Mastering Data Management

Make sure you're keeping total cost of ownership in check

In my previous two posts, we’ve discussed the nuts and bolts of what you need for entity resolution success.

However, I saved one of the most important for last: ensuring a low total cost of ownership (TCO). Especially with stretched budgets, you want to make sure you get the most bang for your buck. From our experience, here are the essential TCO components to consider:

• Highly accurate and automated systems can reduce the number of analysts required and the costs to manually review large volumes of data.
• Accurate, real-time solutions can mitigate the risks and costs associated with citizen threats and protecting officers in the field, and provide results that will minimize wasted time and efforts directed at benign targets.
• Easy and flexible configuration capabilities will result in lower maintenance costs than custom software or rules-based technologies.
• The ability to quickly and easily add additional data sources and tune algorithms for specific data as new requirements arise and constituents start to share potentially valuable information will result less expensive operating costs.
• Is the cost of the solution less than the significant short- and long-term costs of building an in-house custom solution?
• Is the entity-resolution piece of the solution a single, integrated platform or do several products have to be acquired and integrated to achieve the desired results?
• Does the system take weeks or months to deploy, not years?
• Is there a user-friendly way for even the most complex and sophisticated algorithms to be easily tweaked and tuned by unsophisticated users, as required, to maximize results in a dynamic environment?
• To what extent does the solution help ensure that the investigation being conducted, the door being kicked in, the person of interest being interviewed or the munitions headed down-range are all targeted at the right entity?
• Does the solution enable users to Create/Read/Update/Delete (CRUD) data across disparate sources, including updating contributing sources with the record of truth and updating sand boxes where what-if scenarios can be run and analyzed? By automating system updates and eliminating the need for users to provide manual updates to numerous systems, organizations can save hundreds or thousands of man hours.

If you can hit all these criteria, you’re well on your way to a successful – and cost-effective – entity resolution deployment.