The DOBlog

Category: Information/Data Quality Issues

  • 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…)

  • 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…)

  • First: Principles

    [This post was originally drafted as an article for the IAIDQ’s Quarterly Newsletter, but I felt it might be more suited to the blog instead]

    Introduction

    As we continue to stagger shell shocked through the unfolding economic crisis, increasingly commentators are looking at what can be changed or done differently in the financial services industry to ensure that “this can never happen again”. A lot of this comment has tagged the short term focus of the key performance metrics of the financial service industry as a factor in the financial crisis. One commentator, writing in the OECDObserver , puts it very simply:

    “This crisis is a product of the short-term focus of financial firms on Wall Street, in the City of London and elsewhere, which is entirely concentrated on the next quarter’s earnings and other short-term financial measures.”

    He goes on to say that:

    “The breakdown in trust between banks was linked to poor short-term lending practices, a vacuum of accountability and a lack of attention to the needs of their owners and customers.”

    The Secretary-General of the OECD, writing in the same magazine, sums it up eloquently:
    “We are in our current fix because of an excess of financial innovation, driven by ever-increasing thirst for short-term profit.”

    This short-term financial focus relied on visible numbers to drive the reporting of company performance on a quarter by quarter basis, which in turn fed into the reward and compensation schemes of these companies, which created a drive to push up those self same short term measures as much as possible. Often that drive was at the expense of a focus on the real needs of the customer or other stakeholders in the organization.

    Often this meant that companies flitted ‘dynamically’ from strategic priority to strategic priority to catch the prevailing winds of growth, with the focus on the true objective of the business being diluted by the short term needs for growth in the bottom line to match stock market analyst forecasts.

    But as everyone was making lots of money that quarter, people didn’t mind that much.

    Unfortunately, the fallout from the short term financial focus of the Financial Services industry spread through other industries. To get institutional investment, companies had to adopt the same short term thinking and it became ingrained in how we do business.  Accordingly, the focus of managers in other industries shifted to short term growth and financial performance, and a tracking of those things using visible numbers in the organization.

    Not news to Quality professionals

    However, as quality management professionals we should not be surprised by this. This disaster was foretold.

    In his 1983 book The Next American Frontier, Robert B. Reich wrote that:

    “Paper entrepreneurialism is both cause and consequence of America’s faltering economy. Paper profits are the only ones easily available to professional managers who sit isolated atop organizations designed for a form of production that is no longer appropriate to America’s place in the world economy. At the same time, the relentless drive for paper profits has diverted attention and resources away from the difficult job of transforming the productive base. It has retarded the transition that must occur, and made change more difficult in the future. Paper entrepreneurialism thus has a self-perpetuating quality that, if left unchecked, will drive the nation in to further decline.”

    (emphasis is mine)

    Out of the Crisis

    Reich was quoted with approval by W.Edwards Deming in his 1986 magnum opus on Quality Management, Out of the Crisis.

    Deming identified seven “deadly diseases” which afflict modern management practice and which needed to be eradicated. These are:

    1. Lack of constancy of purpose (flitting from priority to priority)
    2. Emphasis on short-term profits
    3. Performance appraisals that emphasise short-term thinking and performance
    4. Job hopping (which increases focus on short-term gains and short term time scales)
    5. Running a company on visible figures only (which becomes more frequent as a company’s performance falters)
    6. Excessive medical costs
    7. Excessive costs of liability

    So, if short-term focus, fanatical attention to the end of quarter bottom line, measurement of performance against the yard-stick of Wall Street analyst expectations, and reward of management for achieving short-term goals at all costs are key contributors to the current global financial crisis is it fair to say that Deming warned us? And what can we take from Quality Management practice and principles to help us reinvent management to ensure a sustainable recovery?
    Of course, as information quality professionals in the trenches you’ll probably remind me that we’ve been trying to change management’s view on these things since the dawn of the Quality revolution with limited success. However I would argue that this was because the voices that Executive management heard loudest were the voices of the investors who were pushing for the short-term profits and returns on investment in the shortest time possible. The golden rule is that he (or she) who has the gold makes the rules. As we lacked gold, we were unable to make the rules and had to struggle to achieve our gains by playing the hand we were dealt.
    Thankfully, the insanity of short-termism is becoming clear through the impact of the global financial crisis and some investors are shifting their emphasis towards sustainability over a longer term.

