The DOBlog

Category: The Business of IQ

A category to collect and collate posts on the business aspects of information quality. Will be used to create a pre-defined view of pages in menu bar.

  • Software Quality, Information Quality, and Customer Service

    Cripes. It’s been a month since I last posted here. Time flies when you are helping your boss figure out how to divide your work up before you leave the company in 3 weeks. I’ve also been very busy with my work in the International Association for Information and Data Quality – lots of interesting things happening there, including the Blog Carnival for Data Quality which I’ll be hosting come Monday!

    One of the things I do in the IAIDQ is moderate and manage the IQTrainwrecks.com website. It is a resource site for people which captures real world stories of how poor quality information impacts on people, companies, and even economies.

    Earlier this week I posted a case that was flagged to me by the nice people over at Tuppenceworth.ie concerning double-charging on customer accounts arising from a software bug. Details of that story can be found on IQTrainwrecks and on Tuppenceworth. I’d advise you to read either of those posts as they provide the context necessary for what follows here. (more…)

  • Leadership – a follow up post

    I had a great response to my post recently about leadership in information quality. Since then I’ve had the opportunity to discuss leadership and aspects of leadership with a number of people, both in person and on d’interwebs. One key trend keeps cropping up… the approach and characteristics of a particular leader may not always be appropriate to the battle at hand and a real leader knows when it is time to pass the torch to someone else.

    It was summed up for me very well by an Irish trade union leader who I spoke with last week. In his words:

    Any leader who is planning for success should really start planning for succession if they want things to be sustained 

    This is the difficult challenge of leadership. Knowing when the time is right for you to pass the baton and, equally as importantly, knowing that the people you are passing the baton too will be able to build on your leadership without appearing simply to be mere managers working solely within parameters you have defined, but instead being leaders in their own right, building on the foundations you have set to create a new vision.

    Knowing the time to move on is difficult. It requires the leader to be able to focus both on the problems of today and the challenges of tomorrow and to have sufficient self-awareness to let them judge how well their skills, experience, passion and energy will meet the expectations of tomorrow’s battles.

    And this needs to be planned with foresight to ensure you have time to develop your people and drive leaders from the bottom up in your organisation and in your team. Often this requires developing people’s confidence in themselves as much as the confidence others have in them. Inevitably it means letting them pedal the bicycle themselves to prove they can do it.

    The plan needs to cover getting the right people on your team, developing them, growing their skills and ‘battle-hardening’ them. It means having a plan to instil the same core beliefs, priorities and passion (in my case for Information Quality) into your future leaders. At the same time you must ensure that they have the ability and capability to think for themselves and build on your example effectively while ensuring continuity and consistency. Above all, to take on the mantle of leadership, and to be effective, your successor needs to have enough credentials and credibility to face down challenges while having sufficient differentiators to avoid being viewed as a puppet of the outgoing leader.

    And your last act as leader is to sell your successor to your stakeholders.

    While this is true of pretty much any organisation, in my experience it is especially true of an information quality team. Getting your IQ programme started is a challenge that requires certain types of leadership characteristics. Keeping it going and sustaining the gains you make can often require a different leadership style and approach. Knowing when to make the change is a skill in itself, and given the risk of ‘pigeon holing’ that any specialist faces in an organisation, it can often require a move out of the organisation you are in (to elsewhere in the larger business or on to pastures new).

    One noted Irish leader I have studied retired recently from a leadership role he had held for almost four decades. He had spent most of the last decade developing the people who are to replace him. They have a track record and credentials in the solutions of the past, have a passion for the issues that are pressing today, and have the vision and ability to lead on the challenges of tomorrow. They are different people to him and the style and approach of the organisation will shift somewhat, but the core elements of the vision this leader established over the last 40 years will remain in place.

    That’s leadership.

  • The Customer perspective on Information Quality

    A short post today. I promise.

    Yesterday’s Dilbert made me laugh. As a telco guy I’m familiar with the lengths my industry will go to to create complicated contracts that can ‘obscure’ the total cost of a phone package. It was nice to see that getting a character all to itself in Dilbert.

