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  • The Electoral Register Hokey-Cokey

    When I was a small child, my grandmother used to entertain me and my siblings by getting us to sing and dance the hokey cokey, a playful little song and dance routine if ever there was one.

    This dance was brought to mind yesterday when Fergal of the Tuppenceworth bloggers emailed me to let me know that he appears to have been taken off the Electoral Register in his home county. Again.

    You put your right to self-determination and election of a government by proportional representation as mandated by the constititution of the Irish Republic in.
    You put your right to self-determination and election of a government by proportional representation as mandated by the constititution of the Irish Republic out.
    In. Out. In. Out.
    And you shake it all about.

    It would seem that Fergal had been taken off the Register during the Great Clean up of 2006. He then had his ballot reinstated. The other day, in a fit of electoral existentialism he decided to try and find himself on the Electoral Register website www.checktheregister.ie

    Zen like, he found himself encountering the concept of nothing as a search for his name at his address revealed nothing. Oh Hokey Cokey Cokey indeed.

    So what may have gone wrong here?

    • Is Fergal’s name transposed on the Register (surname first, firstname last)?
    • Is the address registered against Fergal on the Register different to his address?
    • Does the search function on the Electoral Register require an exact character match on names/addresses? Is “Fergal” interpreted as a different name to “Fearghal” (both Fergals in my book)?
    • If Fergal has indeed been deleted from the Register (again), what triggered the Hokey Cokey here? Was an old copy of the Register loaded to the website?
    • Is the version you search on-line up to date with the version you might find in your library or Garda Station? Might Fergal be on the Register, but just not on the Register that is searched? Might it work in the contrary… Might people be listed as ‘on the register’ in an on-line search but be off the Register in the ‘paper’ world (ie the version that counts on polling day)?

    The list of potential root causes is (especially as I am speculating a bit) quite long. However this is further evidence that the processes for the management of the Electoral Register are a bit knackered. This has been accepted by the Government and the Oireachtas Committee on the Electoral Register recently published a series of recommendations which eerily echoed comments and recommendations made on this blog over 2 years ago.

    However, while there is an urgent need to have as accurate an electoral register as possible (1 Referendum in our immediate future and Local Elections in the not to distant future), care must be taken to ensure we solve the problems of tomorrow as well as the problems of today.

    But in the words of Tom Jones – “I think I’m gonna dance now”…

    “Oh, hokey cokey cokey…. Oh hokey cokey cokey…..”

  • The Electoral Register (Here we go again)

    The Irish Times today carries a story on page five which details a number of proposed changes to the management of the Electoral Register arising from the kerfuffle of the past two years about how totally buggered it is. For those of you who don’t know, I’ve written a little bit about this in the past (earning an Obsessive Blogger badge in the process donchaknow). It was just under two years ago that I opened this blog with a post on this very topic…

    A number of points raised in the article interest me, if for no other reason than they sound very familiar – more on that anon. Other interest me because they still run somewhat counter to the approach that is needed to finally resolve the issue.

    I’ll start with the bits that run counter to the approach required. The Oireachtas Committee has been pretty much consistent in its application of the boot to Local Authorities as regards the priority they give to the management of the Electoral Register. According to the Irish Times article, the TDs and Senators found that:

    “Running elections is not a core function of local authorities. Indeed, it is not a function that appears to demand attention every year. It can, therefore, be questioned if it gets the priority it warrants under the array of authorities”

    I must humbly agree and disagree with this statement. By appearing to blame Local Authorities for the problem and for failing to prioritise the management of the Electoral Register, the Committee effectively absolves successive Ministers for the Environment and other elected officials from failing to ensure that this ‘information asset’ was properly maintained. Ultimately, all Local Authorities fall under the remit of the Minister for Environment, Heritage and Local Government. As the ‘supreme being’ in that particular food chain, the Minister (and their department) is in a position to set policy, establish priorities and mandate adequate resourcing of any Local Authority function, from Water Services to Electoral Franchise.

    The key issue is that Franchise section was not seen as important by anyone. A key information asset was not managed, no continual plans were put in place for the acquisition of information or the maintenance of information. Only when there were problems applying the information did anyone give a darn. This, unfortunately, is a problem that is not confined to Local Government and Electoral data however – a large number of companies world wide have felt the pain of failing to manage the quality of their information assets in recent times.