    Towards Leadership?
    President Obama appears to be showing some of the leadership example that is needed. He has set a clear set of objectives that he will meet and has started working to meet them. He has recently taken a beating in some parts of the US media for the short term performance of the US stock market since he took office.
    Perhaps they think that like the CEO of a large company he should react immediately with a change of strategy and approach when the Dow Jones says he should? I could write more words about why that would be a bad idea, but I’ll point you to the Daily Show’s analysis of this news trend in the US . Jon Stewart says it better than I can.
    Obama also stressed in his inauguration speech the priority of the objectives of government as opposed to the ‘visible numbers’ represented by the size of government.  I would hope that that shift in emphasis back to the objective and purpose of an organization and away from its visible measures can be infused back into businesses as well.
    As Quality Management professionals this crisis presents us with the opportunity to lead and to influence our leaders. Our influence and leadership must be grounded on a clear understanding of the principles of quality management to identify what change to make at least as much as, if not more than, on our ability to manage the tools and technology required to make that change.

    The fundamental change that is required, however, is in the way in which we think about, measure, and reward performance in companies so that longer-term thinking becomes the norm and not the exception. External pressures from investors for change in management approaches will be among our strongest allies here and we should reach out to these influencers.
    In Out of the Crisis Deming advises that the eradication of the “Seven Deadly diseases” will require a total rethink and reinvention of Western management practice. Perhaps historians might look back on this financial crisis as the fever that burned out the contagion in our management approaches and restored us to more balanced and long term thinking about our company objectives and how to achieve them in way that is grounded on quality and principles.
    That change will, however, require leadership and a return to the first principles of quality management.

  • 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.

  • The Electoral Register Hokey-Cokey

    When I was a small child, my grandmother used to entertain me and my siblings by getting us to sing and dance the hokey cokey, a playful little song and dance routine if ever there was one.

    This dance was brought to mind yesterday when Fergal of the Tuppenceworth bloggers emailed me to let me know that he appears to have been taken off the Electoral Register in his home county. Again.

    You put your right to self-determination and election of a government by proportional representation as mandated by the constititution of the Irish Republic in.
    You put your right to self-determination and election of a government by proportional representation as mandated by the constititution of the Irish Republic out.
    In. Out. In. Out.
    And you shake it all about.

    It would seem that Fergal had been taken off the Register during the Great Clean up of 2006. He then had his ballot reinstated. The other day, in a fit of electoral existentialism he decided to try and find himself on the Electoral Register website www.checktheregister.ie

    Zen like, he found himself encountering the concept of nothing as a search for his name at his address revealed nothing. Oh Hokey Cokey Cokey indeed.

    So what may have gone wrong here?

    • Is Fergal’s name transposed on the Register (surname first, firstname last)?
    • Is the address registered against Fergal on the Register different to his address?
    • Does the search function on the Electoral Register require an exact character match on names/addresses? Is “Fergal” interpreted as a different name to “Fearghal” (both Fergals in my book)?
    • If Fergal has indeed been deleted from the Register (again), what triggered the Hokey Cokey here? Was an old copy of the Register loaded to the website?
    • Is the version you search on-line up to date with the version you might find in your library or Garda Station? Might Fergal be on the Register, but just not on the Register that is searched? Might it work in the contrary… Might people be listed as ‘on the register’ in an on-line search but be off the Register in the ‘paper’ world (ie the version that counts on polling day)?

    The list of potential root causes is (especially as I am speculating a bit) quite long. However this is further evidence that the processes for the management of the Electoral Register are a bit knackered. This has been accepted by the Government and the Oireachtas Committee on the Electoral Register recently published a series of recommendations which eerily echoed comments and recommendations made on this blog over 2 years ago.

    However, while there is an urgent need to have as accurate an electoral register as possible (1 Referendum in our immediate future and Local Elections in the not to distant future), care must be taken to ensure we solve the problems of tomorrow as well as the problems of today.

    But in the words of Tom Jones – “I think I’m gonna dance now”…

    “Oh, hokey cokey cokey…. Oh hokey cokey cokey…..”

