifically, to help make these determinations, DHS uses the No-Fly List and the Selectee List, two important subsets within the TSDB. Individuals on the No-Fly List should not receive a boarding pass for a flight to, from, over, or within the United States.”

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[Post from Infoglide] Data Fatigue

“Four years ago this week, a small aircraft lifted off from Watson Island in Miami. It was the plane’s 39,743rd flight. And as the tiny craft first vented white smoke and then lost its right wing in an explosion, it became clear that this was its last. All twenty people in the Grumman G73-T, including three infants, perished. The National Transportation Safety Board later determined that the culprit was metal fatigue.”

ovum: BI, EPM and EDW trends to watch out for in 2010

“For the mid-market and those new to BI, open source and BI software as a service (SaaS) will offer attractive alternatives. In the case of BI SaaS, increasing deployments of enterprise applications in the cloud by SMEs will act as a further driver for take-up of this option.”

destinationCRM.com: Electronic Health Records Get a Check-Up

“Hildreth references a 2009 New England Journal of Medicine survey indicating that close to 4 percent of physicians have a fully functional EHR system. About 13 percent of physicians’ offices have a basic EHR system in the works. Many organizations, Hildreth says, currently have bits and pieces of EHR, but not the full thing.”

insurancenewsnet.com: Hard-up Investigators Battle Against Rise In Comp Fraud

“While prosecution of various forms of insurance fraud is affected by budget constraints, the prosecution of underreporting of workers comp premiums by unscrupulous employers, or their outright failure to purchase the mandated coverage, may take the biggest hit, depending on each state’s priorities, Mr. Jay said.”

intelligent enterprise: Survey: BI Still Hindered By Technical Problems

“Specifically, the 2009 survey found that 29% of BI deployments were slightly successful and 47% were moderately successful. Only 21% of the respondents rated their deployments very successful.’A number of technical factors continue to contribute to — or hinder — stronger BI impact,’ the report said. ‘Data quality, reliability of the BI system and access to relevant data are the most important technical factors.’”

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[Post from Infoglide] Fusion Centers: Enthusiasm and Apprehension

“Identity resolution is a vital technology for law enforcement fusion centers, and we’ve often followed developments with links to stories in this area. When overlapping and adjacent jurisdictions share data with each other, uncovering hidden identities and linkages greatly accelerates the detection of criminal activity. This map shows current and planned deployments of state and local fusion centers.”

dataqualityPRO: Data Quality Blog Roundup - November 2009 Edition

“These three posts formed an excellent blogging debate between Jim Harris, Henrik Liliendahl Sørensen and Charles Blyth on the subject of Single Version of the Truth, a common term in our profession - but what exactly does it mean?”

USAToday: Opposing view: Program keeps fliers safe

“Initially, the Secure Flight program was part of a larger debate about how to identify terrorists consistently while maintaining the privacy of fliers in the post-9/11 world. Once watch list matching was determined to be the correct mechanism, TSA designed the program with privacy and security embedded into its foundation. Secure Flight now uses advanced watch list matching technology and has taken the time to get it right.”

The EHR Effect: 8 Health Stocks Set to Benefit in 2010

“In addition, with some EMR/EHR providers offering as Software As A Service solution (SaaS), the initial fears of implementation costs and backup/disaster recovery planning can be significantly decreased. These SaaS providers have already worked through those issues, and through a web interface, can offer full functionality.”

Business Intelligence News: Master Data Management: Building a Foundation for Success

“Complexity occurs when the subject details being mastered have more variables, and variables that can be vague—such as a person. In the instances of complex subject areas, mastering the reference value requires more sophisticated analysis [i.e. identity resolution] of the numerous attributes associated with the individual reference value such as their name or address.”

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Technology writer Chris Calnan’s story opened with a comment about Infoglide that nicely sums up the evolution of the broader market for identity resolution and entity analytics: “The market may have finally caught up with Infoglide Software Corp.’s technology.”

While identity resolution technology has evolved rapidly over the past decade, its market visibility only emerged fairly recently. It was barely two years ago in mid-2007 when Gartner analyst Mark Beyer dubbed it “entity resolution and analysis” and pointed out that it “was previously an obscure, but gradually developing, technology that has come to the forefront as a result of world events and market forces.” Gartner singled it out as an “On the Rise” technology within operational business intelligence.

That first Gartner “hype cycle” showed entity resolution and analysis entering at the earliest stage. A year later in mid-2008, a broader report on data management  depicted it significantly higher on the curve in the opinion of the Gartner analyst team. In both reports, its estimated time to “mainstream adoption” was 2-5 years, the second fastest category.