    Failing to acknowledge that the lack of management priority was systemic and endemic within the entire hierarchy of Central and Local Government means that a group of people who probably tried to do their best with the resources assigned to them are probably going to feel very aggrieved. “The Register is buggered. It’s your fault. We’re taking it away from you” is the current message. Rather it should be “The system we were operating is broken. Collectively there was a failure to prioritise the management of this resource. The people tried to make it work, but best efforts were never enough. It needs to be replaced.”

    W. Edward’s Deming advised people seeking to improve quality to ‘drive out fear’. A corollary of that is that one should not engage in blame when a system is broken unless you are willing to blame all actors in the system equally.

    However, I’m equally guilty as I raised this issue (albeit not in as ‘blaming’ a tone) back in… oh 2006.:

    “Does the current structure of Local Authorities managing Electoral Register data without a clear central authority with control/co-ordination functions (such as to build the national ‘master’ file) have any contribution to the overstatement of the Register?“

    Moving on to other points that sound very familiar…

    1. Errors are due to a “wide variety of practices” within Local Authorities. Yup, I recall writing about that as a possible root cause back in 2006. Here and here and here and here and here in fact.
    2. The use of other data sources to supplement the information available to maintain the Register is one suggestion. Hmmm… does this sound like it covers the issue?

      3. Could the Electoral Register process make use of a data source of people who are moving house (such as An Posts’s mail redirection service or newaddress.ie)? How can that be utilised in an enhanced process to manage & maintain the electoral register? These are technically surrogate sources of reality rather than being ‘reality’ itself, but they might be useful.

      That’s from a post I wrote here on the 24th April 2006.

      And then there’s this report, which was sent to Eamon Gilmore on my behalf and which ultimately found its way to Dick Roche’s desk while he was still the Minister in the DOELG. Pages 3 to 5 make interesting reading in light of the current proposals. Please note the negatives that I identified with the use of data from 3rd party organisations that would need to be overcome for the solution to be entirely practicable. These can be worked around with sound governance and planning, but bumbling into a solution without understanding the potential problems that would need to be addressed will lead to a less than successful implementation.

    3. The big proposal is the creation of a ‘central authority’ to manage the Electoral Register. This is not new. It is simply a variation on a theme put forward by Eamon Gilmore in a Private Member’s Bill which was debated back in 2006 and defeated at the Second Stage(The Electoral Registration Commissioner Bill, 2005). This is a proposal that I also critiqued in the report that wound its way to Dick Roche… see pages 3 to 5 again. I also raise issues of management and management culture at page 11.
    4. The use of PPS numbers is being considered but there are implications around Data Protection . Hmm… let’s see… I mentioned those issues in this post and in this post.

      5. And it further assumes that the PPS Identity is always accurate (it may not be, particularly if someone is moving house or has moved house. I know of one case where someone was receiving their Tax Certs at the address they lived in in Dublin but when they went to claim something, all the paperwork was sent to their family’s home address down the country where they hadn’t lived for nearly 15 years.)

      In my report in 2006 (and on this blog) I also discussed the PPS Number and the potential for fraud if not linked to some form of photographic ID given the nature of documents that a PPS number can be printed on in the report linked to above. This exact point was referenced by Senator Camillus Glynn at a meeting of the Committee last week

      “I would not have a difficulty with using the PPS card. It is logical, makes sense and is consistent with what obtains in the North. The PPS card should also include photographic evidence. I could get hold of Deputy Scanlon’s card. Who is to say that I am not the Deputy if his photograph is not on the card? Whatever we do must be as foolproof as possible.”

      This comment was supported by a number of other committee members.

    So, where does that leave us? Just under two years since I started obsessively blogging about this issue, we’ve moved not much further than when I started. There is a lot of familiarity about the sound-bites coming out at present – to put it another way, there is little on the table at the moment (it seems) that was not contained in the report I prepared or on this blog back in 2006.

    What is new? Well, for a start they aren’t going to make Voter Registration compulsory. Back in 2006 I debated this briefly with Damien Blake… as I recall Damien had proposed automatic registration based on PPS number and date of birth. I questioned whether that would be possible without legislative changes or if it was even desirable. However, the clarification that mandatory registration is now off the table is new.

    The proposal for a centralised governance agency and the removal of responsibility for Franchise /Electoral Register information from the Local Authorities sounds new. But it’s not. It’s a variation on a theme that simply addresses the criticism I had of the original Labour Party proposal. By creating a single agency the issues of Accountability/Responsibility and Governance are greatly simplified, as are issues of standardisation of forms and processes and information systems.

