NORA is Now Dressed in Blue...

Now that Jeff Jonas's NORA (Non-Obvious Relationship Awareness) and SRDnet.com have been dressed in IBM Blue, a.k.a., DB2 Entity Analytic Solutions it's anyones guess who or what will be "Connecting the Dots."

DB2 Relationship Resolution answers the question "Who Knows Who?" IBM DB2 Relationship Resolution software begins where most solutions leave off, extending the customer view to identify and include the non-obvious relationships among individuals and organizations. An individual's relationships can provide a more complete view of their risk or value to your organization, whether they're a customer, prospect, or employee - even if an individual is trying to hide or disguise his or her identity.


Industry applications DB2 Relationship Resolution has tremendous application in industries such financial services, insurance, government, law enforcement, health care and life sciences, and hospitality. Organizations in these and other industries can use Relationship Resolution to: Connect insiders to external threats.

> Find high & low value customer relationships.
> Give fraud detection applications x-ray vision.
> Determine "network" value of the customer.
> Protect customers, employees, & national security.

What types of relationships can Relationship Resolution find?

> A potential employee who shares a P.O. Box with a convicted ID thief
> An account holder who shares a cellular account w/ a known money launderer
> An account exec who shares the same address as your hottest prospect
> A customer who lived with a wanted terrorist suspect
> An employee who lists your largest account holder as an emergency contact

DB2 Anonymous Resolution determines "Who is Who and Who Knows Who... Anonymously? It enables multiple organizations to selectively share data and leverage proprietary data in a matter that never exposes sensitive information, while still identifying relationships and developing leads.

"Finding the Needle" is not really the right analogy here. It's more like, let's find the one piece of straw in this haystack that meets this range of parameters. However, false positives and false negatives are always the name of the game when it comes to these kinds of solutions.

In order for this solution to work accurately, first you have to know "Who is Who". If this means that some how you have the same name as someone else, and that someone else has links to other people that are on a "Watch List", then you could become a false positive. The only ways to solve this are to feed the system with more information such as addresses, social security numbers, dates of birth and all the normal ways to more effectively ID people who have the same name. It also allows you to cross check who had an insurance policy, drivers license or any other data that would show up on a credit application such as your mothers maiden name. The other strategy is to make sure that you go "public" with who you are, where you live and what your blood type is so that their starting point will always verify who you are, for certain.

"The seemingly simple questions of 'who is who?' and 'who knows whom?' cut across a wide variety of business problems today," said Janet Perna, general manager, IBM Information Management Software. "The SRD technology provides solutions to these age-old problems with unparalleled speed and accuracy."

SRD software strengthens IBM's middleware portfolio via a multidimensional approach to analytics that dramatically extends the capabilities of identity-based applications. The combination provides value to business partners who deliver business intelligence and other applications that might require a single customer view, fraud detection, or customer relationship management across many industries, such as government, banking, insurance and healthcare.

"The combination of SRD technology with IBM's middleware platform will bring a new era of accuracy, speed and scale to business analytics," said John Slitz, CEO, SRD.

The biggest question now is; how do you find some entity that we don't know we are looking for? That is why it's important to see who is connected to what, a phone number, a bank account, an address, a frequent flyer number or a license plate. These patterns and relationships will ultimately give us the "insight" we need to detect a potential plot to commit fraud, launder money or attack a target.