The DOBlog

Author: Daragh

  • Customer focus in the mee-ja

    The PaperRound over at Tuppenceworth has stirred up a hornet’s nest of phlegm and brimstone from at least two sources – the Indo article by Niall Byrne that I mentioned previously and a mysterious comment from ‘Soontobe’ on the Tuppenceworth Blog.

    The team over at Tupp’worth may take issue with my view that the Paper Round study was a valiant first attempt at to measure how closely the Irish newspaper industry meets the expectation that papers contain news and as such is a form of Information Quality Audit of the Irish print media. However, if we consider the Paper round in that light, the responses, particularly the comment from ‘soontobe’ show a significant disconnect in the mindset of Irish print journalism from core principles of quality.

    The basic gist of the responses seems to be along the lines of ‘how dare bloggers criticise journos because bloggers don’t know anything, don’t have real lives and aren’t skilled enough to write for print media‘. We’ll ignore the fact that I know a of number of bloggers who write or have written for print media – Karlin Lillington anyone?

    I will, however, pay attention to what this type of response means.

    1. A study was done by a set of information consumers who had, I assume, paid for their newspapers and hadn’t stolen them and were therefore customers of the Irish print media houses.
    2. This study (admittedly unscientific in its rigour but better than nothing) showed a very mixed bag of results across the papers examined.
    3. These findings were published (along with the methodology)

    In a Quality management context, what has happened here is that a group of customers have identified that their expectation of the product purchased is not being met and have produced some data to support their opinion.

    Quality management advises (or rather mandates) that the focus of all processes and quality measures should be the consumer of your goods or information. Leading companies such as Toyota take the view that a customer complaint is an opportunity to improve their product. Where a customer or group of customers comes to them with actual DATA to backup the frequency or volume of defect, it is the equivalent of Christmas in a Quality manager’s world.

    So, where sit the journos or the ‘journo-aligned’? Have they said “gee, thanks for doing this, now we have something to throw back at our editor when they insist on doing a half-page black and white piece on Claire Byrne’s orange dress”? ehhh…no. Have they said “good grief, what has happened to us? When we were in journo-school we wanted to be Woodward or Bernstein, or at least Robert Redford”? ehhhh…. no.

    What has happened is a response that, to return to an automotive analogy, would be like General Motors telling you to f*ck off and stop bothering them about your dodgy gear box because you knew f*ck all about building cars or running a big company (with optional comments about your level of gratitude and parts of the male anatomy).

    Which is not too dissimilar what GM used to do until the 1980s when they woke up one morning to find they had lost more money in a year than they had made for most of the previous decade. They don’t do that anymore, but have still had their arse kicked by Toyota and other Asian Tiger auto companies.

    Quality is about meeting or exceeding your customer’s expectations. If the customers of Irish newspapers (or papers that are sold in Ireland with Irish-ish content) expect a bit of journalism as opposed to press-releases dressed up as reportage or opinion then the paper round has shown that we are a long way from quality in many cases.

    Unless of course the people who buy the newspapers aren’t the customer. By “buy the newspaper” I mean, of course, the individual buying one copy of the paper. But what if some people have confused that with people who buy the newspaper?

    If you are a consumer of a product that is increasingly failing to meet your expectations because a more powerful group is exerting influence to have their expectations met, then you will switch product or supplier. In the auto industry this happened when cash-strapped students spurnned the gas-guzzling, sometimes patchy quality cars produced by Detroit and opted for the lower cost, more reliable and more fuel efficient Japanese imports in the 1970s. The oil crisis of the 1970s accelerated that trend. By the 1980s, many of these students were trading up and simply bought the newer model from Toyota or Nissan because they knew it met their expectations of quality and cost-effectiveness better than a Chevy or an Oldsmobile.

    In the Information Age, those of us who seek an alternative to the print media sources will increasingly look to the Internet, where peer comment and review and a wide array of varying opinion allow Citizen Blogger to make up their minds. Credibility and status will come not from the weight of a backer’s bank account but from the how consistently the information provider meets or exceeds their reader’s expecations in terms of incisiveness of comment, depth of analysis and the ability to take a story and peer behind the press release to question what is actually happening.

    The fact that this is currently being done mainly by hobbyists is irrelevant. Increasingly organisations are looking to blogs and wikis as ways of improving interaction with their customers. It is inevitable that eventually people will be paid to perform blogalism, either through a corporate entity or through advertising on their sites that pays them more the more people visit. At which point…other than the medium what is the difference between a blogger and a ‘traditional’ journalist?

    A specialist blogger in a niche area who provides reliable, well written, well researched pieces giving a different angle on topical issues will get hits and will become part of a network of ‘go-to’ people for opinion. We can see this happening already with extremely co-incidental similarities between blog posts and pieces printed in some newspapers which I’ve posted about here a while back). But how does this differ from a specialist investigative reporter?

