The DOBlog

Category: Politics & Culture

  • 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!

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Blog Awards 09 build up

    So, the build up to the Blog Awards 2009 has started already. A few weeks ago I was talking with Simon McGarr about whether there was scope to do something in Dublin in the immediate run up to the Blog Awards to cater for people who might not be able to make it to Cork or people who are in transit on our wonderful, space age interconnected public transport system through Dublin to Cork.

    I suggested a pub quiz. For charity. Of course, to run an event like that I need to know that people are interested before I start spending Christmas putting together questions and stuff.

    So, I’ve put together a quick survey to judge demand and interest and suss out what people might be interested in doing. So… JUST FOLLOW THIS LINK to answer a few questions about whether we should set some more questions for you to answer.

    If you want to see how the survey is going… CLICK HERE

  • The 12 Days of Blogger Christmas

    This is inspired by a post over on the Crabbling Otter (greetings and felicitations Mr Byrne).

    He got the flyer below in to work. Commenters over at the ‘Otter have found upwards of 12 errors. So, for the next few days I’ll be running “The 12 Days of Blogger Christmas”. What I’d like commenters to do here is to suggest the festive (and appropriate) gift that would be sent to Christmastreesdirect.eu in this season of giving.

    So, I’ll start the ball rolling….

    “On the First day of Christmas, the Bloggers gave to me….

    A brand new spell checking dictionary”….

    duff flyer frontduff flyer back

  • Free Fees (with every packet of cornflakes)

    So Batty O’Keefe is flying kites in the run up to the Leaving Cert results. Nice one centurion. He has proposed the reintroduction of college fees for students from families where people are earning an “excellent” salary. He defines this as being somewhere to the north of “anybody on €100,000” and “millionaires”. Mr O’Keefe seems to be living in Vague City here, flying an amorphous kite in what appears to be a painfully non-fictional episode of Yes Minister.

    Is it proposed that this will be the joint household income or the income of each earner in the family? What about a project manager in a utility company who is married to a civil servant at HEO level? Combined salaries here could encroach on the €100,000 level . These are not exactly high flying jobs however, particularly if you factor in costs related to commuting etc on top of normal day to day family costs.

    What happens if you have a windfall in a given year (like old uncle Davy popping his clogs and leaving you his prize collection of original Beano comics)? Would such unforseen windfalls be included in the calculations?

    What would the cost to the Exchequer be of administering the ‘Santa List’ of people who are Naughty (earn too much in Mr O’Keefe’s view) and Nice (earn what Mr O’Keefe thinks to be a reasonable salary)?

    Would Universities be required to gather information on parents earnings before awarding students places (so they know who to charge what and when)? How would the costs of capturing, analysing and securely storing this information be met? (Yes, I know.. from fees).

    Would families be able to earn full tax relief on the college fees paid (and if so, what would that cost the Exchequer and how would those costs be offset in the tax take)?

    Would there be exemptions of a household had more than one child at 3rd level at any given time? In a household of 3 students, with fees costing approximately €5k per year (based on the current costs of Masters degrees) would the family pay a flat €5k for the 3, €7500, €10,000 or the full €15k? Would the minister be suggesting a “buy 2 get 1 free” for degrees?

    When would this come into effect? Would families with students who started 3rd level last year or starting this year find themselves having to find a few grand more in the kitty in 2009 or 2010?

    What exactly is the Minister expressing here (other than expressing a need to have his name in the headlines during a dull August and a need to be seen to be doing things?)

    What Minister? What?

    Yes, 3rd level education requires more funding. I know, I teach there from time to time, and I was taught there from time to time. I was one of the ‘transition’ students who started their college career paying fees back in the early 1990s and were then set free.

    I’ll admit was skeptical about the Labour Party plan to bring in free fees and heartily opposed it as a student during debates in UCD – which lead to a few ‘discussions’ with my more left-wing friends. I felt at the time that there was bound to be a more equitable format which would not squeeze University funding unduly while still allowing for social equity and more open access to 3rd level for families from disadvantaged backgrounds.

