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.

Imitation the sincerest form of flattery

I noticed that Informatica have launched a new website called www.doyoutrustyourdata.com, to highlight issues with poor quality information from the media. My personal opinion on the site is that it isn’t very nice looking (but then I’m not a big fan of black on green). However, I’m biased as I moderate the IQTrainwrecks.com blog for …

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How not to handle a customer…

So, I’ve been having problems with my broadband. Problems significant enough that I would suggest that the Dept of Comms actually think through the potential reliance on Fixed Wireless solutions for Ireland’s broadband deficit. More on that another time. What annoys me in the immediate sense is the level of customer service that people seem …

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An IQ Trainwreck…

From Don Carlson, one of my IAIDQ cronies in the US comes this YouTube vid from Informatica (a data quality software tool vendor) that sums up a lot of why Information Quality matters. Of course, I could get snooty and ask what gave them the idea to juxtapose Information Quality and Trainwrecks…. gosh, I’d swear …

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Telephone numbers and Information Quality – the risk of assumption

Imagine you have been given a spreadsheet of telephone numbers that you have been told are international numbers in the ‘local’ formats for the respective countries. You open the spreadsheet and there are no leading zeros (because Excel -and most other spreadsheets- assumes that numbers don’t begin with zero and strip it out). What to you do to get the data back to a format that you can actually use?

Cripes, the blog has been name-checked by my publisher…

TwentyMajor isn’t the only blogger in the pay of a publisher (I’m conveniently ignoring Grandad and the others as Irish bloggers are too darned fond of publishing these days. If you want to know who all the Irish bloggers with publishers are then Damien Mulley probably has a list)! I recently wrote an industry report …

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More thoughts on the IBTS data breach

One of the joys of having occasional bouts of insomnia is that you can spend hours in the dead of night pondering what might have happened in a particular scenario based on your experience and the experience of others. For example, the IBTS has rushed to assure us that the data that was sent to …

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Fair use/Specified purpose and the IBTS

I am a blood donor. I am proud of it. I have provided quite a lot of sensitive personal data to the IBTS over the years that I’ve been donating. The specific purposes for which I believed I was providing the information was to allow the IBTS to administer communications with me as a donor …

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Irish Blood Transfusion Service loses data..

Why is it that people never learn? Only months after the debacle of HMRC sending millions of records of live confidential data whizzing around in the post on 2 CDs (or DVDs), the Irish Blood Transfusion Service (IBTS) has had 171,000 records of blood tests and blood donors stolen. The data was on a laptop …

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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 …

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