    One new thing is the notion that people should be able to update their details year round, not just in a narrow window in November. This is a small but significant change in process and protocol that addresses a likely root cause.

    What is also new – to an extent – is the clear proposal that this National Electoral Office should be managed by a single head (one leader), answerable to the Dail and outside the normal Civil Service structures (enabling them to hire their own staff to meet their needs). This is important as it sets out a clear governance and accountability structure (which I’d emphasised was needed – Labour’s initial proposal was for a Quango to work in tandem with Local Authorities… a recipe for ‘too many cooks’ if ever I’d heard one). That this head should have the same tenure as a judge to “promote independence from government” is also important, not just because of the independence and allegiance issues it gets around, but also because it sends a very clear message.

    The Electoral Register is an important Information Asset and needs to be managed as such. It is not a ‘clerical’ function that can be left to the side when other tasks need to be performed. It is serious work for serious people with serious consequences when it goes wrong.

    Putting its management on a totally independent footing with clear accountability to the Oireachtas and the Electorate rather than in an under-resourced and undervalued section within one of 34 Local Authorities assures an adequate consistency of Governance and a Constancy of Purpose. The risk is that unless this agency is properly funded and resourced it will become a ‘quality department’ function that is all talk and no trousers and will fail to achieve its objectives.

    As much of the proposals seem to be based on (or eerily parallel) analysis and recommendations I was formulating back in 2006, I humbly put myself forward for the position of Head of the National Elections Office 😉

  • Electoral Register issues

    Astute followers of the recent General Election in which there were a number of reports of problems with our national electoral register will doubtless be wondering where my comments on that issue might be.

    Rest assured that I haven’t forgotten about it and am working on collating the media reports of issues and tracking down other substantiated cases of problems with the electoral register. I will be producing an updated analysis of the likely root causes which I will publish here and over at the IQ Network website (www.iqnetwork.org). I may even get around to doing a presentation on it to the IQ Network in the coming months.

    Suffice it to say the issues are both simple and complex and the likely scope of root causes ranges from a failure of governance from Government, the lack of a clear strategy for improving the quality of the register, a reliance on scrap and rework to ensure accuracy (doomed from the beginning) and also the actions or inactions of key people in the voter registration and verification processes (including the public).

    Updates to come soon.

  • First Post Anniversary… Electoral Register Processes Still Broken

    The DobBlog is 1 year old today.

    What have we achieved? Well, about 50,000 words on the state of the Irish Electoral Register, syndicated publication of an article based on those words in two International newsletters for IT/Business Intelligence professionals and a wordpress template I’m finally not unhappy with.

    The electoral register is still buggered (that’s a technical term). The scrap and rework (as predicted) was inconsistent and hasn’t fixed the underlying problems. As soon as the clean up stopped, the register has begun to drift to inaccuracy again.

    The Government continues to be cavalier about the issues involved in our electoral system… a number of constituencies will be under represented in the next Dail because of the failure of the Government to react to the population changes in the Census. That’s assuming the election can go ahead given the Constitutional challenge that has commenced.

    The understanding of the importance of good quality information and well designed processes to gather and use that information has grown however amongst a small (and growing) group of occasional visitors to the blog.

    Hopefully the next 12 months will bring enlightenment to Government on some of the issues I’ve blogged about this year and perhaps they will seek out good practices. Hopefully as well we will see some critical commentary in the media on these types of issue. I lost count of the number of pieces I submitted to Irish media during the year. My hit rate outside of Ireland this year is 2 for 2… domestically it is 0 for lots more.

  • Electoral Register… a reprise

    Bertie Ahern has waded into the fray on the Electoral Register issue.

    Some of his comments are, in my personal experience, bizarre. For example, he says “There are still some people who did not answer the door when people called“. I was working from home the day the people called. During the day. When normally my wife and I would be at work. But I was working from home. So when the door bell rang I walked from the kitchen to the hall door (about 30 feet).

    By the time I got to the door, the callers were walking out of my driveway to the next house. Total time on doorstep was about 15 seconds. I stood at the door, with the door open, for about five minutes as they walked around my estate. Surprisingly very few people were in when they called, during the day, in an housing estate inhabited by commuters and people who work. Even though I was standing in plain view and to get out of my cul-de-sac they had to walk right past me on the way out none of them thought to stop and ask me anything. So even though I was in, we’re probably logged as a no answer. However, we never received a letter from the Local Authority to verify any of our details.