  • Telephone numbers and Information Quality – the risk of assumption

    There is an old saying that the word “Assume” makes an “Ass” out of “You” and “Me”.

    Yet we see (and make) assumptions every day when it comes to assessing the quality (or otherwise) of information. Anglo-Saxon biassed peoples (US, English speaking Europe etc) often assume that names are structured Firstname Surname. “Daragh” = First Name, “O Brien” = Surname. The cultural bias here is well documented by people like Graham Rhind (who advises the use of “Given Name/Family Name” constructs on web forms etc. to improve cross-cultural usability.

    But what if you see “George Michael” written down (without the context of labels for each name part) with a reference to “singer”? Would this relate to the pop singer George Michael, or the bass baritone singer Michael George?

    One of the common ‘rules of thumb’ with telephone numbers is that, when you are trying to create the full ‘internationalised’ version of a telephone number (+[international access code] [local area code] [local number]) you take the number as written ‘locally’ and drop the leading zero. Of course, like most conventional wisdom a little scrutiny causes this rule of thumb to fall apart.

    For example, in the Czech Republic there is no ‘leading zero’ as it is actually part of the international access code (which actually makes more sense to me…). One might assume that Europe, with the standardisation ethos of the European Union would all have plumped for “0” as a leading digit on local area codes. Not so, as Portugal doesn’t use any leading digit on their area codes. Some countries that used to be part of the USSR (like Russia, Belarus and Azerbijan) use 8 instead of 0.

    You might not be safe in assuming that you just need to consider the first digit of the local area code. Hungary has a 2-digit prefix (06), so you would need to parse in 2 characters in the string to remove the correct digits. Just stripping the leading zero will result in a totally embuggered piece of information.

    Also, everyone assumes that a telephone number will consist only of numbers. However, there are a few instances where the code required to dial out from a country (the International Direct Dial code) is actually alphanumeric in that it contains either the * (star) or # (hash key/pound key). Our buddies in Belarus are an example of this, where to dial out from Belarus you need to dial “8**10” (which even more confusingly is often written “8~10”.
    So what does this mean for people who are assessing or seeking to improve the quality of telephone number data in their systems?

    Well, first off it means you need to have some context to understand the correct business rules to apply. For example, the rules I would apply to assessing the quality (and likely defects) in a telephone number from Ireland would be different to what I’d need to apply to telephone numbers relating to Belarus. In an Irish telephone number it would be correct to strip out instances of “**” and then validate the rest of the string based on its length (if stripping the ** made it too short to be a telephone number then we would need to tag it as duff data and remove it). With data relating to Belarus it might simply be that the person filling in the form (the source of the data) got confused about what codes to use.

    Secondly, it means you need to put some thought into the design of information capture processes to reduce the chances of errors occuring. Defining a structure with seperate fields, linking the international access code to a country drop down (and a library of business rules for how to interpret and ‘standardize’ subsequent inputs) would not be too difficult – it would just require investment of effort in researching the rules and maintaining them once deployed. Here’s a link to a useful resource I’ve found (note that I can’t vouch for the frequency of updates to this site, but I’ve found it a fun way to figure out what the rules might be for various countries). Also, Wikipedia has a good piece on Telephone number plans. Graham Rhind also has some good links to references for telephone number format rules
    Looking at the data of a telephone number in isolation will most likely result in you screwing up some of the data (if you have international telephone number). Having the country information for that data (is the number in France or Belarus) allows you to construct appropriate rules and make your assumptions in the appropriate context to reduce your risks of error.

    Ultimately, blundering in with a crude rule of thumb and simply stripping any leading zeros you find because that is the assumption you’ve made will result in you making an ass out of you and your data.

    Which raises an interesting question…

    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?

    Answers on a post card (or in the comments) please.

  • The Electoral Register (Here we go again)

    The Irish Times today carries a story on page five which details a number of proposed changes to the management of the Electoral Register arising from the kerfuffle of the past two years about how totally buggered it is. For those of you who don’t know, I’ve written a little bit about this in the past (earning an Obsessive Blogger badge in the process donchaknow). It was just under two years ago that I opened this blog with a post on this very topic…

    A number of points raised in the article interest me, if for no other reason than they sound very familiar – more on that anon. Other interest me because they still run somewhat counter to the approach that is needed to finally resolve the issue.

