The DOBlog

Category: Information Quality

  • The Leaving Cert exam fiasco

    So. The Irish Government (in the form of the Dept. of Education and the State Exams Commission [SEC]) are faced with a €1million bill because an exam Superintendent inadvertently distributed the wrong exam paper earlier this week.

    An avoidable root cause for this now unavoidable expenditure seems to be that the packaging that exam papers comes in is too similar. The SEC issued a reminder to Superintendents about this very issue. 

    Reminders and warnings are ultimately reactive in nature. They scream “we know there is a risk of a screw up here, so be careful now”. They do not, unfortunately, in themselves reduce the risk of the screw up happening – that requires the person receiving the warning to remember in all cases to act on it.

    Warnings just give the people who issue the warnings the scope to say “we told you to be careful” as they fire the person who made the error. They are, in effect, a verbal (or written) form of inspecting a defect out of a process before it reaches the customer. They do not improve the process.

    So, what might process improvement here be that actually contributes to a reduction in the risk of significant financial loss to the State because one person in one exam centre makes one mistake?

    When assessing whether it is worth changing a process, we need to assess the cost, impacts and risks involved. The risk of the wrong exam papers being given out is not that high. However, the cost and impact when it does happen is proving to be significant.

    If we assume that the risk of it happening is no more than five times in 100 years then that is a 5% risk each year that something will go wrong (remember – we are dealing with probablity, not a schedule).  We can assume that in any year it happens, as soon as it does everyone involved will be acting on every warning given to make sure it only happens once – the survial instinct kicks in.

     If we assume that the basic financial cost each time will be in the region of €1 million, that means that, prudently, we should see what sort of change can be implemented for an ‘insurance premium’ of €50,ooo  per year. This does not, of course, factor in the reputational damage to government agencies, the PR damage for the elected Minister, the stress impacts on students and their families as exams are rescheduled etc and any potential legal liabilities that might arise. For the sake of argument, we will assume that the monetary equivalent of those risks is  €20,000.

    So. What change can we implement for up to  €70,000 per year that would prevent unintentional and indavertent confusion of exam papers because of similarities in their packaging?

    One option would be to colour code the packaging with distinct colours (i.e. avoiding orange and brown and sticking with strong bold colours that definitely look different). Use different coloured packaging for each subject for example, or put a coloured line or cross on the packaging. Print a logo on the front of the packaging that illustrates the subject (a book for English, a globe for Geography, Einstein’s head for Physics, a picture of Peig for Irish). Anything to provide a standardised visual clue as to what the subject is.

    My preference is for totally colour coded envelopes… If it is Red it is English, Green Irish, Blue French etc. 

    Of course, to do it for ALL the subjects offered in the Leaving Cert in ALL centres might prove more costly than the notional €70,000 we’ve set aside as our insurance premium.

    This is where we would need to further refine our view of the impact of the risk per subject. For example, investing in coloured wrapping for English is a no-brainer. It is a core subject that everyone does.  Accidentally leaking that paper affects ALL students in EVERY exam centre. That’s what costs the €1million we are trying to avoid paying out 5 out of every 100 years.

    Colour coding Classical Studies however might be harder to cost justify. It’s not taken by that many students, it’s not examined in that many exam centres. The cost of colour coding the exam script envelopes for subjects like this could possibly be more than the cost of rescheduling the exam. Also, many of these less taken subjects are examined towards the end of the exams window… further reducing the risk of confusion as the box of exam scripts will be emptying fast.

    So. How much would it cost the State Examinations Commission to colour code the top 10 subjects by number of students and number of exam centres? Would we even need 10 subjects coded in this way?

    While there is little that can be done to ‘risk proof’ against an intentional leaking of an exam paper other than to have a second (or third) version of the exam on stand-by and having criminal sanctions for people caught doing so, there are simple changes that could be made to risk-proof against accidental leaking.

    The only question is does the cost of introducing a preventative control that improves the quality of information presentation (by adding an additional cue – in this case colour) out weigh the risk and impact of having packages that are so similar that they can be accidentally confused. 

    What sort of insurance premium against that risk is the SEC willing to pay?

  • IAIDQ Festival del IDQ Bloggers – Episode #2

    Right – I’m opening with an apology. This should have gone out hours ago but it’s a Bank Holiday in Ireland, the sun is (uncharacteristically) shining so I took off to the beach with my wife and lost track of time… but better late than never.