    “If people refuse to check the website”… don’t get me started on the bias in that statement. According to the ITU (International Telecommunications Union), Ireland ranks 32nd on the top 32 countries for Internet penetration. As of Sept 2006, the ITU puts us at 50.7% penetration… just behind such technological hotbeds as Estonia (no offence to people from Estonia). Many of those who don’t have Internet access are in the less well off social demographics, the ones most needing effective representation so their interests are met in Government policy. Is it a case of ‘refusing’ to check the website or is it a case of being unable to check the website? For people to be criticised for not following a process, they have to be actually able to follow that process. For shame Taoiseach, for shame.

    Of course the Bert is correct..  you can’t force people to go on the Register. And the efforts by the Opposition to point to the removal of people ‘in error’ as being grounds for legal action and a ‘very bad thing’ is, to be honest, somewhat lazy opposing. Given the methodology that was being deployed it was inevitable that some people would be taken off the Register and there has to be an element of personal responsibility here which should compel people to get off their couches and, if they don’t have internet access to go to their local library and check the Register to make sure they’re on it and get their name on before the deadline.

    What the Opposition should be focussing on is the absence of any real leadership or activity to address the obviously broken processes that have allowed the Register to get to the state it is in. They should be looking to the cost of non-quality here (how much extra has it cost to do the clean-up, what is the plan to address root causes and avoid that cost in future). For example, could the fact that remain on the Register indefinitely and do not have to re-register periodically be a possible root cause? What about the fact that you can’t change your name on the register without risking being registered twice as the only form available only allows you to change your address.

    The fact that at in at least one Local Authority the Obituary pages of the papers were being used to remove deceased persons because they were unaware that they could get the information from the Central Registrations Office is astonishing. What else is going on under the covers?

    That would show leadership and credibility in an opposition that should be showing its credentials as planners for the future rather than pursuers of trivial non-issues, collateral damage in pursuit of the objective which was to remove people from the Register to reduce the risk of spurious voter registrations being used to pervert the outcome of the next election.

    As it stands, I’m left having to agree with much of Bertie’s defence of Dick Roche. It disturbs me that I can’t find greater affinity with the Opposition on this issue.

    The current cleanup will not solve the problem. Personal responsibility to ensure you are registered is not obviated by Government actions. Just because the tools are on the Internet does not mean that people can use them. Deletion of valid voters is a risk in any Electoral Register clean up – the issue is if there is a mechanism that is sufficiently publicised for people to get re-registered. And an Opposition that wants us to see them as potential Government need to attack something meatier than a the non-issue of collateral damage and should target the fundamental lack of vision that seems to underpin the Government’s approach to this whole issue.

  • Electoral Register Forms

    I previously looked at the issue of the Electoral Register forms – the first point in the information chain that feeds the electoral register. On a whim this morning, I printed a copy out – my intention being to take a closer look at the structure of the form and its layout to see if anything there might contribute to problems in the Electoral register. Attached is a graphic showing what I found….  

    electoral_register1.jpg

    This form cannot be printed completely on a standard printer. The black areas show the sections of the form (instructions and data) that are missing when the form is printed on a standard office laserjet. The clear text area is what is actually printed, which is incomplete data.

    I would have thought this should have been a basic acceptance test  for a downloadable form. As the downloaded form loses important data, it may in itself be contributing to the problem.

    As it stands, my review of the structure of the Electoral Register form will now have to work off the PDF file.

    May 18, 2006

  • Electoral Register on Oireachtas Report

    The coverage of the Dail Committee meeting on Oireachtas Report this evening was a little disappointing. They only covered the Minister’s speechifying on the topic and didn’t show if there had been any debate or challenge on the topic from any of the Opposition politicians who sit on the Committee such as Labour’s Eamon Gilmore.

    My feeling is that anyone who has been following my posts on this site and is familiar at any level with the scrap & rework concept would have found a few open goals in what Dick Roche was putting forward.

