I’m diverting briefly today from my regular information quality themes to pick up on a debate that has been triggered by Simon over on Tuppenceworth about the latest tsunami of magical thinking that is Your Country Your Call.

For those of you in Ireland who reside under a rock or in a cave or readers from outside of Ireland, Your Country Your Call is a competition/website which has been set up on (apparently) a Charitable basis with backing of  number of organisations who have, until recently, been happy to be completely behind the scenes for what one must assume are laudable reasons grounded in humility, modesty and a sense of service.

The goal of YCYC is to find the magic bullet idea that can trigger a renaissance in the Celtic Tiger. Two prizes are on offer for the people who comes up with two ideas and a fund has been established to help develop these mould breaking concepts into  real industries (not a business… an industry).

Simon has made a number of cogent arguments on Tuppenceworth about the terms and conditions of entry which basically mean that the promoters of YCYC own the winning idea and control the purse strings for the development and direction of the idea. That’s bothersome enough.

My issue with YCYC is that it is actually a wasted opportunity that has the hallmarks of  the level of thinking that got us into the current financial mess that the country is in.  If we hype it it will happen. If we generate a general sense of it being built at some point in the future they will come. The general gist of the response to criticism thus far has not been a million miles from the comments made about people who raised concerns about the Irish economy just before the wheels fell off. Apparently it is unpatriotic to question who is behind this and how they are being funded.

Apparently if we all hold hands and think happy thoughts then, just like Peter Pan, we’ll be able to fly, never grow up, and pick pointless fights with our own shadows.

But I digress. My problem with YCYC is that a large amount of money is being poured into it. It has been confirmed that €2 million is being poured into this, when you take prize funds, the development kitty and the general costs associated with a big media splash.  Even if we are as generous as people are seeming to be and assume that the media splash is being done pro bono, we still have a  figure of around €2 million attached to YCYC (see discussion around this comment on ValueIreland’s website)

What other type of model might YCYC have pursued to more effectively make use of this pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, other than a competition model the terms and conditions of which read to me like the ones associated with a Battle of the Bands or a phone in competition to win a car?

How about beefing up funding to EXISTING supports for entrepreneurship in Ireland such as the County Enterprise Boards, LEADER programmes, or the enterprise incubation programmes associated with the various Universities and Institutes of Technology?

• The upper limit for a feasibility study grant from a CEB is around €5000. That €2million could support 400 studies into new business ideas, each of which would need to have a business model slightly better than “Underpants- Question mark – Profit” to get the funding.
• Funding for graduate entreprenuers through the CORD scheme provides up to €30k in funding to participants on an enterprise incubation scheme through an Institute of Technology or University. The €2 million would fully fund 66 additional CORD places around the country, with enough over for a big bang press launch. Even if the money was only to partially fund these places, it would help support real innovation and entrepreneurship.

I would have to ask why the promoter and financial backers of YCYC decided to by-pass the existing support structures that exist for new business ideas in this country. Is it that the organisers thought the existing structures to be inefficient or broken in some way?

This question is all the more pressing to me given that it seems that a chunk of this money (15%) came from the Irish Government, specifically, it seems, the Dept of Enterprise Trade and Employment. The Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment is the Irish Govt. Department which is responsible for County Enterprise Boards. So, rather than fund them more the Dept seems to have been happy to transfer taxpayer’s money to a private initiative.

At least that is what seems to be suggested by Padraig McKeown’s Twitter reply to Tuppenceworth.ie about which department’s budget the €300k was coming from (warning, you’ll need to scroll down on this to see all the relevant comments). This is also an interesting question given recent comments and posts elsewhere speculating about the future of the County Enterprise Boards.

• €300k from the Department equates to 60 Feasibility study grants or 10 CORD funded Incubation centre places.

I’m sure that someone will row in about now with the argument that the Dept can’t just transfer €300k to the CEBs or to the Incubation Centres willy-nilly. But that is exactly what seems to have happened to facilitate a transfer of €300k to YCYC with no (at least as far as I can see) announcement or fanfare that this was being done.

As for the remaining €1.7million that is in the kitty for YCYC? As each CEB operates as a seperate limited company, there would have been no impediment (that I can see) to these backers simply making the fund available as an Innovation Fund which the CEBs or Incubation Centres could draw on to fund grants and other supports for start-up businesses.

