The DOBlog

I used the contact form on the Dept of Enterprise site last night to alert them to the Amazon-inania…

 Here is their response… which includes the email and name of the Private Secretary to the Minister, which I’ve cut out for sake of privacy. If anyone wants them, comment and request (I will not post this information publicly at this time). I’ll ignore the fact that they spelled my name wrong even though all they had to do was cut and paste it.

Tuppenceworth directed me to a worrying bit of news - Amazon have gone totally insane.

Having read the posts and comments over at Michele’s blog, I had to get my writing fingers out.

Let’s start with the issues in the order they come to me:

1. The point was made that if you contacted a baker and asked for their cheap bread, they would be entitled to decline your offer of slang-bread for eating-bread on the grounds that they couldn’t reasonably meet your request without additional costs. Amazon don’t make bread. Amazon is an incredible logistics machine with a proven capability to get packages from Dusseldorf to Dublin - as long as you are willing to pay the shipping costs.
2. There is a quasi-Irish Amazon site - it’s called shopireland.ie and it is run in association with Amazon. Prices are in euro and are quoted at Irish VAT rates. It is very nice. I have used it a lot. (Michele Neylon has informed me that this is an Amazon Associates site - thanks for the clarification.) This is what happened today when I tried to buy from an ostensibly IRISH website. Apparently Ireland is ‘International’ on an Irish site… I wonder if Dermot Ahern knows we’re not in the EU anymore? I wonder how the owners of shopireland.ie feel about their business being impacted by Amazon’s unilateral decision?
3. Somewhat ironically (as anyone who has read the comment over on Michele’s site) Amazon’s customer service centre is not in the UK but…. in Ireland (Cork), as is their Systems, Networks and Operating Centre (Dublin). So our transactions are being captured (technically speaking) within the jurisdiction of the Irish Republic. But as we don’t live in the Irish Republic anymore we are “International”….
4. Companies may try to segment their regional markets for a variety of reasons: operational reporting, segmented pricing (ie different prices in different countries). However if they attempt to enforce those prices when a citizen of the EU ’shops around’ and puts a retailer in a role of ‘passive-seller’ then any attempt to prevent that Retailer from selling to that consumer is an illegal act - either under Free Movement of goods or Competition Law (abuse of a dominant position in Market A to protect/grow Market B).
5. Warranty issues may be a valid argument - but most of the appliances I’ve bought in recently have either come with warranty information for EVERY EU country or just for the UK (because we speak English and they used to live here we must be English apparently). Therefore, the warranty issue is not as strong an arguement. Also, Caveat Emptor is a defence available to the manufacturer - the buyer would take on the risk of not being covered by a warranty - no reason not to sell it.

So it looks like we are no longer in the EU because Amazon has decided so. I can see how that might be the case, what with the CIA allegedly using Shannon as a carpark and Airforce 1 and Airforce 2 stopping off for Duty Free every few months. Combine that with a national development plan that has put the car (single occupant preferred) at the centre of transport planning and I’d be forgiven for thinking we were the 52nd State of the US.

It is either that or Amazon has just bungled into a whopping Information Quality problem. (Well, we do sit between Iran and Iraq at the UN, we’re obviously Middle Eastern).

Given the impact this has on Irish Consumers, and given that Amazon’s Customer Service call centre is based in Cork, I would suggest letting Eddie Hobbs know…. he can drive down and ask them why they are letting us get ripped off!

Quality is defined as the ability of a product or piece of information to meet or exceed the expectations of its customers/consumers.

Quality begins in the design stage, at the white board when you are figuring out how your process should work. I won’t waste my energy today rattling on about our Electoral Register issues, rather I’ll take a different example…

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/10/ms_messenger_paradox/

This is an example of poor quality information. The instructions presented to the customer are illogical and set up a logical recursion that would stump many a Dalek.

Reminds me of the joke about the computer programmer who was found dead in the shower. The shampoo bottle instructions read “Wash, Rinse, Repeat”.

The Irish Times ran a nice editorial piece yesterday (2006/05/11) on the Electoral Register that highlighted the administrative failure that surrounds the Electoral Register.

One good line: “IF the potential for abouse exists within the voting system - and it unequivocally does - the Government’s responsibility is to protect democracy and correct the electoral register”

The Old Lady of D’Olier Street correctly identifies that there is a “reluctance at official and political level to step outside traditional mechanisms to address the situation”.

The reported ruling out by Dick Roche of the use of personal identification at polling stations reflects this apparent lack of willing to change processes to improve the quality of the register and improve the controls on the Electoral process. As the Irish Times rightly points out, you have to produce evidence of address to get a parking permit from Local Authorities. I can’t join a library in Dublin because I don’t have a utility bill at an address in Dublin.

The chronic lack of leadership on this issue is appalling. Here’s a link to a piece I’ve written in an International Journal for Information Quality people… it references some reseach that was done in 2004 into attitudes to Information Quality in UK Public Sector organisations…

… in the mean time as the Irish Times haven’t responded to the opinion piece I sent them based on my chocolate cake/scrap & rework post I suppose I’ll have to tout it around the other papers… I’ll stick up the draft for reference here later today.

Those nice punters concerned citizens over at Tuppenceworth have taken up cudgels in defence of democracy and quoted from my post explaining scrap and rework to explain to their readers why they should prepare for a feeling of dé ja et ré ja vú… (french for “I’ve been here before, and I’ll be here again”).

