The DOBlog

Author: Daragh

  • Managing MANs

    I live just outside Wexford town where I have a relatively expensive, relatively slow and occasionally downright awful fixed wireless/wifi broadband service. It struggles to top 1mb download and yesterday I clocked it at 16kbps upload. I’d have been faster training a pigeon to sing the email to the intended recipient and act out the powerpoint presentation through the medium of interprative dance. It (the broadband, not the pigeon) usually finds mist, fog, rain and leaves on trees to be a total embuggerance.

    Wexford is a hub town on the National Development Plan. Wexford has a grown up fiber-optic MAN that is, at present, woefully underutilised. What could be done to improve things to bring top notch fibre speeds to the door (or the last mile) and open up the use of the MAN to people who are just outside its loop?

    The map of the Wexford MAN can be found on the e-net.ie website. On the eastern side of the Slaney it terminates in an industrial estate (with lots of relatively tall buildings) in Knottown, Ardcavan (follow the blue line out). There are not that many houses out this part of the road as most of the land is agricultural or industrial uses.

    About a 3kms (approx 1.8 miles) north of Ardcavan is Castlebridge, which is a very rapidly growing village unserved by fixed line broadband and patchily served by FWA providers.

    Might the use of technology like this support the extension of that leg of the MAN out to Castlebridge and surrounding areas with a massive increase in available bandwidth for customers in those areas, with reduced attenuation due to distance etc. as instead of having to pick up anntenae in Rosslare or in Wexford town? The industrial estate where the MAN terminates is at the high point of a shallow hill (not that shallow on the bicycle though) and a reasonably tall mast on one of those buildings (such as the one that the Dept of the Environment are using and which Wexford VEC also use) would provide possible base for such a piece of infrastructure. ComReg recently approved the roll out of this type of technology.

    Would this not help convert the Wexford MAN from a virtual white elephant investment (which the Mayor of Wexford has previously complained about the cost of connection to) into something that actually could help make Wexford a ‘knowledge economy hub? Personally, if I could get even 5MB at a reasonable price I would be happy to reduce my commuting and work from home (hey, Minister Ryan… see how broadband can help reduce our carbon emissions? Have you joined those dots yet? Particularly as your colleague Micheal Martin is telling the world how much in demand our skills at hoiking bb into remote areas is.). If the marketing blurb is to be believed, this service would provide a 99.99% availability connecting Castlebridge to the MAN for backhaul. 99.99% availability for >1mb broadband on this platform versus 0% availability for >1mb broadband currently.

    Or have I (as usual) missed something obvious with either the technology or the politics.?

    Perhaps the solution to our broadband joke is the punchline to another joke…

    English archaeologists have dug down in Surrey and found long strands of copper bound together in pairs. This has lead them to deduce that the primitive Britons had an advanced copper based DSL network with speeds of up to 12mb. French archaeologists, not to be out done, have dug down and found long strands of glass laid in leather bindings. This has led them to deduce that the ancient Gauls had fiber to the hut and speeds in excess of 20mb.

    A team of archaeologists from UCD have also done excavations in the South East of Ireland and found absolutely nothing. The only conclusion they can draw from this is that the ancient Celts had a highly advanced totally wireless broadband network with speeds of up to 1GB to the hut.

  • The script is in development…

    It seems that there is a deal imminent in the US Writers Strike.

    Lawyers are due to present the final draft to the writers and studios tomorrow. But already Joe Esterhaz has been lined up to ‘sex it up’ for the masses and Jerry Bruckheimer will produce the mammoth deal, with Paul Verhoven lined up to direct.

    “Esterhaz has a strong track record of taking limp material and making it something people would want to be a part of over and over again.”, says Bruckheimer, “so he was the natural choice to polish the lawyer’s draft. And Verhoven was the best choice to direct because of his gritty vision, strong production values and, with a Paul Verhoven movie, you know someone’s going to get screwed royally at some stage in the action”.

    Commenting on the choice of Bruckheimer to produce, William Shatner was quoted as saying

    ” Well. JerryBruckheimer. Is. thelogicalchoice. to. produce. something. on. the. scale. of. the. impendingend. of. worldasweknowit. Which this was. Yes.”