    I’ll start with the bits that run counter to the approach required. The Oireachtas Committee has been pretty much consistent in its application of the boot to Local Authorities as regards the priority they give to the management of the Electoral Register. According to the Irish Times article, the TDs and Senators found that:

    “Running elections is not a core function of local authorities. Indeed, it is not a function that appears to demand attention every year. It can, therefore, be questioned if it gets the priority it warrants under the array of authorities”

    I must humbly agree and disagree with this statement. By appearing to blame Local Authorities for the problem and for failing to prioritise the management of the Electoral Register, the Committee effectively absolves successive Ministers for the Environment and other elected officials from failing to ensure that this ‘information asset’ was properly maintained. Ultimately, all Local Authorities fall under the remit of the Minister for Environment, Heritage and Local Government. As the ‘supreme being’ in that particular food chain, the Minister (and their department) is in a position to set policy, establish priorities and mandate adequate resourcing of any Local Authority function, from Water Services to Electoral Franchise.

    The key issue is that Franchise section was not seen as important by anyone. A key information asset was not managed, no continual plans were put in place for the acquisition of information or the maintenance of information. Only when there were problems applying the information did anyone give a darn. This, unfortunately, is a problem that is not confined to Local Government and Electoral data however – a large number of companies world wide have felt the pain of failing to manage the quality of their information assets in recent times.

    Failing to acknowledge that the lack of management priority was systemic and endemic within the entire hierarchy of Central and Local Government means that a group of people who probably tried to do their best with the resources assigned to them are probably going to feel very aggrieved. “The Register is buggered. It’s your fault. We’re taking it away from you” is the current message. Rather it should be “The system we were operating is broken. Collectively there was a failure to prioritise the management of this resource. The people tried to make it work, but best efforts were never enough. It needs to be replaced.”

    W. Edward’s Deming advised people seeking to improve quality to ‘drive out fear’. A corollary of that is that one should not engage in blame when a system is broken unless you are willing to blame all actors in the system equally.

    However, I’m equally guilty as I raised this issue (albeit not in as ‘blaming’ a tone) back in… oh 2006.:

    “Does the current structure of Local Authorities managing Electoral Register data without a clear central authority with control/co-ordination functions (such as to build the national ‘master’ file) have any contribution to the overstatement of the Register?“

    Moving on to other points that sound very familiar…

    1. Errors are due to a “wide variety of practices” within Local Authorities. Yup, I recall writing about that as a possible root cause back in 2006. Here and here and here and here and here in fact.
    2. The use of other data sources to supplement the information available to maintain the Register is one suggestion. Hmmm… does this sound like it covers the issue?

      3. Could the Electoral Register process make use of a data source of people who are moving house (such as An Posts’s mail redirection service or newaddress.ie)? How can that be utilised in an enhanced process to manage & maintain the electoral register? These are technically surrogate sources of reality rather than being ‘reality’ itself, but they might be useful.

      That’s from a post I wrote here on the 24th April 2006.

      And then there’s this report, which was sent to Eamon Gilmore on my behalf and which ultimately found its way to Dick Roche’s desk while he was still the Minister in the DOELG. Pages 3 to 5 make interesting reading in light of the current proposals. Please note the negatives that I identified with the use of data from 3rd party organisations that would need to be overcome for the solution to be entirely practicable. These can be worked around with sound governance and planning, but bumbling into a solution without understanding the potential problems that would need to be addressed will lead to a less than successful implementation.

    3. The big proposal is the creation of a ‘central authority’ to manage the Electoral Register. This is not new. It is simply a variation on a theme put forward by Eamon Gilmore in a Private Member’s Bill which was debated back in 2006 and defeated at the Second Stage(The Electoral Registration Commissioner Bill, 2005). This is a proposal that I also critiqued in the report that wound its way to Dick Roche… see pages 3 to 5 again. I also raise issues of management and management culture at page 11.
    4. The use of PPS numbers is being considered but there are implications around Data Protection . Hmm… let’s see… I mentioned those issues in this post and in this post.