    But what made me laugh most of all was the number of root causes of Information Quality problems which are mentioned in just two boxes of this strip:

    Dilbert.com
    Dilbert (c) Scott Adams, 19th April 2009
    1. Unlabelled strings of code – this is DATA, not INFORMATION because it lacks CONTEXT to make it ACTIONABLE
    2. Web forms or applications not designed to make sense with the information requested (fields too short for the code).
    3. Letters looking like numbers (and vice versa).

    If your customer can’t complete a rebate process due to any of the above issues (or similar), then your information quality focus is wrong (or non-existent) and your customers will go elsewhere eventually.

    Wooing price sensitive customers (and aren’t we all these days?) with rebates or discounts but then having processes which fail to successfully operate due to poor quality planning for quality information and quality outcomes means that any competitor who comes close to you on price but can make the customer experience easier and more transparent is likely to win business from you.

    Begin with the end in mind. Isn’t the end you want a happy customer who will buy again from your company (and maybe refer their friends to you)?

  • Next: You’re a Leader – Lead

    Introduction

    In a previous post, I wrote about how much of what is being pointed to as the causes of some of our economic woes being grounded in weaknesses in the ‘conventional wisdom’ of management which had been questioned by Quality Management thinkers and which were described by Deming in particular as being “Deadly Diseases”.  I argued that, as part of any long term recovery, we would need to look to proven Quality Management principles for guidance and that the lessons of Quality Management (in particular where it is applied to information products and processes) need to be learned now as part of the necessary change.

    In this post, I thought I’d turn my attention to just one of Deming’s 14 Points for Transformation, specifically Deming’s Point 7.

    Institute Leadership with the aim of supervising people to help them to do a better job (more…)

  • End to End in the the Information Production Line

    Image of a Production line. cc by ekasbury on flickr
    Image of a Production line. cc by ekasbury on flickr

    Introduction

    This is a short intro. This post is primarily about the concept of an “information production line” in organisations and the risk we face when we let our view of quality management of information become one of better inspection of defects out of a process. However, I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t also a chance for me to trumpet a good news story about innovation and general cleverness in a young Irish software company in the Information Quality space.

    The Information Production Line

    Modern businesses rely on the flow of information along a production line. In this production line, data and information are taken, acted upon, combined with other elements, shared, and applied to produce value for the organisation.

    Whether it is a sales lead being captured, an order being taken, a product specification being produced, or staff member being hired, information is captured, created, consumed and processed at each stage in the production line from entry to delivered objective.

    Everyone and their dog agrees that the best practice and optimum strategy to ensuring quality at minimum cost is to apply your quality metrics and remedial actions as close to the point of first creation as possible, with the ideal being to have zero defects entering your process flow in the first place. Vendors often talk about the “information quality firewall”. Emphasis is placed on the importance of good governance over the information asset to ensure and assure quality. Increasingly emphasis is being placed on the importance of building information quality processes into ETL operations and into data migration strategies.

    All of which sounds great and is a significant step forward from where we were 5 years ago. However,  are we simply reaching the point where we are starting to pay to have people running around the edges of our production lines sweeping up the crud that falls off the line or sifting through incoming parts bins to seperate out the “good” information parts from the “bad” information parts.

    But is that really managing the quality is is it just being really good and very fast at wielding a big dustpan and brush around our information processes to keep the factory clean without actually tackling the real root causes of poor quality? Given that information is created through the operation of processes that are often many steps removed from the final ERP or CRM system (such as spreadsheet based order forms or product specifications) is it good enough that we are relying on inspection effectively at the end of the line to fix our quality problems? (more…)

  • Politics 2.0 and Information Quality

    A lot has been made of President Obama’s use of Web2.0 technologies in his election campaign. Irish political parties are falling over themselves to get on d’interwebby and send their tweets to twitter and make full use of the mygoogleyyoutubebospace.com to woo voters. After all, if you’re not in you can’t win.