So. I’m left with a sense that Your Country Your Call is:

1. A poorly thought out muddle with a worrying lack of clarity about where issues such as Intellectual Property rights to any idea sit (the Terms & Conditions do seem to be clear that the IP vests to the promoters of #YCYC).
2. An initiative that may be laudable in its intent, but perhaps has not been properly thought through – perhaps the use of existing supports that exist under the auspices of the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment and Enterprise Ireland.
3. An initiative that the Government Dept (Enterprise Trade & Employment) responsible for promoting enterprise and employment thought worthwhile investing a significant sum of money into an initiative which keeps the IP to any idea, at what can only be the expense of existing programmes for Enterprise support that exist in the country or, at the very least, at the expense of beefing up those programmes in a structured and sustainable way.
4. YCYC is a wonderful feat of PR puffery with little real potential to deliver the economic kickstart that is required in Ireland, but doesn’t the website look pretty.
5. The priority of the government and the sponsors of this initiative is to promote a forum for fuzzy thinking and “end of the rainbow” speculation at the expense of the existing supports for business start-ups which have a track record of supporting local SME development around the country.

At best it is a noisome distraction and puffery that might, by some sheer accident of chance, uncover a true gem of an idea (that the innovator of which cannot grasp the value of) which will restart the economic engines. At worst, it is a noisome distraction that has diverted funding from existing enterprise support frameworks that exist in the country, apparently with the blessing of the responsible government minister.

Of course, I could be totally wrong.  Maybe the Department of Enterprise had €300k that was sitting around doing nothing and which the CEBs and University Campus incubators had said no to when it was offered to them. Maybe the €1.7 million war chest was touted around the Campus Incubators and the CEBs but was politely declined as well. Perhaps the President of DCU could shed some light on this as he is on the Steering board of YCYC?

Maybe the terms and conditions of YCYC will not put off serious thinkers with real viable ideas to shake things up in the economy which they’ll be happy to part with for a hundred grand.

Personally, I’ll continue with my strategy of knuckling down to graft on my business plan, keeping an eye on costs, and working to build a set of services and products that, while not changing the world, will change that part of it that I’ve spotted needs changing, with a view to creating value and generating employment for others over time.

It’s my country. It’s my call.

I’ve been inspired by Jim Harris’ excellent post about how companies need to love their data this Valentines Day, where he uses 1980s song lyrics to argue his case.  My personal view is that the 1980s, with a few exceptions, were a lost decade for music. So I trawled through my ipod and found this great song about a CEO’s tortured love for information.

I give you “DATA” by Derek and the Dominoes.

What will you do when you get data

Loaded into your new BI?

You’ve been running reports

that don’t make sense for too long

but you can’t blame your poor BI.

Data, you’ve got me on my knees

Data, I’m begging darlin’ please.

Data, darlin’ won’t you ease my worried mind.

I tried to get some information.

But the data lets me down.

Like a fool, I fell in love with you,

But the duff  data turns my whole world upside down

Data, you’ve got me on my knees

Data, I’m begging darlin’ please.

Data, darlin’ won’t you ease my worried mind.

Let’s make the best of the information.

Before I finally go insane

please don’t say we’ll never find a way

or tell me that all BI’s in vain

Data, you’ve got me on my knees

Data, I’m begging darlin’ please.

Data, darlin’ won’t you ease my worried mind.

Of course, if we look further into the archives we can find references to poor quality information dotted through the master works of the blues greats.

• BB King’s under rated “The referential integrity’s gone”, later rereleased as “The Thrill is gone”
• John Lee Hooker’s “I’d got my data workin’ (but it just don’t work on you)”, a song about a failed data migration later reworked and re-released as “I’ve got my Mojo workin’”.
• Robert Johnson’s lost recording “I’ve got Data on my mind”.
• The Blues Brothers “Everybody needs some data (to love)”.

Even older than that, a 7 year old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote the timeless classic “Twinkle Twinkle little infomraiton record, how I wonder how complete and consistent you are“. Unfortunately his father made him rewrite it as a childish ditty about the stars. Astronomy’s gain was our loss.

The list is endless, proving that the struggle with quality information to drive business value is as timeless as good music.

Today’s Irish Times has an article by Orna Mulcahy where she bemoans the fact that the points for college courses will be higher this autumn due to the increase in applications from mature students who have recently found themselves unemployed/between jobs/time advantaged (pick your own term).