      5. And it further assumes that the PPS Identity is always accurate (it may not be, particularly if someone is moving house or has moved house. I know of one case where someone was receiving their Tax Certs at the address they lived in in Dublin but when they went to claim something, all the paperwork was sent to their family’s home address down the country where they hadn’t lived for nearly 15 years.)

      In my report in 2006 (and on this blog) I also discussed the PPS Number and the potential for fraud if not linked to some form of photographic ID given the nature of documents that a PPS number can be printed on in the report linked to above. This exact point was referenced by Senator Camillus Glynn at a meeting of the Committee last week

      “I would not have a difficulty with using the PPS card. It is logical, makes sense and is consistent with what obtains in the North. The PPS card should also include photographic evidence. I could get hold of Deputy Scanlon’s card. Who is to say that I am not the Deputy if his photograph is not on the card? Whatever we do must be as foolproof as possible.”

      This comment was supported by a number of other committee members.

    So, where does that leave us? Just under two years since I started obsessively blogging about this issue, we’ve moved not much further than when I started. There is a lot of familiarity about the sound-bites coming out at present – to put it another way, there is little on the table at the moment (it seems) that was not contained in the report I prepared or on this blog back in 2006.

    What is new? Well, for a start they aren’t going to make Voter Registration compulsory. Back in 2006 I debated this briefly with Damien Blake… as I recall Damien had proposed automatic registration based on PPS number and date of birth. I questioned whether that would be possible without legislative changes or if it was even desirable. However, the clarification that mandatory registration is now off the table is new.

    The proposal for a centralised governance agency and the removal of responsibility for Franchise /Electoral Register information from the Local Authorities sounds new. But it’s not. It’s a variation on a theme that simply addresses the criticism I had of the original Labour Party proposal. By creating a single agency the issues of Accountability/Responsibility and Governance are greatly simplified, as are issues of standardisation of forms and processes and information systems.

    One new thing is the notion that people should be able to update their details year round, not just in a narrow window in November. This is a small but significant change in process and protocol that addresses a likely root cause.

    What is also new – to an extent – is the clear proposal that this National Electoral Office should be managed by a single head (one leader), answerable to the Dail and outside the normal Civil Service structures (enabling them to hire their own staff to meet their needs). This is important as it sets out a clear governance and accountability structure (which I’d emphasised was needed – Labour’s initial proposal was for a Quango to work in tandem with Local Authorities… a recipe for ‘too many cooks’ if ever I’d heard one). That this head should have the same tenure as a judge to “promote independence from government” is also important, not just because of the independence and allegiance issues it gets around, but also because it sends a very clear message.

    The Electoral Register is an important Information Asset and needs to be managed as such. It is not a ‘clerical’ function that can be left to the side when other tasks need to be performed. It is serious work for serious people with serious consequences when it goes wrong.

    Putting its management on a totally independent footing with clear accountability to the Oireachtas and the Electorate rather than in an under-resourced and undervalued section within one of 34 Local Authorities assures an adequate consistency of Governance and a Constancy of Purpose. The risk is that unless this agency is properly funded and resourced it will become a ‘quality department’ function that is all talk and no trousers and will fail to achieve its objectives.

    As much of the proposals seem to be based on (or eerily parallel) analysis and recommendations I was formulating back in 2006, I humbly put myself forward for the position of Head of the National Elections Office 😉

  • 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.

  • Has our Minister for Environment lost it completely?

    The Irish Green Party recently entered coalition with the Fianna Fail party to form a government in Ireland. As part of this coalition, we now have a Green Party TD (member of parliament) as Minister for the Environment.

    Today, Mr Gormley came out in favour of Electronic Voting. Well, actually that isn’t entirely correct.. he has stated that he would like to see electronic voting in Ireland and would not like to abandon the investment made in the e-voting machines we have in mothballs if they can be adapted to secure public confidence.

    He appears to have missed the breaking news from the Netherlands where the Courts have ruled that the use of their e-voting machines is illegal because they can be hacked.

    Personally I think that the Minister should step back from the white elephant of these e-voting machines and take a look at the information quality requirments of the entire election process.

