20-20 Cricket match or Test Cricket

Any day if a cricket fan is asked what would he or she love to watch given a choice between 20-20 and Test match and 90%(I think) would probably say 20-20 . In fact a Test match has started taking the form of 20-20 and finish off in 3 days rather than the whole 5 days. Shehwag has to be blamed for that probably because of irrespective of what form of cricket he is playing he males century at the same speed. Poor guy he is just doing what he is naturally good at. :-)

Given the age and time that we are in why do we think that a customer would wait for 9 months to see a solution implemented. Talk about an MDM Solution and we say that any implementation will take nothing less than 9 months. The customer has every right to say then “Thank You” and move on. The MDM solution ROI has to be shown in lesser time and the complexity has to be hidden. That will be the point where we will be make exceptional growth in markets like India. The Customers in growth market do not have a huge IT department to implement complex solution and neither do they have a window big enough as 9 months to see the ROI.

IBM has taken a step in the right direction by acquiring Initiate into the MDM portfolio and enables customers to implement the simple MDM solution at the same time and realize the ROI earlier. The conceptualization of a virtual MDM to a physical MDM would allow the customer to see the MDM path and end goal much more clearly.

The IBM InfoSphere Master Data Management V10 is the latest release from IBM MDM portfolio. Find all the details about it on the following URL
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/infosphere/mdm/features.html

Hope it it a step in the righ direction to convert some of the MDM Test matches to a 20-20 and customers come flocking towards it. :-)

What type of data is master data?

Recently while doing a demo to one of the customer, one of the question that kept on hovering around most part of the discussion is "I have this attribute. Can I keep it in the Master Data Management Solution". The attributes that were chosen were price of a product, points earned by the customer and so forth.

The price of the product for that customer is something that would change multiple times in a single day and a similar thing could happen with the Point system. This definitely does not contribute to the Master data.

A lot of times it has been observed that customer does not clearly understand what Master Data is and often confuses it with a repository which can hold all their data like a Data Warehouse vis-à-vis a solution which could give them that single view of the customer or any entity. So it is very important to make the customer understand what Master Data is. The attributes that form a part of Master Data should not be highly transactional as then the objective of the MDM is lost.

Looking for views from other MDM Specialists.

Learning Initiate

Recently went through an IBM Initiate training, and I was very impressed with the set of tools and documentation of the product. It has a very cool workbench which gives the capability to configure and maintain the product. This tool can handle all the nuisances of the creation of an MDM server solution. Most of the MDM server projects actually do not reach their achieved goal or are failures because the process to achieve Master view itself fails. Typically the steps involve around loading cleansing, analyzing, and reviewing the data.

The Initiate workbench provides capabilities to do all this and more. The most interesting feature that it provides what it says is algorithm configuration which typically allows you to:-
1. Standardize the data to a format which can be entered into the system
2. Bucket the candidates
3. Compare the members

Configuring Algorithm is also pretty cool through a drag and drop UI. With a clear set of use cases it should take probably a day to configure it . Once you have configured all this, then the data is loaded into the system, and there on you start doing the actual MDM functionalities of matching and linking records.

I still need to see the other UI, which is Inspector and their reporting capabilities but till now what I have seen is quite impressive.

Householding in Telco

Recently I have been looking at MDM Server fitment into a Telco domain. There is lot of scope in the Telco to make it and it is a very heterogeneous vertical. However, the use cases that you would like to demonstrate in a MDM Product which gives you very customer specific view of the story is probably similar.

What could those use cases be and I am adding a few:-
1. Creating a Party
2. Creating a Product
3. Suspect duplicate processing
4. Creating a contract between Party and a Telco product
5. Householding information
6. Establishing Value proposition of a customer
7. Campaign management

Among all the use cases above and I am sure there are quite a few more, householding information is one of the basic concept on which the customer view can give the biggest advantage to any Telco customer. The householding will give the value proposition also to the customer. However the way we define a household may differ in different industry. So in other ways the way we define a householding would be a set of rules using which we can group people together.

There is a very interesting article on the following site about householding that is very informational.

http://www.information-management.com/news/1010001-1.html?pg=2

MDM Solutions and matching capability

Data Quality of the MDM Server is a very important aspect of MDM. The significant use case around Data Standardization, Matching, Suspect duplicate processing, are one of the key elements which differentiate the MDM capabilities from the Data Warehouse Solution.

Talking about the matching requirements of an MDM Solution, in any kind of a CDI solution it is very important to be able to hold of the unique identification of a customer/person. Consider an example wherein a person by name “Sushil Kumar” comes to a bank to open an account in the bank. This person has already defaulted credit card payment some 3 years ago and now because of may be difference in the spelling name or address change, the bank cannot make out that this is the same person. This could lead to wrong decision by the bank in allowing him to open a bank account again and providing him debit/credit cards. A similar error in health care can lead to a life and death situation. So an MDM Solution with good matching capabilities is required. The MDM Solution can either support matching capabilities OOTB or integrate with any of the other good matching engines.

Matching can be probabilistic or deterministic

Deterministic Matching
• Uses combination of algorithms and business rules to determine if two or more records match.
• The result is an either/or outcome: Either records match the requirements of the business rule or they don't.
• Better suited for businesses that have simple data systems with less attributes to match

Probabilistic Matching
• Uses likelihood ratio theory to assign comparison outcomes to the correct or more likely decision
• Probabilistic systems assign a percentage (such as 75 percent) indicating the probability of a match.
• Better suited for businesses that have complex data systems with multiple databases

IBM with its Quality Stage (QS) and Initiate matching engine now provides both the breeds of matching capabilities. The InfoSphere MDM Server has integration with QS to support matching while the IBM Initiate system has an inbuilt probabilistic matching engine. With time both the IBM MDM Solution can look at having support of both the matching capabilities and be able to incorporate any kind of matching.