The DOBlog

….ye wha’?

There has been a lot written in relation to the electoral register and other matters about using information from other sources to improve the quality of information that you have or to create a new set of information.

This makes sense, other people may already have done much of the work for you and, effectively, all you need to do is to copy their work and edit it to meet your needs. In most cases it may be faster and cheaper to use such ’surrogates’ for reality to meet your information needs than to go to the effort of going to the real-world things (people, stock-rooms where ever) and actually starting from scratch to build exactly the information you need in the format you require to exactly your standards and formats.

There is, however, a price to pay for having such surrogate sources available to you. You need to accept that

1. The format and structure of the information may need to be changed to fit your systems or processes
2. The information you are using may itself be innaccurate, incomplete or inconsistent.
3. If you are combining it with other information, it will require investment in tools and skills to properly match and consolidate your information into a valid version of the truth.

These risks apply to organisations buying marketing lists to integrate with their CRM systems but also could be applied to students relying on the Internet to present them with the content for their academic projects or journalists trawling for content for newspaper articles or reviews.

Recurrence of common errors, phrases or inaccuracies in term papers is one way that academia has of identifying academic fraud. Similar techniques might be applied in other arenas to identify and track instances of copyright infringement.

In businesses dealing with thousands of records, the cost/risk analysis is relatively straightforward. The recommendation I would make is that clear processes to manage suppliers and to measure the quality of the information they provide you based on a defined standard for completeness, consistency, duplication, conformity etc. is essential. Random sampling of surrogate data sources for accuracy (not every 100th record but a truly random sample) is also strongly recommended.

These are EXACTLY the same techniques that manufacturing industries use to ensure the quality of the raw material inputs to their processes. If it works for industries where low quality can kill (such as pharmaceuticals), why shouldn’t work for you?

For students, journalists and those of us hacking away in the blogosphere the recommendation is simple. Only rely on surrogate sources if you absolutely have to. If you use someone elses work as your source, credit them. If you don’t want to credit them then make sure you verify the accuracy of their work either by actually verifying against reality or by checking with at least one other source.

That way you avoid having the errors of your source become your errors also and you don’t run the risk of someone crying foul and either suing you for stealing their copyright (and copyright does apply to content posted on the internet and in blogs) or taking whatever other sanctions might apply (such as kicking you off your college course).

In many cases the costs and effort involved in double checking (particularly for a once of piece of writing) are neglibily different to the costs of actually starting from scratch and building your information up yourself. And, depending on the context, it may even be more enjoyable.

The New York Times not so long ago had to relearn the lessons of checking stories with at least one other source for accuracy.

Horatio Caine in CSI:Miami always tells his team to “trust, but verify”.

When using surrogate sources for real-world information in any arena you must assess the risk of doing so and put in place the necessary controls so that you can trust that you have verified.

(c) Daragh O Brien 2006 (just in case)

The Irish Independent, the Irish Times and Silicon Republic have all carried coverage over the last days about TalkTalk, the CarphoneWarehouse fixed line subsidiary’s operation in Ireland (recently acquired from Tele2).

According to Silicon Republic:

“ Talk Talk has been ordered by the Commission for Communications Regulation (ComReg) and the Data Protection Commissioner to make a public apology over complaints by consumers who received cold calls despite recording their preference not to receive unsolicited marketing calls.”

In addition, they have been asked by BOTH regulators (Comreg and the Data Protection Commissioner) to immediately cease all direct marketing until an audit has been carried out.

The root of the problem is that TalkTalk talked to people who had opted out of direct telemarketing on the National Directory Database. As such TalkTalk should not have been talktalking to these people. And some of them complained, to both the Data Protection Commissioner and the Communications Regulator.

TalkTalk have pointed the finger of blame at “data integrity issues in their internal processes” and gaps in the data that they acquired from Tele2 when they purchased it.

In the increasingly comptetive telecommunications market, not being able to direct market to prospective customers effectively puts you out of the game, with an increased reliance on indirect marketing such as posters or TV ads, none of which match the conversion rate of outbound telemarketing.

The Information Quality lessons here are simple:

1. Ensure that your critical core processes (such as marketing database maintenance) are defined, measured and controlled in an environment that supports Quality information.
2. Make sure that your Information Architecture is capable of meeting the needs of your knowledge workers. If a key fact needs to be known about a customer or potential customer (such as their telemarketing preferences) this should be clearly defined and maintained and accessible.
3. When you are buying a new business or merging with another organisation, an important element of due diligence should be to look at the quality of their information assets. If you were buying a grocery store you would look at the quality of their perishable goods (are you buying a shop full of rotten tomatoes?). Buying the information assets of a business should be no different.
4. “The obligation to the customer never ceases”. At some point somebody must have berated a TalkTalk Customer Service/Sales rep for ringing them during Corrie when they had opted out of direct marketing. Why was this not captured? Toyota’s Quality management method allows any employee to ’stop the line’ if a quality problem is identified. In the context of a Call Centre, staff should have the ability to at least log where the information they have been provided doesn’t match with reality and to act on that. If these call outcomes weren’t being logged there is an absence of a valid component in the process. If the call outcomes were being logged but were not being acted on by Management there is an absence of control in the process.
5. “Cease management by Quota”. My guess is that all the staff in the call centres were being measured on how many calls they made and how many contacts they converted. Where these measures were not met I would suspect that there was a culture that made failure to hit targets unacceptable. Unfortunately taking time out to figure out why a customer’s view of their suppressions is different to what is on the screen impacts call duration and the number of calls you can make in a night. Also, removing records from calling lists as scrap and rework slows down the campaign management lifecycle (if the processes aren’t in place to do this as par for the course).

So now TalkTalk’s call centres are lying idle. TalkTalk has joined Irish Psychics Live as being among the first businesses to have a substantial penalty in terms of fines or interruption of business imposed on them by the Regulatory authorities for Data Protection issues. There’s a lot of call quotas not being met at the moment.

I will be interested to hear what the audit of TalkTalk brings to light.