    Conclusion

    If the critical comments posted on Tuppenceworth and elsewhere are indicative of the response by one or more ‘print meeja’ people to the Paper Round then the industry is in a much worse state then the survey shows.

    Either there is a fundamental disconnect between the journalists view of their work or role and the expectation of the newspaper reader, or the reactions are suggestive of the existence of a more powerful ‘customer’ group who have more highly prioritised expectations of the content and editorial policies of our media. If the former is the case, then there may be some hope, as it may be that the Paper Round pricks the slumbering customer-focus of the tired and cynical hacks and prompts some push back on advertorialising and press-release reporting.

    If the latter is the case then the the role and mandate of those pioneering ‘blogalism’ will become increasingly important as Information Consumers seek out sources of news and information that more closely match their expectations of reporting.

    The fact that, despite our growing population, a report at the 57th World Newspaper Congress in 2004 showed a decline in newspaper circulation in Ireland of 7.8% would suggest that there is a shift taking place (source : Wikipedia, accessed 19:04 UTC, 28 Nov 2006)

    When Johann Carolus printed the first newspaper in 1605, chances are the towncriers of the day dismissed him as a hobbyist who had no place disseminating news.

     

    Update—

    Just read over one of the later PaperRound posts on Tupp’worth.. some interesting points made. http://www.tuppenceworth.ie/blog/index.php/2006/11/24/sunday-independent-12th-nov-2006/

  • 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.

  • Tuppenceworth…

    Simon over at Tuppenceworth is getting a bee in his bonnet about the standard of Irish journalism. I have to agree. I am a Director of publicity for an international association for Information Quality professionals. Over the past year I have submitted a number of commentaries on issues such as the Electoral Register.
    Not ONCE has there been a journalist who has contacted me back on any topic, not even to say thanks but no thanks. It seems to be easier to trot out the easy soundbite than to actually research a topic (such as the Electoral Register issue – despite what Dick Roche says it is still an unmitigated disaster area and will NOT be clean come election because the fundamental root causes have not been addressed) and be in a position to ask hard questions.

    For example – with Electronic voting, journalists have swallowed the line that the e-voting systems have been fully tested because that was the response to a Parlimentary Question (dail reportage). Of course, the question was badly put… if didn’t ask how many machines actually passed the tests… (answer is approximately none of them).

    Furthermore, no newspaper I’ve seen in the last month has picked up on the link between the State Claims Agency report on Injuries arising from Treatment errors in the Irish Healthcare system and the number of articles that appeared in Oct and Nov of this year about people who’d had horrendous harm inflicted on them by unnecessary surgery because their patient information had been mixed up with someone elses… I’ve got an article on that drafted that links to the situation in the US… any takers?

    I look forward to a day when I can pick up a respected newspaper and not be accosted by obvious press-release fodder, commercial features or limp-wristed reporting. Hopefully some journalist will pick up on the story at Tuppenceworth and run with it…

    …now wouldn’t that be ironic?

    Update….. Indo picked up on the Tuppenceworth story but not in the way you’d like. Apparently if you don’t like the message and can’t directly attack the messenger you should attack the credibility of the medium the message travels in. Which is ironic given that it is the credibility of print journalism that the Tuppenceworth Paper Round calls into such stark question.

  • So long away…

    the DOB Blog has been on an unintended hiatus in recent months. This was due to a total breakdown in customer service from the american company that I had registered my old domain (www.obriend.com – rip) through.

    I have had this new domain (obriend.info) for a couple of months, but haven’t had the time to plan and implement the data migration from the old blog to the new blog. Luckily tonight I’ve a touch of insomina so at 3:40am on the 15th November, DOB Blog was reborn with all the old content (and user names for those of you who have posted previously).

    I am playing around (again) with templates and my favourite of the day is this one… I will probably make some minor mods to it but it is clean and simple (but needs to be checked for accessibility).

    Well, here’s looking forward to some more heavy blog activity….

  • Please buy Expedia an Atlas…

    Following on from Michel Neylon’s on-going battle with Amazon, it looks like the illness has begun to affect Expedia (who may need to buy an atlas from Amazon).

    A colleague of mine just tried to book a hotel room in London for a weekend away. She got her itinerary number and had confirmed availability and price and was trying to give her credit card details to pay for the booking.

    On Expedia, you have to tell them if you are a UK address or a non-UK address (I suspect that this is to present different address format templates). My colleague selected “Non-UK” and proceeded to fill in her address details.

    Until she got to the part where they wanted to capture Country. Ireland wasn’t listed. Neither was Éire, Republic of Ireland, Irish Republic or Southern Ireland (all common alternatives that are sometimes used).

