The DOBlog

…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…

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.

The Irish Times website is carrying a story today that Starbucks has experienced a downturn in coffee sales in the US in recent months and is not as economically bulletproof as they may have previously thought.

This makes perfect sense to me. When your negative equity hell kicks in and leaves a sour and bitter taste in your mouth and curdles your stomach, the absolute last thing you need to drink is a cup of overpriced shit coffee that will only add to your intenstinal woes.

And for the record, I’m a big coffee drinker. I gave it up for Lent once. The children of Bolivia apparently had no new shoes for Easter Mass. It’s just that what American’s call coffee I, erm… um… don’t.

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…)

Darren over at the Crabbling Otter has laid down a challenge to me, which was in turn given to him by GrannyMar. The challenge is to write my memoir in six words. It is harder then you think. I normally take 20 words to say hello and forty eight to say goodbye.

Worked diligently, invested time, achieved joy.

That’s my starter for 10. But if I was allowed 10 there’d be four more words to play with… bugger.

It seems that there is a deal imminent in the US Writers Strike.

Lawyers are due to present the final draft to the writers and studios tomorrow. But already Joe Esterhaz has been lined up to ’sex it up’ for the masses and Jerry Bruckheimer will produce the mammoth deal, with Paul Verhoven lined up to direct.

“Esterhaz has a strong track record of taking limp material and making it something people would want to be a part of over and over again.”, says Bruckheimer, “so he was the natural choice to polish the lawyer’s draft. And Verhoven was the best choice to direct because of his gritty vision, strong production values and, with a Paul Verhoven movie, you know someone’s going to get screwed royally at some stage in the action”.

Commenting on the choice of Bruckheimer to produce, William Shatner was quoted as saying

” Well. JerryBruckheimer. Is. thelogicalchoice. to. produce. something. on. the. scale. of. the. impendingend. of. worldasweknowit. Which this was. Yes.”

Shatner has denied rumours that he is to release an a cappela album of the terms of the agreement put to the music of the Artic Monkeys.

The Director General of RTE was quick to highlight the role of the Irish national broadcaster in resolving the dispute.

“Given how much of our evening schedules are based around US syndicated dramas and comedies, we had a strong motivation to help resolve this long running dispute. For feck’s sake, we had been reduced to running documentaries produced by the BBC, which half our viewers had already avoided watching when they were on the BBC. To that end we dispatched our most experienced facilitator and chair person, John Bowman, to the States to help get people in a room and bash heads together until there was a deal. It was either that or go cap in hand to the History Channel for a few series of documentaries on the Nazis. And we all know that those things are like home movies to that shower of…”

The Irish national broadcaster later retracted the above statement when it was revealed that the chair of the negotiations committee in the writers strike was actually a totally different John Bowman and it appeared that the Irish John Bowman might actually have liked the addition of documentary programming to the Irish national broadcaster’s schedules.

While the successful completion of a draft script is a key milestone, there is still a risk that the developmental project will be held up by the studios until the money is right, the cast is right or the ground temperature in Hell falls below zero. One Hollywood insider has told us that:

“If the studios don’t feel the market is ready for an epic cinematic journey through the intracies of intellectual property ownership in a post Web2.0 landscape then they may keep the whole production in development for years. Unless their sense of the market is that the money will be there to make the investment pay off they just won’t do it. Too many people were burned by Heaven’s Gate… big production values, lots of investment, but a very long road to payback.

All of the above is a work of fiction and any similarity to real people living or dead is entirely co-incidental, if a little amusing.

So yet another year draws to a close. Usually around this time of year I try to take a few hours to review how things went, what worked and what still needs to be worked on in the coming year. In most cases that is very personal appraisal of whether I had a ‘quality’ year - did I meet or exceed my own expectations of myself (and I’m a bugger for trying to achieve too much too quickly).

Vincent McBurney’s Blog Carnival of Data Quality has invited submissions on the theme “Happy New Year”, so I thought I’d take a look back over 2007 and see what emerging trends or movements might lead to a Happy New Year for Information Quality people in 2008.