    But the human face of free fees for me was my brother. He was 2 years behind me and, but for free fees, would have had to face the choice of deferring his 3rd level education for 2 years until I had finished my degree. And if I’d gone on to post-graduate study, his chance to shine as a student might perhaps have been put off longer. Free fees meant my mother was able to send her two eldest sons to University at the same time, paving the way for el guapo (the Third) to follow a few years after.

    Batt O’Keefe’s proposals (and it is worth noting that the Green Party are making it clear that this is NOT a government proposal, Mary Hanafin has likewise come out against it, as has the leader of the Progressive Democrats, Ciarán Cannon) have some merit if you look at the argument that those who can afford to spend thousands per year on private education at second level for their children might well be asked to foot the bill at 3rd level. However, one must as the question – why do people opt to send their children to fee paying private schools when there is competition for places at 3rd level? Might the apparent availability of better resources, teacher and student supports and other factors (like working toilets and roofs that don’t leak) when compared with state funded schools be a factor? Will the Minister’s proposals address those root causes?

    If the logic for bringing back in fees is to extract funding from people on “excellent salaries” (and we are I must remind you that we are living in Vague City with that term) why not just levy a tax on high earners to create an “Education Fund” to support 3rd level and state funded 2nd Level and Primary sectors? This tax could be levied on all earners of “excellent salaries”, not just those who have children of University going age. The amount levied per year could be smaller (as the pool affected would be larger and over an indefinite period). However, the taxes so collected MUST be ringfenced for education spending only at each level – and not on vanity projects for Ministers but on fundamental tools and resources such as flushing toilets that don’t double as class rooms, and funding research on broad issues rather than focussed industry sponsored research projects.

    The collection of this tax could be done through the normal taxation system (no additional costs). Exemptions could easily be given on grounds of social need through the existing system. Fees could be kept free; the 2008 equivalent of me and my brother would dodge the bullet and the guilt of one having to forego their place just because of costs.

    Ultimately, this would be more equitable as all “millionaires” in the country would be asked to chip in to fund education and learning – the very education and learning that helped develop the economy which allowed them to make their money. Millionaires would not be discriminated against simply because of they have kid or two with delusions of ‘edumication and learning’.

    Fairer for all, and certainly more structured than the vague and amporphous kite-like citizen of Vague City that Batt O’Keefe has floated on the rain-sodden air.

    Ultimately – investment in the training, development and intellectual capital of our country is a key element in developing future productivity and capability. That has to start at Primary level, be continued to Secondary level and then capped off at 3rd level. Minister O’Keefe has an opportunity to take a considered and courageous stand on funding for education in a way that is of benefit to most rather than punitive to many.

    Or he might bring down the government… either way a positive contribution.

  • What is the average airspeed of a laden swallow?

    …or “Why the f*ck can’t I get a decent broadband service in Wexford for love or money?”.

    So, following from my last post (and btw the saga continues off-blog in a reality far far away), I’ve been looking at my other options for getting zippy fast communications that might allow me to work more productively from home for my day job (and, heaven forfend, perhaps form the basis of a revenue creation and job creation buzz here in fair Wexford. After all I can’t commute the monster commute every week for the rest of my life).

    I’ve signed up to 3’s service which proudly announced on their coverage map that they had service in my area… and zip-tasticly not slow it would be as well. Eh… it’s not. It’s painfully slow. Think of how it would feel to have your skin whipped from your bones by a slug who’d just smoked an entire University campus worth of cannabis and was more concerned with what flavour mars bar he’d like to eat and you get an idea of how slow the service is. If that doesn’t work, here’s a picture of a GOOD result…
    speedtest.net results for 3 broadband in Wexford

    However, 3’s customer service are quite good, helpful, polite, and professional, with all my details to their finger tips. They have eventually told me there is an issue in Wexford town and its environs that has been known about for some time in 3’s engineering section who are working on it with no ETA for a solution. So why is the coverage map showing lots’ of deep blue around Wexford? Is it perhaps some form of marketing ploy that might possible be easily confused with lying (which it simply isn’t.. that would be wrong).

    I’m giving it a week. Then I return it and get my money back if it isn’t working above 1MB at least. Anything less isn’t broadband speed.