After more than a decade of falling points and expanding career options, all signs were that getting into a reasonably fulfilling college course would be just a matter of filling in the forms. But the great recession has put paid to that. Certain courses are no longer attractive at all, such as those leading towards a career in property or construction. The inevitable swing towards the sciences or any course that might feed into Brian Cowen’s beloved “smart economy” will increase competition for places. This year more people will sit the Leaving Cert than ever before. And now there’s talk of a wave of the newly unemployed going back to college.

Oh. To put that another way:

Over reliance on the benign nature of an economic model in which effectively turning up and having a pulse assured you of a foot on the entry level (at least) rungs of an asset acquisition ladder has resulted in a shock adjustment when the dynamics of that economic model change due to external factors and internal market forces.

To me, this sounds a lot like what happened in the property bubble and crash in Ireland, when lots of people chased moderate amounts of property with apparently bottomless pots of mortgage money available from banks, resulting in prices rocketing. A lot of people over stretched themselves financially to buy a property and then found themselves in a state of shock when the arse dropped out of prices and they were left paying a gallon sized mortgage on a half-pint asset value. Which is interesting, given that she is the Property Editor of the Irish Times. read more…

There has been a bit of a scandal in Ireland with the discovery that Temple St Children’s Hospital has been retaining blood samples from children indefinitely without the consent of parents.

The story broke in the Sunday Times just after Christmas and has been picked up as a discussion point on sites such as Boards.ie.  TJ McIntyre has also written about some of the legal issues raised by this.

Ultimately, at the heart of the issue is a fundamental issue of Data Protection Compliance and a failure to treat Personal Data (and Sensitive Personal Data at that) as an asset (something of value) that the Hospital held and holds on trust for the data subject. It is not the Hospital’s data. It is not the HSE’s data. It is my child’s data, and (as I’m of a certain age) probably my data and my wife’s data and my brothers’ data and my sisters-in-laws’ data…..

It’s of particular interest to me as I’m in the process of finishing off a tutorial course on Data Protection and Information Quality for a series of conferences at the end of February (if you are interested in coming, use the discount code “EARLYBIRD” up to the end of January to get a whopper of a discount). So many of the issues that this raises are to the front of my mind.

Rather than simply write another post about Data Protection issues, I’m going to approach this from the perspective of Information as an Asset which has a readily definable Life Cycle at various points in which key decisions should be taken by responsible and accountable people to ensure that the asset continues to have value.

Another aspect of how I’m going to discuss this is that, after over a decade working in Information Quality and Governance, I am a firm believer in the mantra: “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should“. I’m going to show how an Asset Life Cycle perspective can help you develop some robust structures to ensure your data is of high quality and you are less likely to fall foul of Data Protection issues.

And for anyone who thinks that Data Protection and Data Quality are unrelated issues, I direct you to the specific wording in the heading of Chapter 2, Section 1 of the Directive 95/46/EC. read more…

Apologies for being away from the blog for the entire month of December.

A new addition to the family and some related complications meant I had some alternate priorities during December. However, I’m making it a New Year’s Resolution to write at least 2 posts of value per month in 2010. Hopefully I will be able to keep up that writing cadence. I may do shorter sound-bite posts as well during each month, but I thought 2 a month was a good target. I’d have gone for 3 a month but I am hoping to be busy enough that I won’t have time for that level of writing.

I’m starting today with a post based on some stuff in the media and a tutorial that I’m developing… there seems to have been a synchronicity of events which is serendipitous.

Two weeks ago I had the privilege of taking part in the IAIDQ’s Ask the Expert Webinar for World Quality Day (or as it will now be know, World Information Quality Day).

The general format of the event was that a few of the IAIDQ Directors shared stories from their personal experiences or professional insights and extrapolated out what the landscape might be like in 2014 (the 10th anniversary of the IAIDQ).

A key factor in all of the stories that were shared was the need to focus on the needs of your information customer, and the fact that the information customer may not be the person who you think they are. More often than not, failing to consider the needs of your information customers can result in outcomes that are significantly below expectations.

One of my favourite legal maxims is Lord Atkin’s definition of who your ‘neighbour’ is who you owe legal duties of care to. He describes your ‘neighbour’ as being anyone who you should reasonably have in your mind when undertaking any action, or deciding not to take any action. While this defines a ‘neighbour’ from the point of view of litigation, I think it is also a very good definition of your “customer” in any process.