Hitting Mainstream
In 2007 Information Quality issues began to hit the mainstream. It isn’t quite there yet but 2007 saw the introduction of taught Master’s degree programmes in Information Quality in the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and there have been similar developments mooted in at least one European University. If educators think they can run viable courses that will make money then we are moving out of the niche towards being seen asa a mainstream discipline of importance to business.

The IAIDQ’s IDQ Conference in Las Vegas was a significant success, with numbers up on 2006 and a wider mix of attendees. I did an unofficial straw poll of people at that conference and the consensus from the delegates and other speakers was that there were more ‘Business’ people at the conference than previous Information Quality conferences they’d attended, a trend that has been growing in recent years. The same was true at the European Data Management and Information Quality Conference(s) in London in November. Numbers were up on previous years. There were more ‘Business’ people in the mix, up even on last year. - this of course is all based on my unofficial straw poll and could be wrong.

The fact that news stories abounded in 2007 about poor quality information and the initial short sharp shock of Compliance and SOx etc. has started to give rise to questions of how to make Compliance a value-adding function (hint - It’s the INFORMATION people) may help, but the influence of bloggers such as Vincent, and the adoption of blogs as communications tools by vendors and by Professional Associations such as the IAIDQ is probably as big if not more of an influence IMHO.

Also, and I’m not sure if this is a valid benchmark, I’ve started turning down offers to present at conferences and write articles for people on IQ issues. because a) I’m too busy with my day job and with the IAIDQ (oh yeah… and with my family) and b)there are more opportunities arising than I’d ever have time to take on.

Unfortunately, much of the ‘mainstream’ coverage of Information Quality issues either views it either as a ‘technology issue’ (most of my articles in Irish trade magazines are stuck in the ‘Technology’ section) or fails to engage with the Information Quality aspects of the story fully. The objective of IQTrainwrecks.com is to try to highlight the Information Quality aspects of things that get into the media.

What would make 2008 a Happy Year for me would be to have more people contributing to IQ Trainwrecks but also to have some happy path stories to tell and also for there to be better analysis of these issues in the media.

Community Building
There is a strong sense of ‘community’ building amongst many of the IQ practitioners I speak with. That has been one of the key goals of the IAIDQ in 2007 - to try and get that sense of Community triggered to link like-minded-people and help them learn from each other. This has started to come together. However it isn’t happening as quickly as I’d like, because I have a shopping list of things I want yesterday!

What would make 2008 a happy new year for me would be for us to maintain the momentum we’ve developed in connecting the Community of Information/Data Quality professionals and researchers. Within the IAIDQ I’d like us to get better at building those connections (we’ve become good… we need to keep improving).

I’d like to see more people making contact via blogs like Vincent’s or mine or through other social networking facilities so we can build the Community of Like Minded people all focussing on the importance of Information Quality and sharing skills, tips, tools, tricks and know how about how to make it better. I’d be really happy at the end of 2008 a few more people make the transition from thinking they are the ‘lonely voice’ in their organisation to realising they are part of a very large choir that is singing an important tune.

Role Models for Success
2007 saw a few role models for success in Information Quality execution emerging. All of these had similar stories and similar elements that made up their winning plan. It made a change from previous years when people seemed afraid to share - perhaps because it is so sensitive a subject (for example admitting you have an IQ problem could amount to self-incrimination in some industries)? In the absence of these sort of ‘role models’ it is difficult to sell the message of data quality as it can come across as theoretical.

I’d be very happy at the end of 2008 if we had a few more role models of successful application of principles and tools - not presented by vendors (no offence to vendors) but emerging from within the organisations themselves. I’d be very happy if we had some of these success stories analysed to highlight the common Key Success Factors that they share.

