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

Delhi Airport Wow !!

Sitting at the Delhi International airport, I was completely overwhelmed by the size and the standards that the airport had now. It had Terminals for domestic and international flights along with secured wireless connections. The immense size of the airport with most interesting places to shop and eat made my 5 hours wait at the airport almost unnoticeable. From Swaroski to Haldiram and Mc Donalds to Nirula’s , it had the right mix of the east meets the west kind of image. The standards were as good as any world class airports. :-)

But what completely took me by surprise was the big banner that I saw on terminal 3 which said “Smarter transportation for a smarter planet” and the known logo of IBM. The managed network infrastructure solution on terminal 3 was done by IBM in partnership with IBM International Airport. All the things that we have been working upon through IBM’s smarter planet initiative and to see them implemented while we actually reap its benefit (while I write this blog) was great.

Last week, I went to buy camera as our last one had become completely useless. I was interested in buying Sony but I was bowled by the options available. Come to it I had just come to buy a plain camera which could take some decent pictures, but then you had this root product of camera which had almost 20 variants like Series H, S,T etc and each of them had further sub variants. And then for each variant there are separate terms and condition which could override the root terms and condition like the warranty period, guarantee periods etc.

Similarly, there was this concept of bundling wherein if I bought the Sony LED 49 inches, I would get a Sony camera free. Well that was little too much to go for but then I realized how complicated the product structures can be.

At the back of my mind I was trying to map this to MDM Server Product domain capabilities. Can this whole structure be implemented in that solution? And yes we could. MDM Server structure capabilities allow saving variants of the products as well as supports complex relationships and bundles.

So finally going back to what I bought. Well still thinking. Hopefully I would be able to close on that soon.

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