    Of course, to a great extent the local zeitgeist is missing the point about Obama’s win. It was not just the technology and the interactions via the web that got him elected. It was the very carefully planned and executed gathering of information about people and their interactions with the party and with the democratic process that helped guide strategy and drive the ‘machine’ to get people out and get them voting. Obama used the technology as a tool to ensure timely and actionable information that drove effective communication. Any idiot can set up a blog (hoisted by my own petard I think here), but mass engagement on a massively personal level requires high quality data so that you can execute your plan and achieve your objectives.

    It’s just the same with businesses – the technology is one part of the equation, the people issues and the focus on the information is the magic essential that makes it all work. To put it another way, all the plumbing in the world won’t make nice tea if your water is full of effluent.

    As I’m currently working with the IAIDQ to improve our web presence and get more active in having conversations with members and potential members via Twitter I decided to take a quick look around what the main parties in Ireland are doing thus far from the point of view of figuring out what the quality of their data might be and what their challenges probably are. I was also inspired by Graham Rhind’s post over on DataQualityPro.com about web data capture. My main area of focus is the ‘sign up’ pages for each of the parties as this is the opportunity to find out up front what people are interested in.

    For full disclosure, I am a paid up member of one of these parties but rest assured I’ll put the boot in fairly. (more…)

  • Certified Information Quality Professional

    Recent shenanigans around the world have highlighted the importance of good quality information. Over at idqcert.iaidq.org I’ve written a mid-sized post explaining why I am a passionate supporter of the IAIDQ’s Certified Information Quality Practitioner certification.

    Basically, there is a need for people who are managing information quality challenges to have a clear benchmark that sets them and their profession apart from the ‘IT’ misnomer. A clear code of ethics for the profession (a part of the certification as I understand iit) is also important. My reading of the situation, particularly in at least one Irish financial institution, is that people were more concerned with presenting the answer that was wanted to a question rather than the answer that was needed and there appears to have been some ‘massaging’ of figures to present a less than accurate view of things – resulting in investors making decisions based on incomplete or inaccurate information.

    Hopefully the CIQP certification will help raise standards and the awareness of the standards that should be required for people working with information in the information age.

  • Data Protection Awareness

    This post has been triggered by two things.

    Firstly, I had a nice chat with Hugh Jones who is running the ICS’s Data Protection training (see www.ics.ie/dp) for details. Hugh is interested in raising awareness of data protection issues both for businesses and for individuals. I wholeheartedly agree with him that this is important, not least because Data Protection has a strong Information Quality component.

    Secondly, just yesterday I saw two very clear examples of poor data protection practices. And that is not counting the dozen or so CCTV cameras I saw in the Dundrum Town Centre without any notification signage alerting me to the cameras or who to contact to get a copy of my personal image. Both of the incidents I saw related to sign up sheets for various things which were left in public places.
    The first Data Protection heeby-jeeby
    The least worrying one was in Wexford, where the sign up sheet for a contact list for a community group was left lying on a table that was unattended (although staff were standing near by). The information being captured was names, email addresses, mobile phone numbers and postal addresses. Each of those records would be worth approximately €100 to the right people. At 20 lines per sheet, each sheet would be worth €2000.

    That pays my mortgage for 2 months.

    Ideally, the voluntary organisation in question should have put someone sitting on a chair beside the clip pad to keep an eye on one of the most valuable things in the room.

    The second Data Protection Heeby-Jeeby (and this one scared the bejesus out of me)

    A car dealership has a display model parked up in the hallways of a large shopping mall in Arklow. On the table beside the car they have a sign up sheet (ho hum) inviting you to leave your personal details in order to be entered into a raffle.
    The first problem here is that this is very obviously a way for them to collect sales leads, contact details for people who they can phone or write to to offer test drives and such like. However the sign up form doesn’t say that. There is no information about what the information is being captured for, what uses it may be put to, or who to contact if you have a query about the information. So, it is not being captured fairly for a specified use – that’s the first Data Protection breach.