Break down barriers
2007 saw a lot of bridges being built within the Information Quality Community. 2006 ended with a veritable bloodbath of mergers and acquisitions amongst software vendors. 2007 had a development of networks and mutual support between the IAIDQ (as the leading professional organisation for IQ/DQ professionals) and MIT’s IQ Programme. In many Businesses the barriers that have prevented the IQ agenda from being pursued are also being overcome for a variety of reasons.

2008 should be the year to capitalise on this as we near a signicificant tipping point. I’d like to see 2008 being the year were organisations realise that they need to push past the politics of Information Quality to actually tackle the root causes. Tom Redman is right - the politics of this stuff can be brutal because to solve the problems you need to change thinking and remould governance all of which is a dangerous threat to traditional power bases. The traditional divide between “Business” and “IT” is increasingly anachronistic, particularly when we are dealing with information/data within systems. If we can make that conceptual leap in 2008 to the point were everyone is inside the same tent peeing out… that would be a good year.

Respect
For most of my professional life I’ve been the crazy man in the corner telling everyone there was an elephant in the room that no-one else seemed able to see. It was a challenge to get the issues taken seriously. Even now I have one or two managers I deal with who still don’t get it. However most others I deal with do get it. They just need to be told what they have. 2007 seems to be the year that the lights started to go on about the importance of the Information Asset. Up to now, people spoke about it but didn’t ‘feel’ it… but now I don’t have trouble getting my Dept Head to think in terms of root causes, information flows etc.

2008 is the year of Respect for the IQ Practitioner…. A Happy New Year for me would be to finish 2008 with appropriate credibility and respect for the profession. Having role models to point to will help, but also having certification and accreditation so people can define their skillsets as ‘Information Quality’ skill sets (and so chancers and snake-oil peddlers can be weeded out).

Conclusion
2007 saw discussion of Information Quality start to hit the mainstream and the level of interest in the field is growing significantly. For 2008 to be a Happy New Year we need to build on this, develop our Community of practitioners and researchers and then work to break down barriers within our organisations that are preventing the resolution of problems with information quality. If, as a community of Information/Data Quality people we can achieve that (and the IAIDQ is dedicated to that mission) and in doing so raise our standards and achieve serious credibility as a key management function in organisations and as a professional discipline then 2008 will have been a very Happy New Year.

2008 already has its first Information Quality problem though…. looks like we’ve got a bit of work to do to make it a Happy New Year.

Vodafone have launched a Christmas e-card site with a difference called Bosco is back. On this site you can put together a custom video e-card featuring Bosco, a perennial kids TV favourite in Ireland.

Why does this site peeve me? Well, due to the way the video is put together (pre-recorded video clips that are assembled in real-time) a lot of the process is driven by drop down menus to select names etc. This is where the problem starts.

As people who have come to my conference presentations know, a lot of my interest in Information Quality stems from the fact that my name (Daragh) has approx 12 alternate spellings and can be either male or female. These simple facts have motivated me over the years to be a bit pedantic about my name (1 ‘R’, a ‘GH’ at the end -silent, Male). So I was a bit dismayed when I flagged my gender as ‘Male’ on the “Bosco is Back” and looked for my name, only to find…

That’s annoying. To cater for the alternate spellings (such as Daragh, Darach, Dara, Daire) it would have been easy enough just to link them to the same video insert. However, it is not as bad as if I was a woman. According to Vodafone “Darragh” (and apparently all the phonetic variants thereof) is only a guys name.

Also, some of the inserts give unexpected outcomes. I was going to send my wife an e-card describing her as a “Dreamer”. Thankfully there is a preview mode which showed me what she’d see. Given that the squeaky voiced puppet would have demanded that she “stop thinking about that girl” I decided it might require more explaining at home than I could possibly manage.

Yes, the whole thing is a bit of fun and I’m probably being overly pedantic. However it does highlight the risk of having ‘non-quality’ outcomes when you rely on drop down menus and defined lists to operate a business process. What, if instead of producing a cheezee e-card I had been applying for phone service from vodafone?

When I get a chance I’ll post up the slides I use about “why I got into Information Quality”… research this morning has identified another 3 variant spellings of my name at least….

