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.

  • First Post Anniversary… Electoral Register Processes Still Broken

    The DobBlog is 1 year old today.

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

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

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

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

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

  • Scrap & Rework Article

    Many moons ago I posted a piece on this blog about Information Quality Scrap and Rework in the Irish Electoral Register. This article was submitted to a number of Irish newspapers at the time (when it was very topical) and was referenced at length by tuppenceworth and others.

    Earlier this year I was invited to write for Larry English’s column in DM Review magazine, an international trade magazine for Information Management and Business Intelligence. It appeared in the on-line ‘extended edition’ of the magazine. Here is the link to this month’s DM Review… I’m on page 5 (I’m credited as a contributor but the content appeared here first, and was picked up by B-Eye-Network last year also. For real afficianados of Irish Electoral Register issues, here’s a link to the paper I wrote on the issue back in the dim and distant past.

    Thanks to Larry and his staff for helping with a minor re-write to make the article more ‘American-friendly’. (Larry’s profile that I’ve linked to above is from the IAIDQ website – www.iaidq.org)

  • Count down to an Information Quality clash?

    Daylight Savings time starts in the US on the 11th of March – that’s next week. DST doesn’t start in Ireland or the UK until the 25th of March. The US change comes about under an Energy Protection Act passed last year.

    Microsoft are warning people in the US that their PCs won’t automatically update (not that mine ever did) and are assuring people that VISTA already handles it.

    So what will happen if your PC has the incorrect locale settings (data)? Will that have triggered it to download the various patches for Windows and Outlook? Have European firms checked that they have no dependencies on US daylight savings time in other software or calculations?

    I’m probably fretting over nothing but seemingly innocuous base data can, if not managed correctly, have a big impact on business processes and on people’s lives.

    My advice – check your locale settings even if you’re using a Mac.

  • Electoral Reg (A slight return)

    OK. In an attempt to make this interesting to the kids, I’m ripping off Jimi Hendrix lyrics.

    The Sunday Business Post reported over the weekend that up to 170,000 people may have been taken of the Electoral Register in error. Apparently politicians of all hues are trading war stories of bungled clean ups on the electoral register. Apparently, amongst other things, entire housing estates have been taken off the register and dead people have resurrected and re-registered to vote. The Minister in question, Dick Roche, has even had to acknowledge that he knows of an incident of a disappearing housing estate in Wicklow (wouldn’t it be ironic if it was up on Turlough Hill muses the author, mixing his Irish geography).

    The Fianna Faíl TD for Meath, Johnny Brady, has commented that:

    • huge numbers of elderly voters have been removed from the Register in his area
    • no letters were left to inform people they were being taken off the Register (or at least people don’t recall getting such a letter).

    According to Mr Brady “Some of the field officers who called to houses decided that if they were not at home, they were taken off”. This suggests a degree of inconsitency in the approaches between local authorities… in my earlier post on when the people came knocking I pointed out that they hadn’t spoken to me, but as of today I’m still on the Register. Therefore it would seem that different rules are being applied in Meath and Wexford.

    Divergences in work practices in maintaining the Register is one of the contributing root causes to the whole original mess. Anecdotes of Local Authorities using the Obituraries in the local and national papers to identify dead people were mentioned in dispatches not so long ago.

    And the treatment of the dead is clearly one of the key root causes for the original shambles… with 30% of Waterford’s voters being members of the daisy pushing brigade. Of course, this discrepancy is matched by the inconsistency between the numbers on the register now and the population as measured by the Census.

    Good grief. What a mess.

    Way back in the summer I wrote that the proposal to rebuild the register by going door to door would not address the actual deficiencies in the register. The key approach should have been to tackle the root causes – such as wildly varying work practices in different local authority areas and then to push out cleansing of the register. This should have been done in a clear and transparent manner.

    However, at this point it is important to bear in mind that often the answer you get to a problem isn’t necessarily the answer you want. The Opposition parties seem to have had an expectation that there would be no collateral damage in the clean up of the register. A cliche involving eggs, omlettes and breakage springs to mind. Rather than engage in debate based on anecdote the Opposition parties should try to ‘speak with data’ and to identify clear examples of where people have been taken off the register in error and get evidence of what process or inaction on the part of the Minister or Local Authorities lead to the error.

    For example, Gay (Gabriel) Mitchell (Fine Gael TD) reported his personal experience where he wrote to the Local Authority officers responsible for the Register to tell them that there were two people resident at his address with the same name (his son is also called Gabriel). However only one Gabriel Mitchell was left on the Register. Why? Did Deputy Mitchell forget to include the respective dates of birth? Did his letter fall through the cracks?

    Dick Roche attempted to clean the register by running en masse a broken process. Throwing people at it to perform door to door checks did not address key root causes (like the fact that you can’t change your name on the Electoral Registration form – it only allows for changes of address). When you throw into the mix that the door to door checkers:

    1. Don’t hang around long enough to talk to people (in my personal experience)
    2. Call during the day when people are at work (might that explain why entire estates in the commuter belt of Dublin have disappeared off the Register?)
    3. Seem to have an inconsistent practice as to how to deal with people who don’t answer the door

    then this whole process is a phenomonal white elephant that may have served to make a bad situation slightly worse.