Recently I had the misfortune to witness first hand what happens when one part of an organisation institutes a change in a process without ensuring that the people who they should have reasonably had in their mind when instituting the change were aware that the change was coming.

My wife had a surgical procedure and a drain was inserted for a few days. After about 2 days, the drain was full and needed to be changed. The nurses on the ward couldn’t figure out how to change my wife’s drain because the drain that had been inserted was a new type which the surgical teams had elected to go with but which the ward nurses had never seen before.

For a further full day my wife suffered the indignity of various medical staff attempting to figure out how to change the drain.

1. There was no replacement drain of that type available on the ward. The connections were incompatible with the standard drain that was readily available to staff on the ward and which they were familiar with.
2. When a replacement drain was sourced and fitted, no-one could figure out how to actually activate the magic vacuum function of it that made it work. The instructions on the device itself were incomplete.

When the mystery of the drain fitting was eventually solved, the puzzle of how to actually read the amount of fluid being drained presented itself, which was only of importance as the surgeon had left instructions that the drain was to be removed once the output had dropped below a certain amount. The device itself presented misleading information, appearing to be filled to one level but when emptied out in fact containing a lesser amount (an information presentation quality problem one might say).

The impacts of all this were:

• A distressed and disturbed patient increasingly worried about the quality of care she was receiving.
• Wasted time and resources pulling medical staff from other duties to try and solve the mystery of the drain
• A very peeved and increasingly irate quality management blogger growing more annoyed at the whole situation.
• Medical staff feeling and looking incompetent in front of a patient (and the patient’s family)

Eventually the issues were sorted out and the drain was removed, but the outcome was a decidedly sub-optimal one for all involved. And it could have been easily avoided had there been proper communication about the change to the ward nurses and the doctors in the department from the surgical teams when they changed their standard. Had the surgical teams asked the question of who should they have in their minds to communicate with when taking an action, surely the post-op nurses should have featured in there somewhere?

I would be tempted to say “silly Health Service” if I hadn’t seen exactly this type of scenario play out in day to day operations and flagship IT projects during the course of my career. Whether it is changing the format of a spreadsheet report so it can’t be loaded into a database or filtered, changing a reporting standard, changing meta-data or reference data, or changing process steps, each of these can result in poor quality information outcomes and irate information customers.

So, while information quality is defined from the perspective of your information customers, you should take the time to step back and ask yourself who those information customers actually are before making changes that impact on the downstream ability of those customers to meet the needs of their customers.

The Irish Times today reports that Bank of Ireland are again investigating incidents of double charging of customers who use LASER cards.

I wrote about this last month (see the archives here), picking up on a post from Tuppenceworth.ie earlier in the summer. I won’t be writing anything more about the issue (at least not for now).

Looking back through my archives I found the picture below in a post that I’d written back in May when Simon on Tuppenceworth first raised his issue with BOI’s Laser Cards.

Mrs DoBlog and I are anxiously awaiting the arrival of a mini-DoBlog any day now. So we have spent some time flicking through baby name books seeking inspiration for a name other than DoBlog 2.0.

In doing so I have been yet again reminded of the challenges faced by information quality professionals when trying to unpick a concatenated string of text in a field that is labelled “Name”. The challenges are manifold:

• Name formats differ from  to culture to culture – and it is not a Western/Asian divide as some people might assume at first.
• Master Data for name spellings is notoriously difficult to obtain. My wife and I compared spellings of some common names in two books of baby names and the variations were staggering, with a number of spellings we are very familiar with (including my own name) not listed in either.
• Often Family Names (surnames) can be used as Given Names (first names) such as Darcy (D’Arcy) or Jackson (Jackson) or Casey.
• Often people pick names for their children based on where they were born or where they were conceived (Brooklyn Beckham, the son of footballer David Beckham is a good example).
• Non-name words can appear in names, such as “Meat Loaf” or “Bear Grylls“
• Douglas Adams famously named a character in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy after one of the “dominant life forms” – a car called a “Ford Prefect“
• Names don’t always fit into an assumed varchar(30) or even varchar(100) field.
• It is possible to have a one character Given name and a one character Family name.
• Two character Family names are more common than we think.
• Unicode characters, hyphens, spaces, apostrophes are all VALID in names – particularly if they are diacritical marks which change the meaning of words in particular languages.
• And then you have people who change their names to silly things to be “different” or “special”,  but who create interesting statistical challenges for data profilers and parsing tools.

