“Garbage in-garbage out” is a phrase you’ve heard many times. It’s usually said as if it’s obviously and always true. “If you guys upstream can’t produce clean data, how do you expect my process, my system, to give usable outputs.”
But does it have to be true? I don’t think so. GIGO shouldn’t be the lame excuse that let’s your system continue to fail. You should expect more. Software that’s so dumb that it gives up at the first hurdle is just not trying hard enough. I see no reason why systems shouldn’t try to do a bit of “garbage recycling” and aim to make something good out of imperfect inputs.
That’s the promise of the Text Search match in Isolist, and now also in ReconSilo.
A Text Search match is a type of sub-string match, where the text in field A is required to match part of the text in field B. However, rather than requiring precise alignment of the substring in field B, a Text Search match allows for defects and inconsistencies. It accepts that the data presented for reconciliation might not be consistently arranged, and tries to find field A’s text anywhere within the text of B.
Text Search match type matches a code at any position in the opposite field.
This is often valuable when some of the data you must reconcile has been hand-typed, for example in a descriptive field. ReconSilo can now use that data to identify matching records automatically, which otherwise would have to be identified by you.
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