    However – with regard to people who have been taken off the Register in error… there is a question of personal responsibilty here. If they wish to be registered to vote then they should check the register at their local libraries or Garda stations or online (if they are in the 50.7% of people who have internet access) and get themselves registered.

    If you are not in you can’t win. If you’re not on the register you can’t complain about the government you get. And by my reckoning that’s what we have at the moment.

  • 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.

  • Electoral Information Quality – A Consolidating post

    As the blog is getting legs a bit now, I thought it best to consolidate the posts of the last few weeks on the Electoral Register issues into one point of reference, particularly for readers new to the site.

    I am also taken the opportunity to upload a few additional articles etc. that I have written on the issue to the blog for reference.

    Articles:

    First up is a draft paper I have put together on the proposed solutions and why they are likely to be inadequate. 

    Next up is a link to an article I have had published in an International newsletter for Information Quality Management Professionals.

    Finally there is an article based on my post on what scrap and rework is of earlier this month. This article was submitted to national newspapers as an opinion piece – and I should acknowledge the assistance of Simon over on Tuppenceworth with whipping it into shape. Click here to download Scrap and Rework article. The article is also reproduced as an appendix in the previously mentioned report.

    As regards posts – pretty much any of the posts in the Information Quality/Electoral Data Quality category are relevant. I will double check all the post categorisations to make sure that nothing is missing.

    That’s my update for today.

     

     

  • Process Design & Quality

    Quality is defined as the ability of a product or piece of information to meet or exceed the expectations of its customers/consumers.

    Quality begins in the design stage, at the white board when you are figuring out how your process should work. I won’t waste my energy today rattling on about our Electoral Register issues, rather I’ll take a different example…

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/10/ms_messenger_paradox/

    This is an example of poor quality information. The instructions presented to the customer are illogical and set up a logical recursion that would stump many a Dalek.

    Reminds me of the joke about the computer programmer who was found dead in the shower. The shampoo bottle instructions read “Wash, Rinse, Repeat”.

     

  • Why Scrap and Rework isn’t good enough

    Simon has thrown down a bit of a challenge…  can I show why Information Scrap and Rework isn’t good enough because it seems like a sensible starting point…

    First off… let me provide a reference that should educate and delight (at least some of you) that explains what this Information Quality yoke is all about… THERE we go. The reference is a little old (2002) but for an update come to ICTEXPO on Friday.

    Now… why isn’t Scrap and Rework good enough?

    Who likes chocolate cake? Isn’t it a pain when your face gets covered in chocolate from mashing handfuls of cake into your gob? But you can wipe your face (usually in your sleeve) and carry on. That’s scrap and rework. A better solution is to wipe your face and take a smaller division of cake (a forkful). That is a change in the process based on an analysis of why you keep getting a chocolatey face, coupled with a scrap and rework task to set a baseline of cleanliness for your face that you will seek to maintain.

    Simon is right – scrap and rework looks like a good place to start, and when you say “Data Quality” to most people that’s what they think, under the labels “data scrubbing”, “data cleansing” or similar. However, it doesn’t address the actual source of the poor information quality, much as wiping your face in your sleeve doesn’t stop your face getting covered in chocolate.

    Therefore, once you clean your database, you will very quickly find it filling up with duff data again. Which eventually results in another round of scrap and rework to fix things again. Which then leads people to say that Information Quality management doesn’t work and costs lots of money. But scrap and rework isn’t information quality management. It is a process step to improving the quality of your information but it is just one step in many that range from culture change (from apathy to active interest) to process change to training etc.

    Tom Redman is one of the co-founders of the IAIDQ. His metaphor is that databases are like lakes. No matter how many times you clean the lake, if you don’t address the sources of ‘pollution’ (root causes, cake-eating processes) then you will never achieve good quality.

    To put it in professional terms that Simon (law-talking boyo that he is) might understand, scrap and rework is like apologising and offering some compensation everytime you punch a complete stranger in the face. A far better solution is to examine why it is you punch strangers in the face and stop doing it. Your apologies and offers of money to the injured fix the historical damage but do not prevent future occurences. And I doubt Simon would counsel any of his firm’s clients to continue punching strangers in the face.

    Scrap and rework is costly. Scrap and rework on a repetitive institutionalised basis is futile, creating a sense of doing something about your Information quality without actually getting anywhere but burning a pile of cash to stand still. It is an important step in any information quality management programme. However, understanding your data capture processes and the root causes of your poor quality data and then acting to improve those processes to address those root causes are the components that contribute to a sustained improvement in quality.

    Scrap and rework solves the problems of today at a short-term economic cost. However, it serves to bury the problems of tomorrow unless it takes place in tandem with process improvement to address root cause and the development of a ‘Quality culture’.

    To tie this back to the Electoral Register, to rely on scrap and rework would mean that we would get a clean register this time around at a point in time. However, over time the register would degrade in quality again, in the same way as your face gets dirty again if you don’t change the way you eat your cake.

    Now put that chocolate cake down and get a fork!