    I am depressed reading the Government’s Broadband strategy. It’s a joke. They don’t have one. They are clutching at straws. There is a vast amount of ‘dark fibre’ network in the country. CIE has some, and wouldn’t it be a nice way to keep rail travel costs down if they could lease that dark fibre to companies who might help service the needs of teleworkers (who might then use the train to travel to meetings when they had to).

    Counting people who have access to broadband in work in their stats for people who have access to broadband is a bit of a cop-out. Are the DCENR seriously proposing that it is OK for people to use company-provided broadband services (which are usually accessed via controlled and firewalled office networks) to do personal business?

    Boss: McMurphy… where’s my audit report?
    McMurphy: I don’t have it done yet boss, I was just uploading photos of my kids to facebook, myspace, bebo, flickr while chatting on GChat with Mike from accounts who left to go to Australia
    Boss: McMurphy… you’re fired (for a documented breach of the company’s acceptable internet use policies).

    My needs are simple… a reliable broadband connection, with a download speed faster than running and an upload speed faster than walking (2MB down, 1 – 2 MB up would do, but I’d like more). I’d like the service to be not prone to sudden and inexplicable outages. I’d like my wife to be able to rely on it so she can video chat with me when I’m travelling for work… usually to Dublin where I’ve broadband a-plenty. I’d like to be able to use VPN tunnelling to access my work servers securely, rather than poxy bloody PSTN dial-up that takes forever to open the tools I use to do my job. I’d like to be able to use that broadband connection to give me choices about my work life balance, future career path, lifestyle etc.

    I’d like to live in the 21st Century, not the 1980s. I’d like to feel that my ability to work with the interweb and adopt a lifestyle that let me blend my work and homelife through telework tools had actually moved on since I first got on-line in 1993 and started reading about the telework studies that they did in Puget Sound in the US and thought “that’s what I’d like to do” (at the time I was trying to run a business out of my bedroom… shortest commute I’ve ever had).

    Right now it doesn’t feel that way. Right now I am painfully personally aware of the ‘digital divide’. This is more than just a pursuit of a Giffen Good (in economic terms). This is a quest for an enabling technology, a commodity not a luxury. Will “access to broadband” join “near a road”, “close to a river” etc. as critieria for discussion in junior cert geography or business studies when the students are asked to site a factory or school or government department in an exam question?

    This ‘enabling technology’ is on a par with rural electrification in the 1940s (a project which didn’t end until the 1970s) , which significantly changed the nature and outlook of life in rural Ireland. One commentator describes the situation pre-rural electrification thus:

    At that time, few towns in Ireland, outside of the major cities, had a local electricity supply. For example, Kilkenny had no electricity supply while others like Carlow had a local supply

    Sounds very like our Broadband situation.

    So, in the absence of a Broadband equivalent of Rural Electrification (which the Government’s broadband strategy definitely isn’t and which the National Broadband Scheme fails to be), or a reliable local provider of reliable local broadband (“all the bits and bytes are made local boss”) I’m pondering training pigeons to deliver messages for me through the medium of interpretive dance.

    Failing that, a note nailed to their ankles will have to do.

  • An IQ Trainwreck…

    From Don Carlson, one of my IAIDQ cronies in the US comes this YouTube vid from Informatica (a data quality software tool vendor) that sums up a lot of why Information Quality matters.

    Of course, I could get snooty and ask what gave them the idea to juxtapose Information Quality and Trainwrecks…. gosh, I’d swear I’ve seen that somewhere before…

  • On the great big Bertie Bye Bye

    From time to time the DoBlog allows honoured guests to write posts (well I would if anyone asked). When I’m stuck for honoured guests, sometimes I invite family, and I even let them get a byline on the piece. No cuttypasty-and-claim-as-my-own here thanky much.

    This post is penned by the brother. If he would actually get off his backside and do a proper blog hisself (he lives over at “Another Crying Shame“) I’m sure the O Brien clan would soon be festooned with Obsessive Blogger badges from Fergal Crehan.

    So… here’s the brother’s take on the Great Big Bertie Bye Bye:

    While it’s certainly good news in a visceral ‘Death to my Enemies’ kind of way I think it will in the long run mean very little or even be a bad thing for the Irish body politic
    (more…)