Among the examples I found flicking through one of our baby name books last evening where “Alpha” and “Beta”. Personally I think it sends the wrong signals to name your children after letters of the Greek alphabet, but I’m sure it is helpful if you have had twins to keep them in order.

I also found “Bairn” given as a Scots Gaelic name for a baby girl. I had to laugh at this as “Bairn” is actually a Scots dialect word for Child. Even Wikipedia recognises this and has a redirect from “Bairn” to “child“.  But it does remind me of the terribly sexist “joke” where the father asks the doctor after the birth whether it is a boy or a child his wife has just delivered. read more…

Back in April I wrote an article for the IAIDQ’s Quarterly Member Newsletter picking up on my niche theme, Common Law liability for poor quality information – in other words, the likelihood that poor quality information and poor quality information management practices will result in your organisation (or you personally) being sued.

I’ve written and presented on this theme many times over the past few years and it always struck me how people started off being in the “that’s too theoretical” camp but by the time I (and occasionally my speaking/writing partner on this stuff, Mr Fergal Crehan) had finished people were all but phoning their company lawyers to have a chat.

To an extent, I have to admit that in the early days much of this was theoretical, taking precedents from other areas of law and trying to figure out how they fit together in an Information Quality context. However, in January 2009 a case was heard in the Court of Appeal in England and Wales which has significant implications for the Information Quality profession and which has had almost no coverage (other than coverage via the IAIDQ and myself). My legal colleagues describe it as “ground breaking” for the profession because of the simple legal principle it creates regarding complex and silo’d computing environments and the impact of disparate and plain crummy data. I see it as a clear rallying cry that makes it crystal clear that poor information quality will get you sued.

Recent reports (here and here) and anecdotal evidence suggest that in the current economic climate, the risk to companies of litigation is increasing. Simply put, the issues that might have been brushed aside or resolved amicably in the past are now life and death issues, at least in the commercial sense. As a result there is now a trend to “lawyer up” at the first sign of trouble. This trend is likely to accelerate in the context of issues involving information, and I suspect, particularly in financial services.

A recent article in the Commercial Litigation Journal (Frisby & Morrison, 2008) supports this supposition. In that article, the authors conclude:

“History has shown that during previous downturns in market conditions, litigation has been a source of increased activity in law firms as businesses fight to hold onto what they have or utilise it as a cashflow tool to avoid paying money out.”

The Case that (should have) shook the Information Quality world

The case of Ferguson v British Gas was started by Ms. Ferguson, a former customer of British Gas who had transferred to a new supplier but to whom British Gas continued to send invoices and letters with threats to cut off her supply, start legal proceedings, and report her to credit rating agencies.

Ms Ferguson complained and received assurances that this would stop but the correspondence continued. Ms Ferguson then sued British Gas for harassment.

Among the defences put forward by British Gas were the arguments that:

(a) correspondence generated by automated systems did not amount to harassment, and (b) for the conduct to amount to harassment, Ms Ferguson would have to show that the company had “actual knowledge” that its behaviour was harassment.

The Court of Appeal dismissed both these arguments. Lord Justice Breen, one of the judges on the panel for this appeal, ruled that:

“It is clear from this case that a corporation, large or small, can be responsible for harassment and can’t rely on the argument that there is no ‘controlling mind’ in the company and that the left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing,” he said.

Lord Justice Jacob, in delivering the ruling of the Court, dismissed the automated systems argument by saying:

“[British Gas] also made the point that the correspondence was computer generated and so, for some reason which I do not really follow, Ms. Ferguson should not have taken it as seriously as if it had come from an individual. But real people are responsible for programming and entering material into the computer. It is British Gas’s system which, at the very least, allowed the impugned conduct to happen.”

So what does this mean?

In this ruling, the Court of Appeal for England and Wales has effectively indicated a judicial dismissal of a ‘silo’ view of the organization when a company is being sued. The courts attribute to the company the full knowledge it ought to have had if the left hand knew what the right hand was doing. Any future defence argument grounded on the silo nature of organizations will likely fail. If the company will not break down barriers to ensure that its conduct meets the reasonable expectations of its customers, the courts will do it for them.