    Shatner has denied rumours that he is to release an a cappela album of the terms of the agreement put to the music of the Artic Monkeys.

    The Director General of RTE was quick to highlight the role of the Irish national broadcaster in resolving the dispute.

    “Given how much of our evening schedules are based around US syndicated dramas and comedies, we had a strong motivation to help resolve this long running dispute. For feck’s sake, we had been reduced to running documentaries produced by the BBC, which half our viewers had already avoided watching when they were on the BBC. To that end we dispatched our most experienced facilitator and chair person, John Bowman, to the States to help get people in a room and bash heads together until there was a deal. It was either that or go cap in hand to the History Channel for a few series of documentaries on the Nazis. And we all know that those things are like home movies to that shower of…”

    The Irish national broadcaster later retracted the above statement when it was revealed that the chair of the negotiations committee in the writers strike was actually a totally different John Bowman and it appeared that the Irish John Bowman might actually have liked the addition of documentary programming to the Irish national broadcaster’s schedules.

    While the successful completion of a draft script is a key milestone, there is still a risk that the developmental project will be held up by the studios until the money is right, the cast is right or the ground temperature in Hell falls below zero. One Hollywood insider has told us that:

    “If the studios don’t feel the market is ready for an epic cinematic journey through the intracies of intellectual property ownership in a post Web2.0 landscape then they may keep the whole production in development for years. Unless their sense of the market is that the money will be there to make the investment pay off they just won’t do it. Too many people were burned by Heaven’s Gate… big production values, lots of investment, but a very long road to payback.

    All of the above is a work of fiction and any similarity to real people living or dead is entirely co-incidental, if a little amusing.

  • Stuck on the train – go on line? WTF

    The Dublin Chamber of Commerce has called for the roll-out of wireless broadband access on public transport including Dart, buses and commuter trains to support the development of Dublin as a ‘knowledge city’.

    Frankly, speaking as a regular long haul commuter (Wexford to Dublin by train or bus, hail rain or shine), this is just nuts.

    The investment necessary to achieve this would be far better spent developing some form of ‘knowledge worker hubs’ in what are currently satellite dormer towns and villages within the East coast commuter belt (which stretches now to Wexford Town). This would reduce the need for people to commute, support development of local communities, support the nuturing of relationships and families etc.

    Sticking wifi on the Wexford to Dublin train would not work (and I suspect similar reasons would apply on other commuter routes).

    Firstly, there are quite large stretches of the line where there is no mobile access (and I’m not talking spanky 3g here, I’m talking ‘hello, I’m on the train’ phone call territory). So that creates a technical challenge to create a network that will actually work and let people do things on the train. Secondly the train in the morning is pretty much full from Gorey up (people were standing from Wicklow this past Monday).

    So the social impact of fishing out a laptop is not to be underestimated as you would inevitably have to smack the person next to you in the head with it (I’ve taken to using my pda to make notes on the train using my spanky bluetooth keyboard to avoid such faux pas). Also, the tables on current commuter trains are tiny and are actually too small to use a laptop on without taking up ALL of the table (again, PDA and small foldy keyboard work OK). For those times when I absolutely have to use my laptop to send/receive email or such like I have a mobile broadband dongley thing from vodafone which meets my needs (until I hit ‘dark territory’ on the route when all bets are off and I just read a book).

    There is of course some spanky technology about that, to an extent, solves the problems of maintaining connectivity when on/in a moving target (actually, the mobile broadband stuff does this reasonably well in my experience using it on the 002 bus to/from Dublin or the aforementioned train). But the issues of network black spots, managing contention, and the physical challenges of actually working on a overcrowded train would take a lot of investment in infrastructure to overcome.

    What is the cost/benefit analysis for this? Is there a better mix that would deliver greater benefit overall?

    As a commuter, I’d much rather have the investment that this would require spent on developing and promoting knowledge economy industries in areas such as the South East, promoting broadband availability to regions (through telcos or local providers), developing integrated ticketing for public transport, increasing capacity, frequency and comfort on commuter rail and generally raising public transport to a point where it is actually possible to work on the train. Reducing the cost of public transport to the passengers would also be a good investment. I already have the level of wireless broadband connectivity I need for working as I travel to Dublin.

