Entity Resolution My Mom Could Understand: A Google Analogy
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Can you explain entity resolution in terms of grapes? Initiate's Jeff Huth tries an analogy
Recently I attended a social event and found myself trying to describe how Initiate's product works.
The attendees were non-technical, non-IT types. Obviously with this group I couldn't say Master Data Management or Entity Resolution so I first tried the business value elevator pitch. That worked at first, but very quickly, they would ask something like, "and how do you do that?"
Most answers we in the industry use to answer that question generally assume the person has some knowledge of information and abstract data concepts. Not this group.
Since most people learn new concepts by relating them to something they already know, I eventually came up with an analogy that worked pretty well.
By now most people perform internet content searches using an engine like Google. In fact "Google" has gone from a company name to a verb: "Google it". So the analogy is this:
"Say you want to learn about Cabernet grapes using Google. When you search on 'Cabernet' you get millions of links spanning multiple websites. As you start clicking and reading you find you are reading the same text copied over and over again or worst you waste time reading about something like red wine, which isn't what you wanted.
You get frustrated and you quit after learning just a little...but what if the thing you really wanted to know was a combination of what was on three websites, two of which you never bothered to get to?
Instead of one big list, wouldn't it be better if those websites were studied and then grouped in a way you didn't have to painstakingly click multiple places to learn a little bit more each time?
You wouldn't have to read the exact same text over and over because something else picked the bits and pieces of unique text about Cabernet grapes from the websites and put it in one place for you to read.
If you wanted to, you could see the actual websites containing the text about Cabernet grapes to assess their validity. Even better, you could see the relationship of your subject (Cabernet grapes) to something similar (Cabernet grape vines).
The system already pulled together everything about Cabernet grape vines together into one place like it did for Cabernet grapes, so it is easy to read.
Maybe you really wanted to learn how to grow the vine itself. If you could study your subject this way, you would save a lot of time and you wouldn't miss anything important about Cabernet grapes that you would likely miss the other way.
We do that not for websites, but for files and records inside a business or across multiple businesses. Customers save loads of time, offer better service because they know everything they need to, or find what they are really looking for like a terrorist or criminal by having our software make sense out of the massive piles of data around them."
We tend to get so wrapped up in talking with ourselves, in the industry, that we forget most people do not benefit from being immersed in it every day. When we come up with new ideas, let's not think about how we would to explain this to a 10 year MDM/ER veteran, but rather how would we explain this to our mothers.
What do you use to explain Entity Resolution and MDM to everyone else? What’s your analogy or elevator pitch?
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Jeff,
Jarrett Goldfedder has boiled entity resolution down even further. Can your 7-year-old understand entity resolution using this analogy?
http://blog.initiate.com/index.php/2010/05/19/entity-resolution-taken-one-step-further-spot-the-difference/
Great analogy!
I've also used Google as an example of why partial-string searches are pretty ineffective, and why misspellings can kill in other products' search capabilities.
For explaining MDM, I use the example from my own family. I'm named after my father, and our first son is named after me. He and his wife named their firstborn after him. So, when our son lived at home and started getting bank accounts etc. There was confusion as to "which Marty are they talking about?"
Another example everyone groks is our credit reports and the threat of identity theft, since so many have been burned or have known someone who was damaged by ID Theft.
Just tell 'em "we fix that!"
Good work!