Lack of understanding of the complexity of international names caused a near-accident successfully prevented by the Dutchman Jasper Schuringa.
On Flight 253, on its way from Amsterdam to Detroit, a passenger tried to explode the airplane. This passenger was not called John Smith, or Peter Johnson. No, his name was a little more complicated: Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Easy to misspell, and that is exactly what happened. A misspelling of the name of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab resulted in the State Department believing he did not have a valid U.S. visa.
A major bank in Dongguan (China) refused a potential customer because his name is Li Jun. Apparently, there were already over 300 bank accounts assigned to the name Li Jun. Not that this particular Li Jun was responsible for opening all these accounts, there were just too many men with exactly the same name. The bank states that the refusal is nothing personal, since nobody with the name Li Jun will be accepted as customer in the near future….. In the meanttime, Li Jun is taking legal action against the bank. (more…)
Just before this summer the U.S. Department of Justice filed a report about the FBI Terrorist Watchlist. This watchtlist serves as a critical tool for screening and law enforcement personnel for alerting them when they come across a known or suspected terrorist. It is used by personnel at airports, harbours and the borderline. Also when you apply for a visum you are matched against this watchlist. The Terrorist Screening Center, a subsidiary of the FBI, is responsible for maintaining the watchlist.
This watchlist was created in 2004 from several other lists and at that time it consisted of about 68.000 entries. I use the word entries, because in the years after it became fuzzy if one record is the same as one individual. By the end of 2008 the list had grown to over 1,1 million entries. In 2008 after the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) mentioned that the list had passed the 1 million, the government came with an explanation. Although we have recorded over 1 million entries in the database, the net result is that these records correspond to about 400.000 individuals. Terrorist often use different and thus multiple identities, use several (falsified) passports etc. But adding entries with only the first initials and last name, while an entry of the full first names and last name already exists will result in unwanted side-effects. (more…)
The 2nd Strategic Technology for 2009 according to Gartner’s David Cearley is Business Intelligence. And as stated by the well known title above this blog there is always the risk of trusting too much on your history while making decisions for the future. We’ve seen in the past that ’these mirrors’ have improved already. There has been significant reduction in ‘history’ in the business intelligence and actual information – it has become more real time. That has direct impact on smartness of decisions and on positive impact of the companies business performance.
No need to convince ourselves that data really brings value in BI! Still we see BI projects struggling with the foundation. The obvious statements as “garbage in is garbage out”, can we really trust the actual figures generated from our BI tool, and did the change management investments on the people providing the data really convert them in ‘data friendly persons’. I still need to smile internally if people complain about the garbage quality of the other departments and are completely convinced of their clean data - challenge them to cleanse and dedup their outlook contacts!
Another pitfall related to data quality is that people trust too often on keys or IDs. I’m sorry but data quality is much more than matching on keys or IDs, even on official keys like social security numbers.
A solid credit rating for consumers has become more important than ever. In the USA companies already provide services to consumers enabling them to verify their credit rating. Whenever a change occurs in your credit rating, you will receive an alert.
They even offer services including protection from so-called “Identy theft”. All those services are marketing-wise labeled as “privacy matters”.
But when privacy really matters to you, have a look at the following video-clip or visit the site http://www.privacymatters.nl. On 14th May Human Inference will organize a breakfast meeting in the Netherlands on this very topic together with the expert Alexander Singewald (breakfast meeting).
Cloud Computing or Cloud Services that’s the ultimate dream we have. It doesn’t bother anymore where services are running, we need a handle to it and it can start raining. Pending on which part of the world you live, you like clouds or not. For someone with lastname “van Holland” it’s almost hard to believe that he needs to trust the clouds!
The first Strategic Technology to watch according to Gartner is Virtualization. And I do like their twist in the whole virtualization debate – focus on data. While the whole world is linking the word virtualization with optimizing your hardware assets by using a virtual layer on top of your hardware. By optimizing the usage of your assets in this virtual way you can significantly reduce the total cost of ownership (ToC).
David Cearley at Gartner comes with a fascinating other angle. Basically he sees virtualization also as strategic technology to virtualize the data. And by that twist, data quality and data governance appears annoyingly in the middle of your radar screen. In order to use this strategy for your operational excellence, to eliminate the number of redundant data on your real storage devices, and make a virtual layer between your applications and this virtual data storage, you need to be sure that all your applications can work seamlessly with that virtual data.
Recently - close your eyes and imagine the meaning of recently in this climate of economic crisis – David Cearley from Gartner published a blog on the most important technical strategies for 2009. In a couple of blogs I want to pick some of them and emphasize my view on them in relation to data value.
In general I agree with the top 10 of technological strategies, be there some slight personal priority adaptations, but let’s focus on that in later blogs. The missing point is in my opinion the lack of emphasis on risk mitigation, and I do realize that things changed since October 2008. Which technologies can we adopt to avoid that we provide services, products, at the end money to the wrong contacts, or that we are sure to deliver it to the right contacts. The technology strategy of Master Data Management, Know your customer, Single View of X, or how we call it, will need our attention in 2009!
It must have been around 2002, that I was discussing the Return On Investment of Data Quality solutions with one of the founders of Human Inference, Norbert Mergen. While discussing the well known benefits: less return mail, more effective campaigns, reduction of debitor risk, single customer view, … I brought another subject at the table: isn’t it strange that we really do ROI calculations on such an obvious need? Did you ever create a fence in the garden and question the ROI of a hammer? We published on this matter in dutch back in 2002 in the CRM Marketing Centre and included the hammer discussion. And now, in 2008, it is so interesting to see that many people nowadays have put the same questions, reading the blog of Jack Vinson ”Stop thinking ROI, think success!” Anyway, it may not convince your management, so you will still need to do the maths, but just bringing the subject to the table may help you getting your data quality project going.
Just before this summer the U.S. Department of Justice filed a report about the FBI Terrorist Watchlist. This watchtlist serves as a critical tool for screening and law enforcement personnel for alerting them when they come across a known or suspected terrorist. It is used by personnel at airports, harbours and the borderline. Also when you apply for a visum you are matched against this watchlist. The Terrorist Screening Center, a subsidiary of the FBI, is responsible for maintaining the watchlist.
The 