    And let’s not forget the terrorist risks, as highlighted by the Steven Seagal movie Under Seige 2, where a terrorist uses a train as a mobile platform to wreak havoc and destruction – using a wireless network connection (where did I put that mobile broadband dongle?).
    Come to think of it, there was a network blackspot as a major plot point in that movie as well.

  • Facebook & Data Protection

    The Younger McGarr (Simon that is) has a very detailed and well written post on the data protection issues that arise (and seemingly are ignored) by Facebook. It can be found over at the McGarr Solicitors website. He has already picked up some complimentary comments, including one from Thomas Otter (who has written on these issues previously). (Surely a reply from Robert Scoble is only a mouse-click away?)

    I’ve been scratching away on some notes for a post on Facebook myself (never one to miss a rolling bandwagon me). Expect more on this soon. (ie as soon as I’ve written the buggering thing).

  • Getting back to my Information Quality agenda

    One or two of the comments (and emails) I received after the previous post here were enquiring about some stuff I’d written previously (2006 into 2007) about the state of the Irish Electoral Register.

    It is timely that some people visited those posts as our Local Elections are coming up in less than 18 months (June 2009) and frankly, unless there is some immense effort going on behind the scenes that I haven’t heard of, the Register is still in a poor state.

    The issue isn’t the Register per se but the processes that surround it, the apparent lack of a culture where the leadership take the quality of this information seriously enough to make the necessary changes to address the cultural, political and process problems that have resulted in it being buggered.

    There are a few consolidating posts knocking around on this blog as I’ve pulled things together before. However a quick search for “Electoral Register” will pull all the posts I’ve done on this together. (If you’ve clicked the link all the articles are presented below).

    I’ve also got a presentation on the subject over at the IQNetwork website, and I did a report (which did go to John Gormely’s predecessor) which can be found here, and I wrote Scrap and Rework articlethat I submitted to various Irish newspapers at the time to no avail but which has been published internationally (in print and on-line).

    At this stage, I sense that as it doesn’t involve mercury filled CFLs or Carbon taxes, the state of the electoral register and the legislative framework that surrounds it (a lot of the process issues require legislative changes to address them) has slipped down the list of priorities our Minister has.

    However, with Local Elections looming it is important that this issue be addressed.

  • No child of John Waters will ever marry a… blogger…

    So there I was, in that horrid hypnogogic state between wakefulness and dreams, when I heard John Waters’ voice booming in my ears like the baritone chimes of God himself (or maybe that was Charlton Heston).

    “Ahh”, thought I hypnogogically, “this will be one of those pontifical nightmares I get after too much cheese and it will be gone in a moment.”

    Then, to my horror, I realised that I was wide awake and the Voice of Waters was coming from my alarm clock radio. He was on Newstalk and he was bitching about bloggers again. So I snapped awake and listened a bit.

    The gist of his argument basically boils down to “All bloggers are [insert prejudice here]”. He proudly informed the nation that he doesn’t engage with blogs or read them but he is adamant that they are full of nonsense. Effectively his argument is that “All Bloggers are [insert prejudice here], but I’ve never actually met one”.

    And the Internet is full of porn. Let’s not forget that. (but so is the top shelf in my newsagents, let’s not forget that either).

    Lovely. Those are firm arguments that one can engage with on so many levels. Oh, hang on, they aren’t.

    Let’s play the ‘parse the argument game’ where we take the structure of an argument and swap the context around a bit to see if the underlying premise is either

    a) a seriously thought through and evidenced argument based on sound reasoning or,
    b) a tenuously cobbled together series of “neo-luddite” prejudices and half-arguments motivated by fear, mistrust, ignorance or the desire to join Kevin Myers in the Independent.

    So here we go…

    1. “All unmarried mothers are [insert negative comment/prejudice here], but I’ve never actually met one”
    2. “All immigrants are [insert negative comment/prejudice here], but I’ve never actually met one”
    3. “All [insert ethnic group of choice] are [insert negative comment/prejudice here], but I’ve never actually met one”
    4. “Women priests are [insert negative comment/prejudice here], but I’ve never actually met one
    5. “People who write songs for Eurovision are [insert negative comment/prejudice here], but I’ve never actually met one”

    Hmm…, I’m not 100% sure but I don’t think that the logic John Waters is applying to his position is keeping particularly good company. I could go on with further examples, but that would be labouring the point.

