Integrating data
AA: Data integration can often be a big challenge for organizations. What are your ideas around the infrastructure processes that are needed to support this?
CM: When you’re going to integrate data from different sources, you have to make sure that that data can be unified. A good example is in the medical industry, where people try to integrate EHR data from different hospitals.
There’s been some research that shows that if you have 40 different hospitals, everyone codes things differently. You can’t just look at the data and say, “Well, here are the labels for the data. This is what it is.” You have to go into the actual details and understand, “Is this the same data?” If you’re just looking at tabular data such as customer profiles, that’s fairly straightforward (but even that has real problems!). But when you start getting into things such as complex legal documents, insurance claims, or medical...