    As some of you may know, I’m a member of the IAIDQ, an international not-for-profit dedicated to developing the profession of Information Quality Management (a profession that spans both business and IT, and a host of professional disciplines from Compliance to Risk Management, to Legal, to Marketing, to Sales/CRM… Basically, if you need good quality information to succeed in a role, you need good quality information quality management).

    This year the IAIDQ is 5 years old and is having a series of rolling celebrations, the Blog Carnival “Festival del IDQ Bloggers” being one of the strands of those celebrations. I’m honoured to be counted among the cadre of IDQ Bloggers (people who blog about Information Quality issues) and take immense pride in presenting to you, dear reader, the Roll of Honour for IDQ Bloggers from May 2009.

    Entry #1 Steve Sarsfield

     Steve Sarsfield of the Data Governance and Data Quality Insider with this great post about Data Quality/Data Governance as a Movie. In it, he compares the “heroes” of the Data Governance/Data Quality profession as they battle (á la Neo or John McClane) to eliminate the “bad guys” of poor quality information and sloppy or ineffective data governance. 

    Personally, I’d have added Kelly’s Heroes to the mix here, but then those of you who know me would say that I’d try and add Kelly’s Heroes to anything.

    Steve Sarsfield is a data quality evangelist and author of the book the Data Governance Imperative.  His blog covers the world of data integration, data governance, and data quality from the perspective of an industry insider.

    Entry #2: Bob Lambert

    In this thought provoking post, Bob Lambert  shares his insights into why Project Sponsors aren’t blind, they just need glasses. In it, he highlights an all to common problem in poorly aligned IT projects and ‘re-engineering’ efforts where the project hits a “speed bump” of poor quality information and missed data integration requirements which leads to an inevitable project failure. Bob argues that the Project team should be given the mandate to have a checkpoint for the Project Sponsors to reality test the project costs and business case before blindly tilting at windmills trying to make the project work.

    This one should be mandatory reading for anyone working in an IT/Business interface role who is staring down the barrel of a “rationalisation” programme or a “next generation business/systems architecture” programme. 

    Bob Lambert is an IT professional interested in information management, business analysis, databases, & projects, and how IT and business get together to plan, build, and maintain business value. His blog at RobertLambert.net is about “aligned IT:” Aligned IT means IT integrated with business to create business value, and as such implies on time, on budget projects that meet their goals and motivated professionals working together to solve problems.

    Entry #3 Jim Harris

    Jim “the Gentleman” Harris returns this month with yet another amusing and thought provoking post on how the path to poor quality data is often paved with good intentions. In his post “The Nine Circles of Data Quality Hell“, Jim collates a number of factors (explored in earlier posts on his blog) which can lead to the Hell of Poor Quality data.

    While a few commeters on Jim’s blog have suggested a few more, I think Jim has done a very admirable job documenting the common pitfalls that leave poor data quality managers every where facing yet another day pushing boulders up hills.

    Jim Harris is an independent consultant, speaker, writer and blogger with over 15 years of professional services and application development experience in data quality. His blog, OCDQBlog.com is an independent blog offering a vendor-neutral perspective on data quality.

    Entry #4 William Sharp

    Entry number four comes from “new kid” on the Information Quality blogging block, William Sharp. In his post “Begin at the End – Ensuring Data Quality Success” elegantly sums up one of the challenges in developing, presenting, and implementing information quality improvement – the Value Proposition. William very nicely spells out the need to link you data quality project to clear business objectives in order to sell the value as, unlike ‘traditional’ IT projects, the impact of an information quality project is not as immediately apparent.

    A great post from a promising new arrival to the Community.

    William’s blog is the “DQ Chronicle“,  attempt to capture the  opportunities and challenges that exist as part of the various data quality initiatives encountered in the enterprise environment. He tries to keep the topics in a format easy to digest and direct as possible, side stepping profound pronouncements on Information Quality theory in favour of more direct content aimed new comers to the profession and people wanting to learn more.

    William is a skilled business professional with 12 years experience in client partnering. He is based in US.

    Entry #5 Tuppenceworth.ie

    Tuppenceworth.ie is one of the leading blogs in the Irish Blogging community. Earlier this month they ran a post about poor quality information in one of the leading Irish banks and its impact on customers – a touching “real world” story of a real customer impact (I blogged about it myself and it was picked up by IQTrainwrecks.com).

    Read the post here

    Founded in 2001, initially as a static HTML site before morphing into its current blog format in recent years, Tuppenceworth.ie has become a noted fixture in the Irish Blogging community. Members of its writing team have featured on Irish media discusing blogs and blogging and bloggers (amongst other things). With themes ranging from media, arts, culture, politics and legal issues, Tuppenceworth is an eclectic read.

