January 13th, 2010 by Eddy Reimerink
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.
We love damage control, not prevention
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Tags: Blacklist Matching, Customer Due Diligence, Misspelled Name, Terrorist
Posted in Data Governance, Data Quality | 1 Comment »
January 6th, 2010 by Winfried van Holland
Dealing with matching of persons or contact data in general, we are all aware that individuals can make use of abbreviations or nicknames as kind of synonyms for their name. Classic examples are the usage of the name Bill for the actual name William, or like my own father is using the name Mans while officially his name is Hermanus. Most matching engines make use of a kind of synonym table to take care of this. That can be done because within a culture or region the nicknames are quite often linked to the same names and people do not tend to use completely different official registered names.
It becomes more challenging if there is no longer a link between nickname and official name. That may happen, for example, if people move from one cultural region to another where also other writing sets are used. Take for example my chinese friend 高为民, whose Latin name would be Gao Weimin (family name first), but the moment he works in Europe or the US he is using the Latin variant William Gao. There is no common relation to the name William and Weimin both in Latin or Chinese and it they are no phonetic variants of each other. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: cultural differences, fault-tolerant matching, matching, names, naming confusion, nicknames
Posted in Data Quality | No Comments »
December 21st, 2009 by Winfried van Holland
In the evolution of information technology Gartner provided a new term as ultimate goal to reach: Pattern-Based Strategy.
As you were reaching for the final destination in your ultimate journey to transform bits and bytes to real information, again you encounter a new optimum. Pattern-Based Strategy, as described by Yvonne Genovese et al. can be identified as the last era in all the eras of IT-value add. Basically, the level of control identifies in which of the era you currently operate – from tight control and pure automation in the ‘old’ days via augmentation, e-commerce/Web 1.0 and web 2.0 to the highest era called – Pattern-Based Strategy. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Business Activity Monitoring, Business Inteligence, gartner, pattern-based strategy, Yvonne Genovese
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December 3rd, 2009 by Ron Mulderij
Every year when autumn comes the assistants of the sales department get a little nervous. They know what will happen in short term. It’s almost Christmas and the selections of contacts to receive a Christmas card have to be made.
Every year it’s the same. First the selections for every account manager are made and they will have to check manually if these are correct. This year will be the same as ever, which means that:
- relevant companies and contacts are missing
- new companies and contact persons will be added
- contact persons will be deleted
- contact persons will be transferred to their new company
- addresses appear to be not up-to-date Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: address standardization, christmas cards, CRM, CRM-system, customer view, marketing, process management, validation
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November 10th, 2009 by Ron Mulderij
Through the increase of modern technologies our payments are processed electronically more and more. Banks try to reduce costs and force their customers to carry out the payments themselves. Internet banking has become the standard. Customers no longer can deliver written transfer orders at their bank, but have to book the transfers using internet banking facilities.People can easily make a typing error in the account number that still will result in an existing account number. The risks are fully on the customer’s side. Although banks always are willing to help them to get the money returned, it’s better to avoid these errors.
In my opinion, banks should be obliged to perform a name-number-check for every payment or at least for every larger amount. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: fault-tolerant matching, money transfer, name-number-check, risk mangement, typing errors
Posted in Data Quality | 2 Comments »
October 28th, 2009 by Holger Wandt
The internet is on the verge of one of the most fundamental changes in its history. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is expected to agree on the use of internet addresses in non-Latin characters during this week’s ICANN convention in Seoul. If all goes according to plan, it will be possible to use Greek, Cyrllic, Arabic, Chinese, Korean and many other characters in the internet browser’s address bar. More than half of the 1.6 billion internet users in the world are using a character set which is not Latin. Therefore, ICANN expects that the number of non-Latin domain names, and thus the number of new internet usersm, will increase rapidly.
This far-reaching change in the use of he internet is based on a system that can “translate” or “convert” different writing systems (with sometimes different writing directions, i.a Arabic and Hebrew). On a high level, it would look a little like this, I would imagine:
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عربي
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中文
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English
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日本語
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Deutsch
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Français
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Español
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Русский
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Português
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한국어
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Italiano
|
|
AR
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ZH
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EN
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JA
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DE
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FR
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ES
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RU
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PT
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KO
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IT
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Naturally, this phenomenon raises questions concerning the matching of internet addresses. Is ووو.هُمَنِنفِرِرِنسِ.كُم the same as www.humaninference.com? It appears that generic multilingual data matching issues also apply in this particular case. How do we handle these comparisons? For a couple of thoughts, please read this…….
Tags: ICANN, international domain names, internet address, matching, Seoul, transliteration
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October 21st, 2009 by Holger Wandt
On 28 january 2010 the next Human Inference Data Quality Summit will be held in the Evoluon in Eindhoven (NL). The theme – Value your data, value your future- is inspired by the idea that investments in data quality have become part of standard business and that vision, strategy and solutions are being synchronized with these investments. As data quality has reached a certain level of maturity, it is time to have an in-depth look at the (near) future of Data Quality.
The program is challenging, comprehensive and entertaining. Keynote speakers include Ted Friedman (vice president Gartner Research), Mathias Klier (professor at the University of Innsbruck) and Sabine Palinckx (CEO Human Inference). Additionally, in the break-out-session a wide variety of theme-related topics will be addressed: maximising the buisnes value of information, guiding a dq-project through migration, data quality maturity, marketing effectiveness and many more….. In short, the Data Quality Summit is not to be missed!
Save the date and register by clicking this link!
Tags: data quality maturity, Data Quality Summit, DQS 2010, gartner, Human Inference, integration, migration, Sabine Palinckx, Ted Friedman
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September 7th, 2009 by Holger Wandt
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Banks, Chinese characters, customer view, Data Quality, deduplication, interpretation, knowledge, single customer view
Posted in Data Governance, Data Quality | 2 Comments »
August 24th, 2009 by Holger Wandt
The more a company knows about its customer’s wishes, needs and habits and the more that company is able to tailor its proposition accordingly, the greater the value it will eventually provide for its customers. We all know that there are countless examples where defective, fragmented, or just plain poor customer data cause unnecessary costs, decrease in revenue, employee dissatisfaction or frustation, damage of the corporate image and many other unsdesirable or painful consequences.
Customer data quality and integration problems impact every area of the value chain of organisations. Far too often companies have a multiple view of their customers. Customer Data Integration (or MDM for Customer Data) is the key to providing companies with a single view of their customer. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: cdi, customer view, data processes, identification, intelligent matching, MDM for customer data
Posted in Data Quality, MDM for customer data | No Comments »
August 21st, 2009 by Ramon de Noronha
The term Golden Record is closely related to Customer Data Integration or MDM for Customer data. It refers to the “single truth” which has been created or calculated from all those duplicate customer records from different systems. This post is not about finding or tagging all those duplicate records. There all kinds of ways to find them using advanced statistical methods, fuzzy matching etc.
But what do you once you have found the duplicates. How do you create the best possible customer data out of all gathered elements? Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: ACCU, deduplication, first name, golden record, matching methods, MDM for customer data
Posted in MDM for customer data | 2 Comments »