    1. Our Electoral Register is in a shambles. A key root cause is the design of the electoral register forms… they are simply appalling and do not capture information in a clear and error-proofed manner. A holistic Information Management strategy needs to be developed and implemented, along with adequate governance, funding and resources to help ensure high quality of information in the Electoral Register. This will likely require changes to legislation to allow for improvements in the Electoral Register processes and to clarify responsibilities and accountabilities for the management of this critical information.
    2. A clear and unbiased view needs to be taken of how best we can ensure a verifiable voting process so that votes dont’ go missing, get tampered with or are just not counted. Pencil and paper means that voters who mark the box with their preference can see their preference going into the ballot box… that is a level of confidence in the process that currently isn’t matched by e-voting.

    Rather than continuing to piss around with the e-voting machines, I would much rather the Minister take a strong leadership stance as regards the quality of the Electoral Register and its related processes. His predecessor tried to pass the buck and it would seem Mr Gormley hasn’t yet grasped the reins (sorry for mixing my metaphors like that). The investment in the key set of master data for our electoral processes – the Register of Electors – would be a much better spend of (increasingly constrained) government funds (ie the funds we taxpayers provide).

    In business people take investment decisions every day and spend money with the goal of making more back. But every day business managers have to draw a line under poor investments and walk away from the business idea to spend their resources on more valuable opportunities. Seeking to spend more money on a bad idea in the hope that enough money might make it a good idea is just bad business. A number of people I know, myself included, have walked away from business ideas because they weren’t working or could not be made to work with the resources available. Yes it is a pain in the arse, yes there is a sense of failure, but at least you can move forward knowing you have made a tough decision and can learn from it.

    Or perhaps Minister Gormely is auditioning for a part in a remake of Monty Python & The Holy Grail? How many castles will we need to build in the e-voting swamp before they stop sinking?

    I built this kingdom up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was swamp. Other kings said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show ’em. It sank into the swamp. So, I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So, I built a third one. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp, but the fourth one… stayed up! And that’s what you’re gonna get, lad: the strongest castle in these islands.

    Investing in key infrastructure and assets (the electoral register and its related processes and governance) which will be used either in the ‘as is’ world (pencil and paper voting) or the ‘to be world’ (the utopia of secure and seamless e-voting) is a better investment of resources.

    Chasing the Fianna Fail pipe dream of e-voting simply because it is what the bigger boys at the Cabinet table want you to smacks of an inability to see the wood for the trees and prioritise what will work in the lifetime of the Government (improving the Register and its governance) over what will never work in the lifetime of the Government (e-voting machines).

  • Dell Quality Happy path

    Good news

    Keyboard arrived today (July 30th) just before 13:00. Spent lunch swapping out keyboard. Can now type Quality again without pausing….

    ….received phone call at 14:00 from Dell tech support to confirm that I’d received the keyboard and that I’d been able to swap it over without difficulty.

    Excellent ‘within-warranty’ customer service – my only issue is with their on-line form and the processes that support it which changed my name and required me to re-enter a lot of information Dell would (should?) already have about me.

    Bad news

    The question I’m left with now is why has it taken Dell 5 months to address the other more substantive issue, the one where the laptop wasn’t built to specification and they have not yet remedied that situation?

    The time and cost clock on this instance of non-quality is still ticking. The number of Dell staffers I’ve dealt with is still growing. The root cause of this whole issue is an information quality problem which could easily be avoided. Ergo, the costs involved and time-hassles involved could have been avoided if the relevant information process had functioned correctly and, failing that, if the corrective processes had operated efficiently.

    On the subject of Information Quality, I’ve attached a copy of the article Common Law and IQ Governance. It’s a break from a series I’m writing based on my experiences with Dell with regard to my graphics card. I’ll be presenting on this and related legal topics in Information Quality (or should that be related information quality topics in law?) at both the IDQ Conference and the IRM UK Conference and will most likely be using this whole issue as a case study, highlighting the various legal issues that it raises (compliance with EU Distance Selling Regulations, Data Protection, Contract Law, Negligence etc.). To read the rest of the articles in this Quarter’s IAIDQ newsletter go to http://www.iaidq.org and join the IAIDQ (if you aren’t already a member).

    As I have had no further substantive contact from Dell (John was well meaning but nothing seems to have come of it) and as it is over a month since graphics card number 5 was supposed to have been sent to me I’ll be meeting my legal advisors this week to discuss next steps.