    More worrying is that the table (and the sheets and box full of personal data) were left unattended when I walked past yesterday afternoon. Personal data for about a dozen people was clearly visible on the table, unsecured, unprotected. I took a photograph with my phone. I had considered uploading it to this blog post, but there is some personal information clearly visible. So I won’t. But I have 19 rows of personal data, including at least 1 mobile phone number in an image on my (secure to a point of paranoia) archive drive at home.

    Unfortunately, I suspect that someone else took something more as the sheet was gone a few minutes later. 19 rows of data at €100 a pop… not bad for 3 seconds work. The sheet may have fallen on the floor. However, even in that case the data was no longer in the control of the Data Controller.

    So, to the car dealership that put that blue Hyundai I20 in the Bridgewater Shopping Centre in Arklow: you REALLY REALLY should consider sending a few of your staff to the Data Protection Lunch & Learn session or to the 1 day or 3 day Data Protection courses run by the ICS. Currently your entire marketing set up in the Bridgewater Shopping Centre is in breach of the Data Protection Act.

    Conclusion
    I would advise everyone to make themselves aware of the provisions of the Data Protection Act and to evaluate every time someone asks you for personal information. Don’t give your information to anyone who isn’t capturing it fairly, processing it fairly or treating it as a valuable asset. If they leaving it lying around in a public place unattended and unsecured… think twice.

    If you are a person or organisation capturing personal information about people, then you should put some time and effort into planning how you will capture the information, secure it, prevent it being photographed, swiped or mislaid, and ultimately put it to use. You should avoid the temptation to promote your data capture as something that it is not… yes, offer a raffle prize but let people know if you are planning to use the data to drive a marketing campaign.

  • Information Quality Train Drivers

    The IAIDQ is working to develop an industry standard certification/accreditation programme for Information/Data Quality Professionals (similar to the PMI for Project Managers). This is a valuable and significant initiative that will (hopefully) lead to a reduction in the types of issues we see over at IQTrainwrecks.com.

    The IAIDQ has set up a blog over at idqcert.iaidq.org to share news and feedback from the Certification development project. Currently there are some good posts there about the first international workshop that was held in October in North Carolina to thrash out the ‘knowledge areas’ that needed to be addressed. That workshop was a key input into the next stage of the project – a detailed Job Analysis study.

    Of course, industry defining initiatives like this need to be funded and the IAIDQ is eager that this be a Community lead project “by IQ Professionals for IQ Professionals”, rather than being driven by the objectives of vendors (although vendors are good and the IAIDQ is looking for vendor sponsorship to help this initiative as well). To make this a ‘community’ initiative it was felt that individuals might like to ChipIn a few quid. If you are in the US it is tax-deductible due to the legal status of the IAIDQ (a 501(3) not for profit). The rest of us might just need to be less generous.

    I personally think this is a great initiative that will raise standards and objectivity in the field of Information Quality. Please give generously.

  • Obama’s win… a win for information quality

    Barack Obama just might be the first ‘Information Age’ President of the US.

    The Houdini Project that his team ran has highlighted the value of information, and especially good quality and timely information, when making decisions or trying to gain a competitive advantage. From the details that have leaked out (and while Newsweek get the credit for breaking the story, I found it discussed here a few days ago) it is clear that from the top down there was an understanding of the value of timely and accurate data with additional ‘richness’ of information to help focus resources (ie not calling people who’d already voted or who weren’t going to vote Obama), prioritise effort (ie putting the priority on calling in areas where voter turn out was lower than expected), and generally just getting the edge on the opposition.

    On the DailyKos, UMassLefty wrote:

    We were plugged in to the GOTV operation throughout the day, and we knew that it was working, that what we were doing mattered.

    Ironically, only yesterday I was delivering a presentation on how information quality professionals needed to work with their customers (stakeholders) to make that link between the goals and priorities of the Executive Committee and the actions, deeds and drivers of the people in the front line to give a clear and coherent alignment of information quality to strategy (and vice versa).

    The IAIDQ has issued a press release commenting on the value of the information to the success of Obama’s campaign.

    As more information emerges about how the Houdini project worked, I’m sure either the IAIDQ or I will be writing more about it.