I won’t go into the much reviewed and dissected failures in the security framework and system that led to the attempted terrorist attack on the Northwest flight from Amsterdam, Netherlands to Detroit. Rather President Obama’s admission of a systemic failure in the nation’s security apparatus and that the US had early signals and uncorrelated intelligence, shines the light back on a core solution that has been available and is actively being deployed in major commercial businesses. That solution is called Master Data Management (MDM).
I’ve blogged about MDM many times in the past having spent 4 years of my professional career recently working for Siperian, a best-of-breed MDM vendor. To recap, MDM software allows siloed data from disparate sources to be cleansed, matched, and possibly merged to produce an accurate representation of inconsistent data so that the information can be relied upon and trusted. More importantly, and applicable to this and other repeated situations where accurate data then needs to be correlated and made sense of, the unearthing of relationships between the data is when MDM can really shine.
If you saw Angels and Demons, you saw Tom Hanks systematically piece together clues of a puzzle to solve a mystery. If you know about Kevin Bacon and the Six Degrees game or use linkedin, you’ll understand how hops across relationship networks allow you to get a wider view and perspective once matches are established between related persons or even products. Other more commercial MDM examples involve counterparty management which determines exposure and risk of financial institutions and can have wide reaching effects in preventing domino effects that can contribute to the worldwide financial crisis.
Granted, we are dealing with a massive global network of information and sources with many layers of governments, bureaucracy and human intervention in between. But surely with all the commitment after 9/11 for cooperation and all this MDM technology available we can and should do better.
Initiate Systems, of all of the MDM vendors has the most visible ties to Government, and one of their investors is In-Q-Tel, a private venture group established by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to deliver solutions to the CIA and the broader intelligence community. Additionally, Initiate even regularly authors several blog topics on this subject and even has a VP in charge of Intelligence and Security.
Siperian meanwhile has Match/Identity resolution software OEMed from Informatica and embedded as part of their core platform. Informatica acquired that technology from Nokia’s Identity Systems Division. Government intelligence agencies around the world are said to rely on Informatica Identity Resolution’s accuracy and precision to meet their stringent requirements. A leading data service bureau benefits from high-performance scalability for processing 12 million transactions per day using 2.6 billion records stored in 18,000 files.
So the question I’m asking is, does the government have ANY SORT of MDM SYSTEM IN PLACE? Are they using Initiate Systems effectively or not at all? Clearly since Informatica Identity Resolution has been licensed standalone to many government agencies for many years, they don’t have a product like Siperian to correctly leverage the technology in a proper MDM framework. So even if matching and identity resolution is being leveraged, is the problem that the government does not have a core MDM Hub for relationship, hierarchy and correlation management to discover and uncover the information to alert us of these attacks and prevent them?
MDM solutions are also offered by the big players like IBM, Oracle and others, so can whoever is responsible for technology solutions to detect and prevent such incidents issue a proper MDM RFP or just pick up the phone and call Siperian or Initiate Systems already before MDM becomes better known as an acronym for Master Disaster Management?