Mastering Data Management

Building an economic business case for entity resolution is a must

Usually you think of lives saved and a nation protected when you think about combating terrorism. The cost-benefit seems obvious.

Economists at the University of Texas at Dallas have developed a model to create an economic return on investment for counter-terrorism budgets.  And apparently Interpol is doing quite well by saving $200 in expected costs for every $1 spent in prevention.  That is a great return on investment.

The economic model sounds massively detailed and even includes savings to a country’s GDP from fewer terrorist events.  The conclusions from this research are interesting.

“Interpol’s cooperative-based proactive measures leading to the arrest of terrorists or prevention of movement among countries also do not have the same potential for backlash attacks that military actions sometimes spur. Our findings, taken together, could say a lot to members of Congress as they consider how they should allocate funds for fighting terrorism.

“Quite simply, Interpol presents large paybacks on small expenditures as it addresses the shortfall of collective proactive measures,” the authors wrote in their upcoming article. “This is a smart way to fight transnational terrorism.”

Restated, intelligence information sharing, analysis and proactive action (such as that performed by Interpol) are the most efficient way to economically battle terrorism. Interpol’s mission is to coordinate information and operations among nations, to allow countries to track criminals across borders and share information of common interest.

This also happens to be a very good way to describe the business function of entity resolution technology.  Said differently, Interpol will correlate information from their 188 member countries (resolve entities), identify threats to a country (detect relationships), and disseminate that data (share information) to the right country to defer the threat before it occurs.

In a way we can now think about an economic business case that supports the function of entity resolution.  What we do (correlate data fragment into entities, link them, alert, share, etc.) can be reflected in dollars and cents and tangible cost savings to justify the investment expense.

This is critical to continued adoption of the technology from early adopters who are led by what it can do to the much larger, more mainstream market which are led by what it can do for them.   I look forward to hearing more about this research study.

For a different perspective, check out my colleague Larry Dubov’s series on building a business case for Master Data Management.