    Yes, there are some appallingly poor bloggers out there. There are people who think that their opinion is worth listening to, no matter how bizarre, poorly founded or just plain crazy. But then there are people like that in the Op-Ed and letters pages of national papers every day. Yes there are bloggers who can’t write legible, comprehensible or intelligible English and whose posts I wouldn’t print out to hang on a nail in the outside loo in case the toilet paper runs out. But then there are a good number of journalists that I have the same opinion about.

    But just like there are good journalists whose writing and research is good, there are good bloggers who through passion, special expertise or insight, or just plain hard work produce interesting and thought provoking pieces, or give us things that make us laugh and lighten our days a bit. I don’t shout out that all journalists are idiots just because there are journalists who I can’t stand to read.

    However, all bloggers look alike to John Waters (who doesn’t read blogs apparently).

    Waters challenged the Newstalk Breakfast show to find him “a blogger who can string three sentences together”. This abruptly, superficially and prejudicially dismisses some excellent people who blog intelligently about subjects that they are passionate about or have a particular specialist expertise in. Some of these people (dare I say it) are also print journalists.

    Immediately I think of Edward McGarr in McGarr Solicitors, Simon and the punters over on Tuppenceworth, the unstoppable Damien Mulley, Steve Tuck’s Data Quality blog, the Freaknomics blog on the Wall Street Journal, or some of Mr Water’s colleagues in the Irish Times, the investigative insights of Maman Poulet (why can’t mainstream press get scoops like this?). And let’s not forget the irrepressible Twenty Major.

    Using the same prejudiced thinking (in a different context) Waters might equally have challenged Newstalk to find him a black man or a woman who would have the ability to be credible candidates for the Presidency of the US. Oh… what’s that Internet?

    I do hope that Newstalk consider rising to John Waters’ challenge. Get Mulley, either (or both) of the McGarrs, and a few of the Irish Times bloggers into a room.

    Of course it is fundamentally unfair for those of us who blog to take task with the arguments put forward by John Waters. As he claims not to read blogs or to engage with blogs he has opted out of his right to reply in this medium. So I’d ask anyone commenting to:

    1. Refrain from playing the man… play the ball. Address the logic, comment on the fear or philosophy that might be motivating it, but do not play the man. I’ll red card anyone who plays the man and they’ll be put in the sin bin (ie I’ll won’t approve your comment and the world will never see your wit and erudition.)
    2. Each commenter should say one nice thing about John Waters in their comments. The nice thing should be really nice, not sarcastic. I’ll suggest a template for the nice thing… “John Waters is [insert nice thing about John Waters here], but I’ve never met him“. If you have met him, please share the most pleasant thing you can recall about the experience (did he tell a funny joke, pull a funny face, rescue a small child from a burning building, that kind of thing.)

      [Update: As some people seem to find this challenging, I’ll extend it to allow for surreal or illogical compliments to JW. However they should still be nice things and not outrageously sarcastic. Think Satire not Sarcasm.]

    3. If you want, please include in your comment a link to a particularly well written, informative and reliable blog (ie one that is not prone to publishing lies and that quickly corrects errors in their posts – that kind of thing).

    My starter – John Waters looks like he takes good care of his hair, but I’ve never met him.

    Of course the blogging community could just decide to ignore the issue all together.

    But I have a dream. I dream that one day the children of bloggers and ‘traditional media’ journalists will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that the children of bloggers will not be judged by the medium they choose write in but by the quality of their content. I have a dream that one day, John Waters might actually go on-line and read some good blogs (he could start with some of the Irish times ones, particularly Shane Hegarty’s) and realise that sweeping arguments built on sand have been overturned many times in the past.

    [Update: The podcast of this morning’s John Waters’ bit on Newstalk this morning is up on the Newstalk site, a little over 8 minutes 50 seconds in.. My views here are based on his comments this AM and on his previous comments, which I’d like to link to but the link to the podcast seems broken.]