At the end of 2008, noted consultant and speaker Jill Dyché of Baseline Consulting issued her predictions for 2009. Along with predictions about SaaS, data governance, BI, and MDM, she said that “Identity Resolution will get its due.” Rob Karel of Forrester had written several months before about Informatica’s acquisition of one of the two closest Infoglide competitors (IBM EAS being the other one). Identity Systems was acquired from Nokia for $85 million.

As we progressed further into 2009, the most meaningful indicator of identity resolution’s growing importance surfaced: an escalating identification with the space by other companies. IBM, Infoglide, and Informatica were joined by Initiate Systems, Intelligent Search, and Netrics, each of whom began incorporating messaging around identity and entity resolution.

For our customers and for us, this is all good news.  Our evolving space becoming better known and more highly valued will provide more alternatives for customers while increasing our own visibility. The future of identity resolution looks bright, and we all win.

[Distributed earlier this week in our quarterly publication, Identity Resolution Quarterly]

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By the Infoglide Team

Come by and see us at TDWI World in Orlando Nov. 3 & 4, Booth 405

The Emculturated World: Unmanage Master Data Management

“MDM breaks down in the moment it becomes divorced from a practical, immediate attempt to capture just what is needed today. The moment it attempts to “bank” standard symbols ahead of their usage, the MDM process becomes speculative, and proscriptive.”

Governing: Can I Say No to an Electronic Health Record?

“In some instances, patients don’t even know their information is being shared. For example, if consumers turn over prescription drug records when applying for life insurance, the insurer will sometimes hand off the information to business partners who then hand it off to data miners. To keep a tighter grip on privacy, Deven McGraw, director of health privacy at the Center for Democracy and Technology, would like a set of rules that all organizations in the health IT world would have to follow.”

Related post: “Applying Identity Resolution to Patient Identification Integrity”

San Antonio Express-News: McManus recalls 9-11 at GEOINT summit

“Bart Johnson, acting undersecretary for intelligence and analysis with the Homeland Security Department, said cooperation is improving, although problems remain with security clearances and interdepartmental connectivity. ‘The federal government can only do so much in getting it down to the street level,’ Johnson said. Homeland security and Justice Department officials have formed 72 “fusion centers” — terrorism prevention and response centers where federal agencies work with the military, local law enforcement and private partners. Three are in Texas: Austin, Dallas and Collin County near Dallas.”

information management: From Search to Explore

“It’s no surprise that people are looking at more and more internal and external resources for informed decision-making. In the internal case, data integration is a foundation of master data management as well. But integration for BI to common visual tools is increasingly taking place in subsystems, relational databases and cubes, and the visualization layer itself.”

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By the Infoglide Team

CRMBuyer: The BI Outlook: A Bright Spot of Growth in a Gloomy Economy

“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.”

OCDQ Blog: Adventures in Data Profiling (Part 3)

“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.”

SearchSOA.com: SOA with MDM prevents messaging confusion

“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.”

iHealthBeat: Privacy and Security: Experts Focus on Legal Issues Surrounding EHR Use at AHIMA Summit

“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.”

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[Post from Infoglide] Walking the Privacy/Security Tightrope

“In a post last April, we talked about the privacy/security balance issue for fusion centers and for vendors with supporting technology. Now an article in the Austin Sunday paper about a proposed fusion center again highlights the tension between security and privacy. Each time a fusion center is proposed, the story goes like this…”

information management: MDM for Tough Times: 5 trends to strengthen organizations during recession

[Aaron Zornes] “Enterprise MDM solutions are steadily but rapidly evolving away from data-centric hubs into full-blown application stacks. In other words, MDM is becoming less of a standalone technology infrastructure as the emphasis is increasingly on relationships between domains, user interface and integration with other emerging and adjacent technologies such as RFID, entity analytics and business intelligence.”

InformationWeek: Healthcare Tech: Can BI Help Save The System?

“Healthcare IT is a good place to be these days. While IT budgets in many verticals have been tightly reined, healthcare is enjoying multiple government mandates. This has resulted in an infusion of funds to modernize and integrate IT infrastructure, applications, and data. However, we aren’t starting from a high ground. There are multiple challenges to attaining a 21st century-grade IT environment.”

OCDQ Blog: Adventures in Data Profiling (Part 2)

“The adventures began with the following scenario – You are an external consultant on a new data quality initiative.  You have got 3,338,190 customer records to analyze, a robust data profiling tool, half a case of Mountain Dew, it’s dark, and you’re wearing sunglasses…ok, maybe not those last two or three things – but the rest is true.”