Here’s the link to them and here’s a trackback link to my comment to them re: ICT Expo…

I was disappointed… but given the number of Healthcare, Dept of Social Welfare and HSE people who came along I would be less worried about going to hospital and claiming for the sick days off the social than I would be about whether my vote would actually be counted in the midst of “vote-spamming” (a term I will now coin to describe the use of fictitous votes or the ’stacking’ of the register to influence the outcome of an election)…

sheeeeeeeessssshhhhh!

I’m just winding down from the last few days of excitement around the ICT Expo Information Quality Master Class. Larry English was over to do a Master Class on Information Quality. It went very well, and I think Larry enjoyed his visit to Dublin.

Everyone seemed to get a lot out of what was a very intense day- not least me. It is a pity that none of our politicians came along - but there were representatives from our Hospitals, the HSE, financial services and telecomms.

Larry’s take on our electoral register issues was interesting, especially given the work that he has done with the Carter Foundation for Electoral Reform in the US. The use of Census Enumerators is just scrap and rework. It will establish a cleansed register at a point in time but unless the processes and root causes are addressed the register will degrade again from that point forward.

I refer readers to my previous posts on that topic….

By the way… 16 days left to the expiration of Census Enumerator contracts (and counting).

Folks, amongst the things you shouldn’t do is mess around with your blog theme on a borrowed laptop at 01:00 in the morning when you should be sleeping. It causes you to make a booboo and a have to revert to a different template that doesn’t look as good.

Nut bunnies.

Update at 2006/05/11: I have tinkered around with a few templates and this one is my favourite so far, so i think I’ll be sticking with it….

Simon has thrown down a bit of a challenge…  can I show why Information Scrap and Rework isn’t good enough because it seems like a sensible starting point…

First off… let me provide a reference that should educate and delight (at least some of you) that explains what this Information Quality yoke is all about… THERE we go. The reference is a little old (2002) but for an update come to ICTEXPO on Friday.

Now… why isn’t Scrap and Rework good enough?

Who likes chocolate cake? Isn’t it a pain when your face gets covered in chocolate from mashing handfuls of cake into your gob? But you can wipe your face (usually in your sleeve) and carry on. That’s scrap and rework. A better solution is to wipe your face and take a smaller division of cake (a forkful). That is a change in the process based on an analysis of why you keep getting a chocolatey face, coupled with a scrap and rework task to set a baseline of cleanliness for your face that you will seek to maintain.

Simon is right - scrap and rework looks like a good place to start, and when you say “Data Quality” to most people that’s what they think, under the labels “data scrubbing”, “data cleansing” or similar. However, it doesn’t address the actual source of the poor information quality, much as wiping your face in your sleeve doesn’t stop your face getting covered in chocolate.

Therefore, once you clean your database, you will very quickly find it filling up with duff data again. Which eventually results in another round of scrap and rework to fix things again. Which then leads people to say that Information Quality management doesn’t work and costs lots of money. But scrap and rework isn’t information quality management. It is a process step to improving the quality of your information but it is just one step in many that range from culture change (from apathy to active interest) to process change to training etc.

Tom Redman is one of the co-founders of the IAIDQ. His metaphor is that databases are like lakes. No matter how many times you clean the lake, if you don’t address the sources of ‘pollution’ (root causes, cake-eating processes) then you will never achieve good quality.

To put it in professional terms that Simon (law-talking boyo that he is) might understand, scrap and rework is like apologising and offering some compensation everytime you punch a complete stranger in the face. A far better solution is to examine why it is you punch strangers in the face and stop doing it. Your apologies and offers of money to the injured fix the historical damage but do not prevent future occurences. And I doubt Simon would counsel any of his firm’s clients to continue punching strangers in the face.

Scrap and rework is costly. Scrap and rework on a repetitive institutionalised basis is futile, creating a sense of doing something about your Information quality without actually getting anywhere but burning a pile of cash to stand still. It is an important step in any information quality management programme. However, understanding your data capture processes and the root causes of your poor quality data and then acting to improve those processes to address those root causes are the components that contribute to a sustained improvement in quality.

Scrap and rework solves the problems of today at a short-term economic cost. However, it serves to bury the problems of tomorrow unless it takes place in tandem with process improvement to address root cause and the development of a ‘Quality culture’.

To tie this back to the Electoral Register, to rely on scrap and rework would mean that we would get a clean register this time around at a point in time. However, over time the register would degrade in quality again, in the same way as your face gets dirty again if you don’t change the way you eat your cake.

Now put that chocolate cake down and get a fork!

Saw this on the Labour party website:

Coughlan calls for the establishment of Irish Open University

Interesting. What about:

Oscail (www.oscail.ie) DCU’s distance learning school?

What about UL’s courses in Project management that are offered over distance learning.

And above all else… what about the Open University in Ireland?

Perhaps what is needed is some funding to develop Irish universitites existing distance learning programmes?

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Oh, hang on.. the speech/press release was posted on 1st April 2006. I hope I’ve been sucked in by a prank. I really do.

Simon over at tuppenceworth has been on to me. Apparently my blog isn’t quite meeting his expectations.

Can’t have that.

Simon’s problem is that he isn’t quite sure what scrap and rework is. He says that it sounds bad to him, and I use it in a way that suggests it is a thing we shouldn’t do… but what exactly is it?

Can’t have that. Must meet or exceed expecation… so what I will do is put together a page in the blog that will contain a lexicon of terms that I can link to… I’ll try to make it alphabetical as it would be ironic if I couldn’t manage that simple an Information process.

Any terms that I use (and I suspect there may be many) that require definition please let me know. I sometimes speak a different language (dataqualitarian) and I acknowledge that I need to translate sometimes to communicate clearly.

Thanks Simon.