    [Update – I’ve decided to close comments on this as I’m bored of it now – I can’t quite rouse Damien’s passion about JW. Pings are still allowed however. Thanks to everyone who contributed.]

    [Update: Wikipedia have picked up on this whole bruhaha and John Water’s profile includes reference to the ‘Blogging Controversy’. Twenty Major and this site are cited as references.]

  • Why do a law degree?

    My sister-in-law is currently deciding what she wants to do when she leaves school. She will be sitting the Leaving Certificate this year. She has decided she wants to pursue a career in law. The advice to her from friends of mine who are lawyers was “don’t study law in university if you want to be a solicitor or barrister – do something else that interests you and will give you extra skills”.

    As there are no longer any exemptions for law degree graduates on the professional qualifications for solicitor or barrister there is no advantage there.

    However, one might suspect that if you have studied Tort, Criminal law, Legal Systems and a raft of other subjects that are part of the core exams for professional qualification you would have some sort of advantage or ‘head start’ (I suspect this is the thinking behind my sister-in-law’s persistence at wanting to do a law degree first). This would seem to make sense and would be, as JK Galbraith put it, “Conventional Wisdom”.

    But interestingly, some research has been done on just this question (admittedly in the US) and the results were interesting enough for the Freaknomics guys to write about it on their blog on the New York Times.

    To quote from the article:

    no relationship existed between law school courseloads and the passage rate of students ranked in the first, second or fourth quarters of their law school class, while only a weak relationship existed for students who ranked in the third quarter.

    In other words, smart people with work ethics (the top 2 quarters of the class) passed the Bar exams regardless of the courses they studied in law school. The bottom tier failed regardless of what courses they took. The middle ground people… well for them it might have helped a little bit – but only a bit.

    My legal friends view was that given that you have to study for the professional exams anyway, it would be better to become a more rounded person with perspectives from other disciplines before embarking on the legal route. Many of the solicitors I know from college either didn’t study law or, for those that did, went into another career for a few years before returning to the law with a wider skillset.

    One of the most thoughtful and insightful legal minds I know doesn’t have a law degree from University. He studied classics and was a civil servant for a while. He took the professional qualification route to solicitor (as everyone has to). As a result he is an interesting fellow to talk to about things ranging from politics and social ethics to the campaigns of Philip of Macedon and the merits of the Kaiser Chiefs. He has been known to give pretty good legal advice too.

    That’s not to say that people with law degrees are dull and boring. Many of them are not. I must categorically state this… law degree holders are not boring (on average). (Disclosure… in my misspent youth I spent 4 years studying in UCD’s Law faculty to get my BBLS)

    So, the anecdotes from my lawyer friends are that if you want to be a lawyer you should spend three to four years studying something else that interests you before you embark on your professional qualification. That learning will round you out as a person, give you different perspectives on the law, it might give you contacts you can call on in the future (expert witnesses, plumbers, whatever) and at the very least it gives you time to be certain you want to be a lawyer.

    The scientific evidence is that what you study in law school doesn’t affect your ability to pass professional qualifications (and I know that the study relates to the US and Bar exams and similar studies might have different results here… but I doubt it). Add to that the fact that you can enter the legal profession here through a variety of routes and don’t need to have completed a law degree first and I am left with the question…

    Why study law if you want to be a lawyer?

    I’m not sure if anyone has done a similar study in Ireland but it would be interesting to see if there is a correlation between pass grades in Solicitor FE1s or Kings Inns exams for people actually having completed a law degree versus those without.

  • Oh for the love of all that is holy…

    Last week the Government was telling us that they had no choice about the imposition of water charges on schools that it was being imposed on us by the ‘evil’ EU (cue pantomime boos and hisses). Then various opposition TDs and MEPs pointed out that that wasn’t actually correct to the point of pretty much being a blatant and unmitaged lie.

    So now the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) has announced that schools should hold off on paying the bills that they have at the moment because there may be some alternative to the thing that they were only just saying that they had no control over.

    For frak’s sake (thank you Battlestar Galatica for giving me safe profanities), what are these muppets playing at? In the struggle to retain some veneer of actually being in control of things and working for the good of the people who elected them they are executing more flip flops than a footwear firing squad on an Australian surfing beach.

