Mastering Data Management

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The goal is to ensure that the investigation is leading to the right door belonging to the suspect.

MDM is starting to catch on within public sector organizations tasked with identifying, targeting and mitigating threats to citizens. The challenge today, however, is cutting through many technologies in the marketplace that claim to provide MDM capabilities but in reality can only support bits and pieces of what true MDM is all about.

Running risk analytics and analysis on various names and name variations contained within disparate data sets is only a small component of what an MDM solution should be. To truly master your data you must be able to, in real time, manage (CRUD), disambiguate and correlate all types of data, not just on name or identity attributes.

Oh, and do it in a way that is secure, takes into account lineage and pedigree of your data and controls who can see what across the enterprise.

To that point, I see a lot of name matching and “identity resolution” technologies that claim to provide MDM solutions but they’re not able to satisfy requirements that are much larger than simple name matching or identity resolution. Customers need an MDM solution that is much more than one-dimensional (i.e. can master any type of data…not just a product OR a name).

For example, the prospects and customers I’ve been working with over the past 15 years do not always have a name or person associated with every record within their data sets. With that said, they still need to master “identity-less” data to eventually get to a person of interest along with actionable intelligence with what to do next.

As a matter of fact, many of the bad guys tend to apply deception techniques that mask their true identities, such as misspelling data elements or providing false names. Law enforcement agencies will also admit that they cannot always verify a suspect’s name depending on whether or not that person had an ID (whether real or fake) on them at the time of the infraction or interrogation.

As a result, MDM technologies MUST be able to resolve entities on multi-domain objects including people, objects, locations and events (POLE). To do so will allow customers to see collapsed and consolidated views of unique entities (notice I didn’t just say identities). This also enables you to quickly recognize non-obvious links, associations and relationships based on exact or fuzzy similarities in the data (partial VIN or license plate number attached to two different individuals, businesses, locations or events, for example).

At the end of the day, the MDM solution provider must be able to immediately adapt to whatever data is available to ensure that customers are still able get the answers they need. The end goal is to ensure that the investigation being conducted, the door they’re kicking in, the person of interest they’re interrogating or the munitions they’re sending down range are all targeted at the right entity.