DataFlux

As I noted in Part 2 of this series on regulatory compliance, watch list compliance is not simply a matter of comparing a customer (or customer list) to a watch list and locating matches.

While this is certainly part of it, it is also a process that is ever changing. Apart from changes to the regulations, there are always more names and aliases being added to the lists, others being dropped off, cultural-specific information (including names) being included, and data quality issues of all kinds being innocently inserted. Despite best efforts, the lists are not perfect. - Read the rest of this entry »

I had a conversation with Davida Berger from DebTech the other day, and we spoke about the feedback from the recent conference on Data Governance that DebTech and Wilshire Conferences organized and ran in Orlando this past December. - Read the rest of this entry »

I like to tune in to The Situation Room on CNN, hosted by my man Wolf Blitzer. Recently Wolf had former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in the hot seat. Albright did a respectable job volleying Wolf’s hardball questions. At one point, when she expressed lack of confidence in the administration’s ability to interpret intelligence, Wolf broke in and asked, “Because of the poor information that led to the war in Iraq?” - Read the rest of this entry »

As I noted in Part 1 of this series, data quality can be important to an organization’s compliance efforts and, furthermore, there are some regulations that actually need data quality tools for effective compliance. To illustrate both issues, I am going to proffer the example of watch lists and how organizations should approach watch list compliance. - Read the rest of this entry »

I want to apologize to every data modeler I have ever known (and those I don't know) for the stress inflicted upon them by members of the own information technology teams! I am so sorry! - Read the rest of this entry »

When consolidating your customer data into a centralized MDM repository, there is an expectation that the tools included in your solution will completely support the determination of unique identities and the resolution of many different data instances into one of those uniquely identified objects within the master index. However, no tool is infallible, and errors such as false negatives (not linking two instances that truly represent the same entity) and false positives (incorrectly collapsing two entities into one identity) can happen. - Read the rest of this entry »

Regulatory compliance remains a troublesome issue. While there have been some changes in recent years to eliminate some of the sticking points in certain regulations (e.g., making it easier for small cap organizations and foreign fliers to comply with SOX), compliance nevertheless remains a difficult, expensive, and frequently inexact proposition – inexact, because there are many “gray” areas in the laws where the exact requirements are unclear, because the laws themselves continue to change, and because regulations from country to country are inconsistent. - Read the rest of this entry »

I was presenting at a conference in September of 2006 on the subject of BI as a service in a service-oriented architecture (SOA). I included MDM and CDI as service components, and as feeders to BI in my enterprise diagrams. Needless to say, some of the comments and questions were very interesting. MDM and CDI technology have exploded, and I started thinking, could MDM or CDI be a service? - Read the rest of this entry »

MDM and SOA are not often spoken of in the same breath, although these technologies complement one another and, in fact, an SOA increases the value of MDM. - Read the rest of this entry »

In last week’s blog, I wrote about MDM in health care. The widespread adoption of electronic medical records and the accompanying interest in EMPI (Enterprise Master Patient Index) has propelled health care providers from late adopters of data-enabling technologies to authorities on master data. - Read the rest of this entry »