    In true pantomime tradition, why don’t all the children look around the stage and see where their credibility and believability have gone? Oh yes indeed, it’s behind them… waaaaayyyyyy back there. Dying like an old man on a dirty hospital trolley in a plague ridden hospital.

    The row back on the “b*starding EU has tied our hands” obviously has nothing to do with Ireland being the only country in the EU that requires a Consitutional referendum to ratify the new EU Consitution-Lite Treaty. No. Not a bit of it. Not that, and nothing either with them being found out as being as economical with the truth about this issue as our Taoiseach is about what money he got from where and why when he was Minister for Finance.

  • Information Quality in 2008…

    So yet another year draws to a close. Usually around this time of year I try to take a few hours to review how things went, what worked and what still needs to be worked on in the coming year. In most cases that is very personal appraisal of whether I had a ‘quality’ year – did I meet or exceed my own expectations of myself (and I’m a bugger for trying to achieve too much too quickly).

    Vincent McBurney’s Blog Carnival of Data Quality has invited submissions on the theme “Happy New Year”, so I thought I’d take a look back over 2007 and see what emerging trends or movements might lead to a Happy New Year for Information Quality people in 2008.

    Hitting Mainstream
    In 2007 Information Quality issues began to hit the mainstream. It isn’t quite there yet but 2007 saw the introduction of taught Master’s degree programmes in Information Quality in the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and there have been similar developments mooted in at least one European University. If educators think they can run viable courses that will make money then we are moving out of the niche towards being seen asa a mainstream discipline of importance to business.

    The IAIDQ’s IDQ Conference in Las Vegas was a significant success, with numbers up on 2006 and a wider mix of attendees. I did an unofficial straw poll of people at that conference and the consensus from the delegates and other speakers was that there were more ‘Business’ people at the conference than previous Information Quality conferences they’d attended, a trend that has been growing in recent years. The same was true at the European Data Management and Information Quality Conference(s) in London in November. Numbers were up on previous years. There were more ‘Business’ people in the mix, up even on last year. – this of course is all based on my unofficial straw poll and could be wrong.

    The fact that news stories abounded in 2007 about poor quality information and the initial short sharp shock of Compliance and SOx etc. has started to give rise to questions of how to make Compliance a value-adding function (hint – It’s the INFORMATION people) may help, but the influence of bloggers such as Vincent, and the adoption of blogs as communications tools by vendors and by Professional Associations such as the IAIDQ is probably as big if not more of an influence IMHO.

    Also, and I’m not sure if this is a valid benchmark, I’ve started turning down offers to present at conferences and write articles for people on IQ issues. because a) I’m too busy with my day job and with the IAIDQ (oh yeah… and with my family) and b)there are more opportunities arising than I’d ever have time to take on.

    Unfortunately, much of the ‘mainstream’ coverage of Information Quality issues either views it either as a ‘technology issue’ (most of my articles in Irish trade magazines are stuck in the ‘Technology’ section) or fails to engage with the Information Quality aspects of the story fully. The objective of IQTrainwrecks.com is to try to highlight the Information Quality aspects of things that get into the media.

    What would make 2008 a Happy Year for me would be to have more people contributing to IQ Trainwrecks but also to have some happy path stories to tell and also for there to be better analysis of these issues in the media.

    Community Building
    There is a strong sense of ‘community’ building amongst many of the IQ practitioners I speak with. That has been one of the key goals of the IAIDQ in 2007 – to try and get that sense of Community triggered to link like-minded-people and help them learn from each other. This has started to come together. However it isn’t happening as quickly as I’d like, because I have a shopping list of things I want yesterday!

    What would make 2008 a happy new year for me would be for us to maintain the momentum we’ve developed in connecting the Community of Information/Data Quality professionals and researchers. Within the IAIDQ I’d like us to get better at building those connections (we’ve become good… we need to keep improving).

    I’d like to see more people making contact via blogs like Vincent’s or mine or through other social networking facilities so we can build the Community of Like Minded people all focussing on the importance of Information Quality and sharing skills, tips, tools, tricks and know how about how to make it better. I’d be really happy at the end of 2008 a few more people make the transition from thinking they are the ‘lonely voice’ in their organisation to realising they are part of a very large choir that is singing an important tune.