    Tuppenceworth.ie is the brainchild of Simon McGarr and Fergal Crehan, with frequent guest contributions.

    Entry #6 IQTrainwrecks.com 

    IQTrainwrecks.com posted a story in May about a banking error by a bank in New Zealand which left a young couple with a massive overdraft facility, which they proceeded to drain before absconding. What IQTrainwrecks pointed out which was missed in mainstream media was that this was not the first time that this particular bank has made an error of this kind.

    Read: Antipodean Bankers Sheepish over Overdraft Bungle (again)

    Since 2006, IQTrainwrecks.com, which is a community blog provided and administered by the International Association for Information and Data Quality (IAIDQ), has been serving up regular doses of information quality disasters from around the world.

    Entry #7 The DoBlog.

    Despite having a busy month in work, I found time to put one post up that was inspired by the Tuppenceworth post.

    In “Software Quality, Information Quality, and Customer Service”  I let a picture from a recent Dilbert strip do the talking for me (eventually). 

    Perhaps if the Pointy Haired Boss had someone explaining the value of Information to his objectives (á la William’s post),  and if the project team had the mandate to cry “Halt” when things stopped making sense (as Bob suggests), then the team and customers wouldn’t find themselves descending the 9 Circles of Data Quality Hell, and the organisation wouldn’t need to cast around for a hero (see Steve’s post) to fix the inevitable IQTrainwreck.

    Wrap up

    Thanks to everyone who submitted a post for the June published, May reflecting edition of the IDQ Blog Carnival. Steve Sarsfield is the host for the next edition, hitting the Internet on or just before the 1st of July, covering Information/Data Quality blog posts published in the month of June (no cheating people – if you have a really good one from January.. update it and submit it). 

    Literally within seconds of writing the first draft of this, I spotted a few more new Information Quality bloggers joining the fray. Welcome to them and I hope they submit a post or three.

    If you want to submit a post for that edition, please visit the IAIDQ’s Blog Carnival page for details on how to submit your post.

    Keep blogging!

  • 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)?

  • Happy Birthday DoBlog

    The DoBlog is 3 years old today. For 3 years I’ve been sharing my thoughts on topics information qualitarian and other things with a captive audience (I locked a few neighbours in the shed with an old PC and a packet of biscuits). I’ve also managed to attract a reasonable ‘free range’ following.

    Obsessive Blogger Award
    Obsessive Blogger Award

     

     

    In that time I’ve won an “attaboy” award from my peers in the Irish blogging community (but never an official Irish Blog Awards nomination… not even a mention in dispatches. Woe is me)

    The DoBlog would not be what it is today without the help and support of a number of people:

    • Mrs DoBlog. For putting up with me sneaking downstairs in the dead of night when an idea hits me.
    • Simon and Fergal over on Tuppenceworth.ie for giving me encouragement to carve out my niche in this space, and for being quick to point out errors or opportunities to improve. And also for the Obsessive Blogger award.
    • My colleagues on the Board of Directors of the IAIDQ, for their encouragement and their insights into good stories.
    • My colleagues in the Irish Computer Society (ICS)
    • Damien Mulley for creating the wonderful motiviator for self-expression that is the Fluffy Link  (an honour I still crave… c’mon Damien… give us a nod…please? Validate me!)
    • The Irish Ministers for the Environment since 2006 (Dick Roche TD and John Gormley TD), for the original and on-going issues in the Irish Electoral Register (which got me my award)
    • The Irish Ministers for Communications since 2006 (Noel Dempsey TD and Eamon Ryan TD) for the continued failure to implement a post code system in Ireland. 
    • My fellow Information Quality Bloggers – of whom there were very few in 2006 but now there is a growing community. (yes, I’m sure I’ve missed some of you out… ping me a mail or a comment to get added to my list here)

    Thanks also to everyone who has commented (either on the blog or over beers at a conference), contributed, cajoled or prodded me into writing about information quality issues. I’d particularly like to thank Tom Redman, Larry English, Danette McGilvray, Lwanga Yonke, and my IAIDQ editor-in-chief who prefers to stay in the background but has helped me hone my writing immensely.

    Finally, I’d like to thank all the people who create, process or consume information in their day to day existence, and in particular I’d like to thank everyone (me included) who has had a hand in creating some IQ trainwrecks that may have inspired posts here.

    If I’ve forgotten anyone… there’s always next year. 

    And, to cap things off… here’s a look back at the very first post on The DoBlog on the 18th April 2006.

  • 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…)

  • 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.