Why we chose a left brain and the name pretectum

We’ve been looking at the concept of secure solutions for customer data management since before Y2K and we believe that in the latest version of this platform we may have “cracked the nut” that combines our view of what customer data should look like and what it needs to look like for a wide variety of organizations.

Our founders’ early work in Hospital Management Systems demonstrated that simple duplicate record matching was difficult when names were incomplete or there were significant differences or missing pieces of other data in the customer master. Duplicate record identification was found to be not only tricky with overmatching but problematic with the primitive Soundex algorithms used to match names in particular. Additional coding is needed to cope with the complexities of duplicate record identification.

With the passage of time, it was found that in financial benefits and HMO systems duplicate records could only be avoided if a linkage was created between a master record and recorded events. As such inferring a relationship or ideally forcing the selection of a related record were considered critical. With the technologies for large-scale search and match still slow and expensive, it was felt that custom batch jobs would have to remain the de facto approach to the identification of potential duplicates.

The absence of a true customer master or even a collection of masters remained a hurdle.

Subsequent work with customers in the telecoms, public sector, and retail determined that often many systems were in play with customer records but the unifying systems for consolidating all these many systems of record were either inadequate or very expensive to implement.

The needs of certain customers needed to be less prescriptive and more about proving options for implementation and this became the genesis for the Pretectum CMDM platform a SaaS Master Data offering for Customer Data Management.

Providing a logical and organized home for your data

Our vision in the Pretectum brand is encapsulated in our choice of the name Pretectum and a simple vector graphic rendering of the left hemisphere of a human brain with digital connectivity and nodes to the right, that we hold in the brand logo and which you will find is used everywhere in the product and the supporting collateral.

The left part of our brains is traditionally considered the part that is analytical, logical, idea-based, fact-based, mathematical, and trained. The right hemisphere focus on creativity, intuition, arts, feeling, and imagination.

A left-brained orientation is often considered tidy, linear, logical, organized, goal-oriented, analytical, objective, and rational. We think that MDM is philosophically all very left-brained.

We also recognize that there is an execution and connectedness requirement that is necessary for the master data ‘brain’ of customer information to be most useful in your organization.

Giving you a perfectly focused view of your data

In biological terms, the pretectum itself is described as a forebrain region present in creatures with visual abilities. Characteristically it is often referred to as a single entity, whereas the pretectum is in fact a number of seven distinct nuclear groups (nuclei) with a close relationship to the functions of the retina responsible for functions like handling aspects of our REM and focus. This is not dissimilar to how we think of customer master data which is made up of clusters of information that, when combined, sorted, and focused on, bring more clarity and insight to the customer. _{^{[1] [2]}}

It is also apropos then, that as we consider the many aspects of customer data mastery we consider the things that we think are most important and how these have parallel meaning when we consider how we and our customers see the world.

Building trustworthy and secure customer data

Purely by coincidence, we also hope that the name of the brand conveys a sense of trust and security in the digital home that you might choose for the mastery of customer data. Pretectum may sound not too dissimilar from protection and in modern language the concept of “pretect” implies “A verb to denote steps taken prior to events seen as threatening or dangerous, to ensure safety…”

In contrast to protect, “…a form of present-tense action, ‘Pretect’ denotes steps taken in advance of the need for protection.

Perhaps a form of assurance, ‘pretection’ guards against the possible adversarial forces in one’s future, when actual protection is required.” ^[3]

Combine the logo and the name and we think this aptly sums up what you’re doing and want to be able to do when you’re using our system as a hub for your customer records management.

You’re logically organizing your data in a secure way to derive the greatest focus for your organization with optimal clarity.