    Role Models for Success
    2007 saw a few role models for success in Information Quality execution emerging. All of these had similar stories and similar elements that made up their winning plan. It made a change from previous years when people seemed afraid to share – perhaps because it is so sensitive a subject (for example admitting you have an IQ problem could amount to self-incrimination in some industries)? In the absence of these sort of ‘role models’ it is difficult to sell the message of data quality as it can come across as theoretical.

    I’d be very happy at the end of 2008 if we had a few more role models of successful application of principles and tools – not presented by vendors (no offence to vendors) but emerging from within the organisations themselves. I’d be very happy if we had some of these success stories analysed to highlight the common Key Success Factors that they share.

    Break down barriers
    2007 saw a lot of bridges being built within the Information Quality Community. 2006 ended with a veritable bloodbath of mergers and acquisitions amongst software vendors. 2007 had a development of networks and mutual support between the IAIDQ (as the leading professional organisation for IQ/DQ professionals) and MIT’s IQ Programme. In many Businesses the barriers that have prevented the IQ agenda from being pursued are also being overcome for a variety of reasons.

    2008 should be the year to capitalise on this as we near a signicificant tipping point. I’d like to see 2008 being the year were organisations realise that they need to push past the politics of Information Quality to actually tackle the root causes. Tom Redman is right – the politics of this stuff can be brutal because to solve the problems you need to change thinking and remould governance all of which is a dangerous threat to traditional power bases. The traditional divide between “Business” and “IT” is increasingly anachronistic, particularly when we are dealing with information/data within systems. If we can make that conceptual leap in 2008 to the point were everyone is inside the same tent peeing out… that would be a good year.

    Respect
    For most of my professional life I’ve been the crazy man in the corner telling everyone there was an elephant in the room that no-one else seemed able to see. It was a challenge to get the issues taken seriously. Even now I have one or two managers I deal with who still don’t get it. However most others I deal with do get it. They just need to be told what they have. 2007 seems to be the year that the lights started to go on about the importance of the Information Asset. Up to now, people spoke about it but didn’t ‘feel’ it… but now I don’t have trouble getting my Dept Head to think in terms of root causes, information flows etc.

    2008 is the year of Respect for the IQ Practitioner…. A Happy New Year for me would be to finish 2008 with appropriate credibility and respect for the profession. Having role models to point to will help, but also having certification and accreditation so people can define their skillsets as ‘Information Quality’ skill sets (and so chancers and snake-oil peddlers can be weeded out).

    Conclusion
    2007 saw discussion of Information Quality start to hit the mainstream and the level of interest in the field is growing significantly. For 2008 to be a Happy New Year we need to build on this, develop our Community of practitioners and researchers and then work to break down barriers within our organisations that are preventing the resolution of problems with information quality. If, as a community of Information/Data Quality people we can achieve that (and the IAIDQ is dedicated to that mission) and in doing so raise our standards and achieve serious credibility as a key management function in organisations and as a professional discipline then 2008 will have been a very Happy New Year.

    2008 already has its first Information Quality problem though…. looks like we’ve got a bit of work to do to make it a Happy New Year.

  • The test results….

    Earlier this week I wrote about some inconsistencies in Amazon.co.uk’s apparent policy not to ship electrical goods, software or Xbox games to the Irish Republic.

    At that point, I’d only identified that the Amazon check out was flagging some Xbox games I had in my basket as being unshippable but notall of them. As I had other things on the order that I wanted, I proceeded with it, expecting to get an email or something from Amazon explaining that they couldn’t ship the Xbox game (Ratatouille as it happens) to me because it was a class of software.

    Imagine my surprise this morning when the postman delivered a package containing the game to me. Sheesh. I did notice, however, that the item description seems to categorise the Xbox game as ‘video’.

    Either Amazon have miscategorised the product (an Information Quality problem which Amazon never suffer from) or their policy on shipments to the Republic of Ireland is a nonsense.

    Electrical goods like toasters and blenders and TVs I’d understand, but software or games makes no sense at all unless there is some form of market carve up taking place. And if there is, then miscategorising products so they sneak through the net can only result in problems down the line.