VIDEO: Interview with Secure Flight

TSA Secure Flight Program Director Paul Leyh is interviewed about recent developments.

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[Post from Infoglide] iPhones, Identity Resolution, and Cloud Computing

“A personal favorite saying for years has been “invention is the mother of necessity” (a twist on the original saying, of course). It aptly conveys what has driven the high tech industry for the last several decades. Principles like Moore’s Law and its equivalent for the internet have created unanticipated waves of computing and networking power. All that available power has released the combined creativity of tens of thousands of engineers and marketers who dreamed up ways of interacting and managing our lives and businesses that were inconceivable 30 years ago…”

Liliendahl on Data Quality: Match Destinations

“When matching party data – names and addresses – very often it is not just only about hitting similar records, but also about performing some form of transformation with the data before, during and after the hitting.”

Tech Law Notes: Health IT & Open Source

“Repeatedly, I hear the refrain that this stimulus money is going to go to systems that can be put to a “meaningful use,” and that is going to exclude rogue open source Health IT developers from being funded, squelching innovation in the market place.  I imagine that complying with the security regulations under HIPAA probably hinder innovation, too, but they increase the reliability of the system vendors that remain in the market place and reduce the risk to the data of patients that might be in their computer systems.”

The Data Doghouse: People, Process & Politics: Integration Portfolio

“Existing IT projects may be under the label of: Corporate Performance Management (CPM), Master Data Management (MDM), Customer Data Integration (CDI), Product Information Management (PIM), Enterprise Information Management (EIM), Data Warehousing (DW) and Business Intelligence (BI).”

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By the Infoglide Team

cnet news: What you need to know about e-health records

“Supporters say electronic medical records will boost the quality of medical care, reduce duplication of services, and limit errors, all of which could save money and lives. The National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine estimates that between 44,000 and 98,000 people in the United States die each year because of errors such as being prescribed medicine to which they are allergic.”

tricityherald.com: Travel restrictions to get tighter June 1

” Beginning June 1, travelers will need either a U.S. passport, a state-issued enhanced driver’s license, a U.S. passport card or a trusted traveler card to enter the country through land or seaports. Passports were made mandatory for air travel in 2007.”

Las Vegas Sun: Fusion center’s attention on prevention

“The trio appeared to be doing the kind of photographic surveillance terrorists might do before they strike a target, the officers concluded. So they contacted the Southern Nevada Counter-Terrorism Center. The center is run by Metro Police and houses investigators and analysts from local, state and federal law enforcement agencies in Southern Nevada.”

Destination CRM Blog: Tom Siebel Sends His Regrets

“Our customer data is now more siloed than it ever was, it doesn’t match, and the owners of the respective systems that process it don’t talk to each other much. The single version of the truth has eluded us. We’re still trying to sell customers products they already have.”

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[Post from Infoglide] Let’s Be Reasonable

“A recent post, ‘Terrorist Watchlist, Troubling Flaws Revealed’, starts out by making a valid point. If the terrorist watchlist is flawed, then the name matching results against such a list will be flawed. The author then goes on to reach related conclusions through rationalization rather than reasoning.”

Acxiom: Prognostications for the New Year 

“Identity resolution will get its due. Sure, you can call it infrastructure. Processing and rules intensive, customer identity resolution has been relegated to the underlying algorithms of third-party data providers, MDM, and data quality vendors. However, companies are recognizing that they may have unique customer data-matching needs-a bank we work with has more than 50 definitions of a household-and they’ll be looking at smarter, more specialized ways to automate them.”

Dallas Morning News: Dallas Police Department’s Fusion Center outsmarts criminals

“Chief David Kunkle, who championed the unit’s formation in January 2007, refers to it as the “brains” of a department that reported a 10 percent drop in crime last year and a nearly 19 percent decline in the first quarter of this year.”

datanomic: Fractured approaches to Sanctions Screening put UK Companies at risk, says new FSA report

“‘The use of multiple identities is common in the criminal world and Al-Qaeda’s own training manual requires its operatives to use false identities to hide their terrorist activities. Exploiting variations of a criminal’s real name is, perhaps, the simplest way of acquiring a new identity. Typical approaches are to use name variations or switching the order of names,’ added Pearson. ‘Other data, such as dates of birth are often manipulated simply by transposing digits.’”

Cloud Computing Journal: Experian QAS Launches QAS Pro On Demand

“‘By offering address verification in a SaaS model, we are enabling organizations of all sizes to maintain accurate contact data in a cost-effective platform,’ said Joel Curry, chief operating officer, Experian QAS. ‘As businesses change over time, our new infrastructure is able to adapt to shifting demands.’

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