    1. Use of ‘relevant databases’ within Local Authorities – this amounts to a process change to address a root cause (well done Minister). However there may be data protection issues given that data can only be used for the purposes for which it is captured – this fact was glossed over by the Minister. In addition, just because one has a second surrogate source for reality it doesn’t mean that it is any more accurate or complete than your ‘problem’ dataset. Furthermore, what tools do Local Authorities have available to them to actually match across these datasets quickly and accurately (short of manual efforts)? The Minister has been somewhat quiet on the ‘how’.
    2. The Minister referred to using ESB databases to update the register on the basis that we all use the ‘leccy. Again, this is not a complete surrogate for reality as it would hold the details of only one, at most two, individuals at an address. That data may not match against the Electoral Register for a variety of reasons (different spelling of names, use of aliases or akas (e.g. John Vivian Smith may be listed on the ESB bill as J.Vivian Smith or just plain old Vivian Smith or just J Smith)) – Again Data Protection issues (and commercial considerations) exist here but were glossed over by the Minister.
    3. Finally, Minister Roche is plowing ahead with the plan to give records of deceased persons to Local Authorities. The data will be sent in Excel format. There are issues with that idea that I will address in a later post (once I have gotten my thoughts on it ironed out) but in the meantime the question that arises is simply this – once the Local Authorities have their Excel spreadsheets of names and addresses of the deceased, how will they go about matching them against the Electoral Register and flagging matches for action? What is the process that will operate to convert raw data into actionable information?

    This issue is a national crisis. The Government seems content to operate on a scrap and rework basis with no real thought leadership or strategy. It is all well and good to identify potential sources of data against which the accuracy of the register can be checked, but in the absence of clear processes to use that information or the capability to process it all that Local Authorities will have is more data and a Minister who’s approach has been to criticise and berate and to effectively manage by sound-bite. Provision of ‘ring fenced’ budget and 3rd party data sets will not enable Local Authorities to perform their duties re the Electoral Register any better if there is no understanding of what needs to be done to address these problems in the long term.

    Where is the action plan to assess root causes and address the core deficiencies in the Electoral Register process? Where is the leadership in terms of thinking and in terms of control of the processes?

    I wonder what the boys and girls over at Digital Rights Ireland would have to say about the ESB providing its billing database or customer relationship management database to EVERY Local Authority (in excel format perhaps)?

    My suggestion of 2 weeks ago still stands…

    1. Scrap the current register
    2. Mail everyone on the current register and request that they re-register
    3. Use that register as the appropriate data set for the Draft Register
    4. In parallel assess Root Causes – involve Local Authority staff (not County Managers but Revenue Collectors, Librarians – anyone with a role in the process) to identify the root causes – even go as far as to talk to (dare I say it) Citizens to find out what is broken in the processes
    5. Develop a plan to address those root causes, addressing governance issues and Information Architecture issues as well as cultural issues.

    Scrap and Rework without corresponding review and improvement of processes will not solve the problems in the Register, it will merely postpone them until a later date.

  • Dail Committee Discussion on Electoral Register issues

    There is a Dail Committee discussion on the Electoral Register issue being held this afternoon at 16:15. The Minister for the Environment will be facing questioning on what is being done to fix our shambles of an electoral register.

    According to the published schedule, this discussion is to be televised. I’m not sure exactly where on the Oirechtas.ie website the Dail committee discussion will be televised, but the link to the general page is here.

    Oireachtas Report is on RTE1 at 23:40 tonight so it might carry coverage there.

     

  • Electoral Register Forms

    I had a look at the Reach Service Portal ( a central portal for citizen information).

    They had a helpful link to a form to register for the Register of Electors. Very helpful. My thoughts are as follows:

    1.  If there is no standard template in existence amongst local authorities ( to the Minister’s surprise), why has the Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County Council form been picked as the standard one to select through a central information portal? Is it in some way superior to the other forms? If so, should this be the standard form?
    2. The form does not allow for deleting people from the register (such as might need to be done if a person moved out of a residence) nor does it seem to allow for flagging a change in name – which could lead to additional people being added to the register just because they got married and their names changed.

    The form does state that it is an offence to provide false information. What processes are in place for checking for false/inaccurate information?

    Perhaps Irish citizens visiting the Blogosphere could check with their local authorities to see if they can register to vote through an ‘on-line’ facility. Thus far all I have found is a link to Dun Laoghaire/Rathdown County Council. I may be missing something on www.wexford.ie (Wexford County Council’s site) but I can’t even find a link there to an application form.

    If you do find a form or on-line service, post a comment here with your assssment of the form – is it easy to understand/use? Is the information capture process meeting your expectations?

    Dunlaoghaire Rathdown Councils’ form for Electoral Register… the apparent standard form.

  • Irish Electoral Register… a reprise

    OK. It looks like somebody in the Dept of the Environment is either thinking things through or reading this blog or a bit of both.

