Mastering Data Management

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By sharing information across agencies, you can stay alive and not lose your marbles

I remember from my childhood a game called Stay Alive. It was a board game where marbles were placed on 25 spaces supported by ten interlocking sliding panels.

Each individual panel had a number of holes in it, but when you interlocked the panels you would get a board with no holes. Players would alternate sliding these panels back and forth trying to expose holes through which their opponents’ marbles would fall. You can see a picture to get an idea.

A recent article on HBR.org reminded me of this game. The authors had done research on data providers and had been surprised to learn that no data provider had full coverage of the individuals and companies in their markets.

“Vendors simply don't have every [person] in their databases,” Ruth Stevens wrote. In the world of data, no system knows everything about everyone, like in the Stay Alive marble game where no single panel is without holes.

Gaps exist not just with commercial data providers, but with the data that all companies and governments use.

In government, gaps in data can expose security risks. No single watchlist has information on every criminal or terrorist. No single law enforcement agency has all of the information it needs on all of the criminals it is tracking. The marbles falling through the holes are criminals and terrorists exploiting gaps in our system.

This highlights the need for sharing information. Although no single system has all of the information an organization needs, when we combine systems, like interlocking panels in Stay Alive, we ensure that we have better data to protect and serve citizens. A law enforcement agent that has access to shared data from neighboring counties is suddenly able to connect all the dots, which leads to solving the crime.

Effective information sharing requires accurate entity resolution. (Entity resolution is the ability to recognize that two pieces of information refer to the same individual or thing.) Unless the information sharing platform can recognize that the John Smith I know about is the same as the Jonathan Smythe that you know about, we fail to realize the benefit of sharing our information.

By sharing information and accurately resolving it, we can all keep from losing our marbles.