Secondly, the Court clearly had little time or patience for the argument that correspondence generated by a computer was any less weighty or worrisome than a letter written by a human being. Lord Justice Jacob’s statement places the emphasis on the people who program the computer and the people who enter the information. The faulty ‘system’ he refers to includes more than just the computer system; arguably, it also encompasses the human factors in the systemic management of the core processes of British Gas.

Thirdly, the Court noted that perfectly good and inexpensive avenues to remedy in this type of case exist through the UK’s Trading Standards regulations. Thus from a risk management perspective, the probability of a company being prosecuted for this type of error will increase.

British Gas settled with Ms Ferguson for an undisclosed amount and was ordered to pay her costs.

What does it mean from an Information Quality perspective?

From an Information Quality perspective, this case clearly shows the legal risks that arise from (a) disconnected and siloed systems, and (b) inconsistencies between the facts about real world entities that are contained in these systems.

It would appear that the debt recovery systems in British Gas were not updated with correct customer account balances (amongst other potential issues).

Ms. Ferguson was told repeatedly by one part of British Gas that the situation was resolved, while another part of British Gas rolled forward with threats of litigation. The root cause here would appear to be an incomplete or inaccurate record or a failure of British Gas’ systems. The Court’s judgment implies that that poor quality data isn’t a defence against litigation.

The ruling’s emphasis on the importance of people in the management of information, in terms of programming computers (which can be interpreted to include the IT tasks involved in designing and developing systems) and inputting data (which can be interpreted as defining the data that the business uses, and managing the processes that create, maintain, and apply that data) is likewise significant.

Clearly, an effective information quality strategy and culture, implemented through people and systems, could have avoided the customer service disaster and litigation that this case represents.  The court held the company accountable for not breaking down barriers between departments and systems so that the left-hand of the organization knows what the right-hand is doing.

Furthermore, it is now more important than ever that companies ensure the accuracy of information about customers, their accounts, and their relationship with the company, as well as ensuring the consistency of that information between systems. The severity of impact of the risk is relatively high (reputational loss, cost of investigations, cost of refunds) and the likelihood of occurrence is also higher in today’s economic climate.

Given the importance of information in modern businesses, and the likelihood of increased litigation during a recession, it is inevitable: poor quality information will get you sued.

This post is written by Colin Boylan, an independent market research professional based in Wicklow, Ireland with extensive experience in Market Research in pharma and other industries in the UK and Ireland. In this post, Colin explains how the quality of the population sample used in a market research study can have significant effects on the quality of the findings. His post was inspired by recent posts here and here about “Golden Databases“. I’m glad to give Colin a chance to try his blogging chops out and I hope visitors here enjoy reading his insights in to information quality and market research.

Finding Red Herrings or Missing a Trick?

For most businesses there are major advantages to investing money in doing direct research with your customer base In theory it’s a ready built list of people who are familiar with your business – so they can speak with authority on their experience as your customer.

The value of customer research to business should be by now fairly obvious, but there’s an old saying in research (and elsewhere) – “garbage in, garbage out”. The insights built off the data generated from your customer list is only as relevant as the list of people you ask to participate in the research.

However if, for example, they are lapsed customers then researching them is going to give you a picture of what your past customers wanted from you (unless these people are the focus of your research of course). Is this the same as what your present customers want? And if you are looking for why past customers stopped dealing with you and use a list full of current customers you end up with either few people able to answer the questions you set or …worse….data from people who shouldn’t have answered the question – which leads to another scenario.

Picture an important piece of research done with a list of past and present customers mixed in together with no way to tell who is who. Do current and ex-customers differ in their wants and needs from your business? I don’t know – and neither do you. So how useful are any insights generated from this research? Not being able to separate these two groups gives rise to two potential scenarios. Either the excess numbers in there are throwing up ‘clear’ results that are not applicable to your current customers or the combination of both bodies is adding noise which stops you uncovering real insights about the customers you’re interested in – you’re either finding red herrings or you’re missing a trick!

I’ve used just one scenario here to make a point that can be applied to lots of customer data stored by companies – be it incorrect regional information, incorrect gender, you can add whatever block of data is relevant to your own company here and the story is the same. If the data is not accurate then any use it is put to suffers.