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.

Account domain in MDM Server

InfoSphere MDM Server is one of the MDM Solutions which provides multi-domain support along with multi-style. One of the domains that it supports out of the box is Account domain.

What is a Account in MDM terminology?
An Account is an an agreement between two parties with terms and conditions which is enforced by the MDM Server. An account leads to purchase of a product by one party from another party leading to creation of an agreement. For e.g take the case of a customer creating a savings account in a bank. Here the bank and the customer are the two parties forming an agreement when the customer buys the product savings account.


An account domain can be used to provide support for value packages. Value Package allows providing bundle multiple products which can be then sold to customer. This concept can be used in the financial as always telco line of businesses. In telecom also the concept of value package is quite useful. Take the case wherein a customer purchases a mobile connection and a GPRS connection is provided to him as a value package and these two are stored as accounts in the MDM System. The rules and details of the product like a mobile connection is defined by Term and Agreement of that product.

The account domain support was added in MDM 8.0 and has become stable with the releases.

Master Data Management from a primary focuses on creating a consistent view of the data across the organization or a company and manage the data change also consistently. To get to this consistent view, the data needs to be deciphered and siphoned from various data sources. However one of the major issues in deciphering this data is that almost 80% of this enterprise information is in unstructured.

What is unstructured data?
Unstructured data is any data like the blog that you are reading now which cannot be typically stored in a database in a row/column format. It will be done in the form of a BLOB (binary large object). With the boom of the internet and the World Wide Web this data is growing at a mind boggling speed. A lot of government and financial organization still has a document oriented systems wherein there will be different forms that will be filled and maintained.

Being able to pull the content and the data together to create a single view is the biggest challenge. Master content of an MDM solution can be effectively managed by integrating with an intelligent tool which can manage the content intelligently and optimize all business process. IBM Enterprise Content Management is a product which can do all these. Integrating this with an MDM solution will give a complete 360 degree view of the data and the content to effectively manage and analyze any business.

Take an example of an insurance company which has considerable amount of content in terms of insurance policies and their terms and agreement. As mentioned earlier lot of this unstructured information is also captured as feedbacks and blogs from customers which is also very important for the company’s satisfaction metrics. The same company now wants to implement an MDM Solution to give him a unified view of its customers to effectively manage his business. It would be difficult to move the content based unstructured data into an MDM solution. The company would not want to loose these feedbacks and would definitely want to have these views whenever it is looking at a specific customer profile.

MCB (Master Content Bridge) is aimed at providing this unified view by integrating IBM Enterprise Content Management and InfoSphere Master Data Management Server. It would enable the following:-

1. Mapping document and their attributes to corresponding MDM parties and attributes

2. Capture document creation and change events as they occur
– Synchronize master content metadata into MDM server
– Create linkage between MDM parties and documents

3. Initial load and linkage of existing documents in ECM in bulk

4. User interfaces and applications consuming MDM services have access to structured and unstructured data.

MCB would thus help in bringing to the table a complete true value of MDM solution for a customer and providing the power of enterprise content to single view.

More information at the link-
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/infosphere/mdm_server/master-content.html

Smarter HealthCare Solution

Recently was attending a Conference in Atlanta and one of the panel discussion that I attended was on Smarter Health Care Solution. A very interesting set of panelists from Google, Symantec, Intuit and Microsoft participated in it. Indeed in US it is a hot topic because of the highly expensive healthcare system. The point of discussion was how do we make the healthcare system much smarter and worth the amount that is spent on it by an individual. Everybody agreed in the panel that in order to create a smarter healthcare solution one of the biggest steps was to create an electronic health record. This record can be something that can be shared easily between hospitals and doctors that a patient needs to consult. Considering that one of the studies shows that in 5 years 30% of the world's data would be around health record, it definitely makes more sense.

An electronic health record idea is great but currently there is lack of a standard format to create and share this record. Companies like Symantec and Google have solutions to create electronic healthcare record but each of them have their own standards and they are completely non-interoperable. So for example consider that there are two hospitals that provides and maintain an electronic health record. A patient from the first hospital has to consult a doctor from the second hospital. Can the same electronic record be used in the second hospital? Currently it is not possible. So the solution needs to be standardized and then only it makes sense to do that, otherwise the patient will land up carrying more printed data which are anyway questionable in terms of security.

Once an electronic health record is created the next thing is about the security and integrity of the record. Most of this data is very sensitive and needs to be carefully shared so it is very important to provide access structure around this record. At the same time the integrity and the uniqueness of the data also needs to be maintained as an error in health record can actually cause very severe outcomes. IBM's recent acquisition Initiate provides a high quality data integration solution. Initiate has a very strong matching engine where key criteria for matching is:-

• Bringing together a complete set of information even if the individual is known as J Krishnamurthy in one system and Jay Krishnamurthy in another and so on.
• Also another criteria is avoiding mixing information from two distinct patients
  who live in same city like Rahul Sharma and Raul Sharma.