    Nepal and the South Mariana Islands were available options though. Lucky for them.

    Let me put it another way… the drop down list of countries was significantly incomplete for a company that is operating within the European Union (25 states and counting). Ireland hasn’t been part of the UK since 1922.

    My colleague rang Expedia to find out what was going on and to see if the order could be completed over the phone. To her surprise she was told that “expedia can’t take orders from Ireland”. Which is the equivalent of “the computer says no” from Little Britain.

    I wonder if the legal eagles who hang out over at tuppenceworth would have an opinion on the legality of Expedia’s business model, which to my mind smacks of an unjustified (and unjustifiable) restriction on free movement of services within the European Union and the European Free Trade Area.

    In the mean time, my colleague will be using a different site to book her accomodation in London. Until, of course, “the computer says no”.

    (editor’s note: I’ll stick the links ‘n’ stuff into this later).

  • Propogation of information errors and the risks of using surrogate sources

    ….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 real cost to business of poor quality Information

    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.

  • Something’s wrong – I find myself agreeing (in general) with a PD

    http://www.progressivedemocrats.ie/press_room/1812/

    Senator Minihan makes a good deal of sense in his speech to the Seanad (Irish Senate, second house of our executive).

    His is the closest I have seen in the debates and coverage thus far to an apolitical statement of purpose. Also, he has touched on a number of potential root causes for the current state of the register.

    He is espousing a long term strategy (good) and a short term scrap and rework (not so good, but necessary at this stage). He questions why there is so much variation in ‘quality’ between local authority areas and what the motivation might be for local authorities to manage the register in the current modus operandi.

    Significantly he states that the long term planning shouldn’t be put off until after the election but should start now. This is in keeping with good Information Quality Management practice where scrap and rework is commenced in parallel with process review  and improvement (ideally process improvement should start first).

    My recommendation is that the root cause analysis that is currently at anecdotal level should be formalised into a format similar to that outlined in my Draft Paper on Electoral Register Information Quality Approaches. The root causes should then be prioritised in terms of their frequency of occurence and their ease of remediation.

    Senator Minihan correctly points out that you need to provide more information when setting up an ESB account or a phone account than you do when registering to vote. Is that not a telling root cause?

    However, the challenge now is to ensure that the constancy of purpose that Senator Minihan calls for is achieved as if the governemnt believes that some scrap and rework is all there is to solving this problem they are sorely mistaken.

    I’ll have to read this speech a bit closer to find exactly what it is I can disagree with.

  • Phone company not employing psychic dog – shock!

    I heard about this piece of bother on RTE Radio 1 news today.

    Apparently a Fianna Fail TD is up in arms that people who had been renting a phone handset from eircom and subsequently bought a new one and didn’t return the rented phone or alert eircom that they were no longer using it have continued to be charged for the phone.

    So the reasoning seems to be that if you have finished with something you’ve rented and you don’t hand it back the company you rented it from should know through some Jedi mind trick that you are no longer using it and stop charging you rent.

    Applying that logic…

    1. That Library book that I finished when I was 12 and never returned… Dublin corporation shouldn’t have kept charging me late fees, they should have just wished me well with my new book that I bough in Easons.
    2. The rent I paid my land-lord while i was on holidays should be returned to me (b*stard land-lord)
    3. Xtravision should clear my account of outstanding charges for that copy of Kill Bill that I took out because I didn’t like it and bought Yo Jimbo from play.com instead.

    The electoral register is in a shambles and a Fianna Fail TD is taking up valuable airspace, column inches and interweb bits and bytes effectively telling us that we should have absolutely no personal accountability for ensuring that we follow simple processes in life (such as telling our local authorities when we move house so our old electoral register entry can be deleted and a new one created at our new address or contacting a service provider we’re renting something off when we decide we want to exit the rental agreement).

    Short of placing a monitoring device in your house or ringing you every month to see if you’re still using your oatmeal slaney phone from 1996 or hiring a psychic dog to sniff out changes, there is nothing that a provider of any service can do to identify if you have changed your equipment. The only way that they know is if you ring up and tell them so that they can change your contract, remove the charge and make arrangements for the phones to be returned for recycling.

    I’d be more impressed if the good deputy took up the issue raised over on Michele Neylon’s blog re: Amazon’s decision not to sell certain categories of goods to people resident in Ireland

    If you find you are paying phone rental, check out www.eircom.ie and you should be able to find out how to get the charge cancelled and get your phone recycled.

    To Fianna Fail – please stop wasting our media space with innanities! We know that there is an election looming and backbenchers need to remind people that they exist, but there are far too many important issues to be debated in this nation of ours.

    Now, I’m off to see if I can buy a psychic dog and go into consultancy with a phone company (just to keep Deputy McGuinness happy)….

     

  • 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