    In the Dáil (Irish Parliament) yesterday the statements from the Minister Dick Roche were interesting:

    1. Local Authorities had recently been given regular access to electronic files linked with the General Register Office containing information on deaths in their areas.
      • OK – so that addresses one of the points I raised in my last post on this topic. However, do to the files that can be accessed contain sufficient information to allow Local Authorities to accurately match against their electoral register data? Access to data is half the battle. If that ‘raw material’ input to a process does not meet the needs of the process then it is worse than useless because it gives the impression of meeting a need without meeting the need.
      • Do the Local Authorities have the resources (people/technology) to manage a process of clashing these data sets? What is the process?
    2. The Minister called on Local Authorities to make a concerted effort to improve the electoral register in their areas. He stated that “updated and consolidated guidance” was being given on how to do this.
      • In an earlier post I called on the Minister to provide refreshed training to Local Authorities and to provide leadership. To an extent this is starting to happen. However, improved training and guidance on the operation of a process that is broken simply means that the broken process will be followed more accurately.
      • Admonishing the ‘workers’ is not an approach to managing Quality – Deming clearly shows this in his “Red Beads” experiment. See here for a good description of this experiment.
    3. The Minister also indicated that arrangements to delete names of the deceased…
      • This one puzzled me a bit because the earlier point (1) would suggest that that was already being done? Again – Access to data does not equal Information until the data is acted upon through some process. tsk tsk Minister – those are exactly the droids we are looking for!
    4. A proposed Information Campaign was mooted by the Minister
      • Again this is something that I’ve been pushing for in most of my posts on this topic – Deming advises managers to ‘invest in training’.
      • However, training people in a defective process is not likely to improve the quality of the final deliverable. What is broken Minister? What needs to be done differently to improve the process – I refer you back to the Red Beads. If the process is set up in a way that does not ‘build quality in’ then no amount of incentivisation or training will improve the quality of the outputs of that process.
    5. The use of Enumerators in the short term seems to be getting pushed off the agenda
      • Obviously somebody has realised that there will be a lot less enumerators after the 21st of May.
      • The preparation of the next Register for 2007/2008 is being mooted as a time for their deployment – this is good. It gives time to fix the rest of the processes that may be broken and get a sound understanding of the root causes so that once the register is cleaned to a baseline level of completeness and accuracy the ‘data drift’ can be controlled to prevent the current need for a total scrap and rework of the register.
      • The fact that an early start will be taken is also commendable… however starting without first looking at the processes that have produced this level of non-quality (10% to 20% of the population – a large error no matter what way you cut it).

    The Minister resisted calls for a Watchdog organisation as requested by the Labour party. Now, at the risk of being hung drawn and quartered by my family…. I agree with the Minister. A new organisation is not needed.

    However I disagree with the Minister’s dismissal of a need to change the governance model. The ‘stovepiped’ model that currently exists (with Local Authorities responsible for their patch) is part of the problem. A General Register of Electors managed by a centralised authority may be required to consolidate our ‘single view of voter’ and manage the issues of population mobility etc. Furthermore, a function would be required to monitor the statistical trends in the data for error trends (completeness, consistency, accuracy, breaches of business rules – like “dead men can’t vote” etc). The role of Local authorities may need to change – rather than being the ‘data owners’ they may become ‘data stewards’ responsible for the capture of information from their areas and ‘on-the-ground’ spot checks and audits for accuracy.

    None of this requires a new organisation. It requries a cross functional governance model that breaks down the traditional stove-pipe view of the world. The General Register Office could be the ‘owner’ of a centralised Electoral Register. The CSO could provide the analysis and measurement function. The Dept of the Environment could perform the co-ordination function with representation at a steering board from Local Authorities and personnel skilled in Information Quality Management principles.

    So I call on the Minister..

    1. If your department has been reading my blog, let me know – quote me in the Dail, something to show you care.
    2. Learn from the Red Beads experiment (if you want a live demo, let me know -I’d do it for free as part of my civic duty as a citizen)
    3. Start putting in place some leadership and a clear strategy to continuously improve the processes around and ergo the quality of our Electoral Register and the governance for this critical information asset.

    To Opposition TDs, please stop taking easy potshots. The low hanging fruit is easy to pick but rots quickly. Now that the Minister is setting out a longer term stall (because the quick fix isn’t feasible) the opportunity is there to start driving an Information Quality Management based approach – to ground the artillery barrages in dail debates in clear strategy and proven methodologies. And if you’ve been reading my blog… a mention in Dail dispatches would be nice!

     

    Come and see Larry English, world thought leader on Information Quality Management at the ICTEXPO on the 5th of May

     

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