The next thing after ensuring the correct accurate data is building analytics on top of it so that research and predictions can be done around them. India is becoming a hub of high standard healthcare at very affordable cost. Hospitals are equipped with instruments and doctors who can do the most complicated surgery at reasonable costs. So a smarter healthcare system should definitely be the journey that the companies especially in India should start investing in, so that the there is economic growth and the society also progresses.

Telecoms Boom in India and MDM Story

Telecom market is undergoing a boom. Mobiles industry have completely revolutionized the Telecom market . Especially for a country like India wherein a significant percent of population do not have stable home, the landlines are becoming misnomers. The Indian story of telecoms is quite different from the world. Specific difference between mobile users in India and other developed countries are:-

• The high end phones are not much in demand but instead the cheaper ones which suffice the purpose are more in demand. The Nokia 3000 series is still the most used series of mobile easily available in 1000-1500 Rs. This is the usual rate which significant person of the population prefers and there is a variety of choice available from vendors like Samsung, Nokia, Micromax and others in this range. School going to Road sweepers dangle this piece of electronics like proud
  owners


• The rates per minute had gone down to as low as 30 paisa /per minute. In our age also at least there is something that comes in paise . This is lesser than the landlines rate of BSNL.


• The pre-paid customers can recharge their mobiles with amounts as low as 5 Rs.Wow!!. That is less than the amount that we pay for an ice-cream also.


• A significant person of the population uses pre-paid packages, so the vendors need to be quite competitive in coming up with offers that could attract the customers to use their services. The case wherein the recharge can be done for as low rates as 5 Rs. is an example of that.

One of the mobile vendors came out with a wonderful advertisement wherein people are recognized by their mobile numbers in villages since it has become so affordable and easy to use. Remember Abhishek Bachchan grinning on the exclamation “Wah kya idea hai Sirji”. Looks like a huge competition to the UID project.

So what does it mean?

Countries like India and China are redefining lot of sectors and domain because of their size and population. The Telecom sectors especially in India would require the capability of a good MDM implementation involving multi-domain MDM capabilities to bring more profit and value to the customers and the vendors. A good MDM solution can provide capabilities like:-

• Multi domain capabilities to bring Customer, Vendor and Product
• Account and Terms and Agreement capabilities between Customer, Vendor and Product
• Fraud Management
• Up-Sale and Cross-Sales of Products
• Understand the Customer Value Chain
• Campaign Management
• Rounded view of customer
• Product Bundles and Variants

These are some of the Use Case where in an MDM Solution can directly make an impact and create a smarter Telecom sector.

MDM Implementation Styles

Implementation Styles of MDM Server as defined by Gartner Group

Consolidated – For reporting analytics and centralized reference
Registry – Mainly for real-time central reference
Coexistence – For harmonization across databases and central reference
Transaction – Acts as a system of record to support transactional activity

The common aspects of these architectural styles are:-
1. All have a requirement to create/define a central store or database for the master data
2. All have requirements for the solution to have a data quality foundation
3. All have requirements to act as the master source of data despite how many multiple sources of data are being accessed

The architectural styles differ by:
1. The level of physical instantiations of the master data versus virtual or metadata
2. To what degree the solution can perform transactionally with other operational systems
3. How and where the creation of the master data takes place
4 The level of neutrality to connect with transactional and analytical applications

Some of the misconceptions about the architectural styles:-
1. A solution offering addresses only one architectural style.
2. Organizations have to adhere to one approach for the lifespan of the project.


So basically any of the Master Data Management products could be used to implement solutions following any of the implementation styles. Let us consider some products in terms of their suitability for different implementation styles:-

1.InfoSphere MDM Server – It can be implemented in all different styles. However if used for Registry style, their might not be effective usage of the rich set of services provided by the product. Highly useful for a transaction style of implementation. Most of the MDM-Server customers are financial sector as they want to implement the transaction style of MDM implementation. The other reason also being that they want to own the master record.

2.Initiate Systems – It is highly useful for registry style since it has a very strong capability of linking to source master record. It has services for view, search and matching capabilities. Initiate finds its market in the Health Care domain where only a subset of the data is viewable and searchable. The purpose is to link to the master record which might reside on some other physical MDM.

The database compatibility layer

The new database compatibility layer offered by DB2 makes migration much more simpler and easier. Read more at
http://blogs.forrester.com/noel_yuhanna/10-06-30-database_migrations_are_finally_becoming_simpler