Dave Spingarn

Tell us about your educational and professional background and how you came to D&B.

I went through a few majors in school that I was not thrilled about. Eventually I found Computer Applications, which is an applied business approach to developing applications with less emphasis on computer science, and this became my focus in school. I ended up graduating from Clarion University in Western Pennsylvania and had such a great time there that I decided to go back and get an MBA from the same school.

I started out professionally as a programmer at a small insurance company in Sussex County that maybe 5 people in the world know about today. Shortly thereafter, I started at D&B in 1986. So I’ve been here for 39 years total. I’ve had more roles here than I can count. My first one was working on applications for what was at the time called Receivable Recovery Systems which was a commercial credit collections business that was eventually divested.

Over the years I moved away from development work and into architecting solutions, which I did for about 19 years. At that point an opportunity arose to move from technology into strategy for hierarchies and linkage — relationships between businesses. 

You’re an inventor on a patent¹ covering the technology behind Linkage Discovery Engine — how did you contribute to that?

This originated with the goal of the DUNS Right strategy — focused on how we could build more in key markets around the world. How can we source more data, mature it, get it into majority-ownership-based hierarchies, global family trees, and alternative linkage relationships? There was a recognition that there’s data out there that wasn’t being used that we could leverage to deduce or discover relationships between businesses. We proposed this idea and the Chief Data Scientist at the time said, not only should we develop this, but we should patent it across a number of global markets. 

Do you have any projects you're working on now that are particularly novel and unique?

My current undertaking is in Identity Resolution, which is all about reconciling the customer’s information about businesses to D&B’s data on those same businesses. In a traditional approach, there are judgment calls involved and the need to prioritize one set of indicia (like a registration number or address) over others. But sometimes the data can be contradictory. D&B has experience using multiple indicia to match customer data to a DUNS Number and rank the output — this is our Optimizer product. What we’re working on now — we have the capability to do multiple match passes in parallel with various combinations of indicia from the customer’s inquiry. It’s a type of Match Intelligence — the customer has the opportunity to specify what matters most to them, their data and use case, and tailor the match functionality to those preferences in a dynamic way. We’re patent-pending on this technology now.