So, Christmas is coming, the Goose is getting fat. I thought I’d put some euros in Jeff Bezo’s hat..

So I decided to try to order some Xbox games as part of my Christmas shopping. I fully expected to get big “DANGER WILL ROBINSON” warnings for all the purchases given Amazon’s decision NOT to sell software or electrical goods into the Irish market for no apparent reason (which I’ve written about before here and here and here and which featured on other blogs last year… here…. and which I brought to the attention of the relevant Government Minister here). I haven’t actually received a response on this yet, over a year later. Shame on me for not chasing it up.

Imagine my fricking surprise when I got this…

Apparently the XBox game Ratatouille is not the same class of thing as the XBox games “Cars Mater-national” or “the Simpsons”. Now, this puts Amazon across two of my pet bugbears…

1. Nonsensical and unexplained restrictions on shipping of goods within the EU (which, in the absence of a REALLY good explanation is probably a breach of EU law)
2. Buggered up information quality

If all of the game titles had been restricted I’d have simply shrugged my shoulders and moved on. But they weren’t. This suggests that either:

• The information which Amazon use to classify their games and software is inaccurate or incomplete and allows exceptions through the net (boo hiss)
• OR (worryingly) The restriction on shipping electrical goods, games and software has less to do with the WEEE regulations in Ireland (Amazon’s nonsense excuse) but have more to do with producers seeking to create and maintain artificial market segregation. In the context of a web site selling into Ireland, that could raise issues of EU law and, if it is the case that a number of different manufacturers have made similar requests to Amazon to restrict the Irish Market, then that could be viewed as a cartel-like operation, which is apparently a bad thing.

Not that Amazon would pander to that kind of thing. Gosh no. This has to relate to the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment regulations because they define Electrical and Electronic Equipment as:

“electrical and electronic equipment” means equipment which is dependent on electric currents or electromagnetic fields in order to work properly and equipment for the generation, transfer and measurement of such currents and fields falling under the categories set out in Annex IA of European Parliament and Council Directive 2002/96/EC on waste electrical and electronic equipment and designed for use with a voltage rating not exceeding 1,000 volt for alternating current and 1,500 volt for direct current;

Yes. That definitely includes inert plastic with encrypted digital information on it (aka a dvd or cd with MS Office or Halo3 on it - take yer pick). Although, if you were particularly pedantic an Xbox game does rely on “electric currents or electromagnetic fields in order to work properly”. But only if you are being RIDICULOUSLY pedantic. I am pedantic. I’m renowned for it. Even I wouldn’t stretch things that far…

Either way it is an avoidable and undesirable process outcome, and as it is happening inconsistently it is embarrasing. . It is particularly irksome given that Amazon are basing a Customer Service Call Centre in Cork and have a Service and Operations centre in Dublin and have been applauded by our Government for their investments.. Amazon’s relocation from Slough to Ireland was caught by the BEEB…

I’ve posted on this previously and these posts can be found under the Amazon-Inania category on this blog.

Hmmm… perhaps I should have wished for that time machine after all. I keep missing deadlines for the Science Week thing.

Today’s question is “What invention has helpd you most with your working life”

As my job centres on computing and computery things many people would expect me to say “the computer” or “d’Internet”. But Babbage’s calculating engine and its descendants are just fripperies when compared to other inventions that I might mention.

Booze is another possiblity, given its ability to unlock creative thought processes so that complex problems fall away in a “moment of clarity”. But I suspect that , overall, it may have hindered me more than helped given the fuzzy headed hangovers and general making a tit of myself at Christmas Parties when I was a younger man (ie up to last Christmas).

However, when I think about the nature of my job and my working life since mid-way through college, I realise that the majority (if not all) of my career has dealt with clearly defining and structuring problems in a way that results in clearly defined and structured solutions becoming possible. Take away my computer and I can still do that. Take away my booze and I can still do that, but I’ll have a much more muted celebration afterwards (”yippee, mine’s a tea please”). Ultimately my career has been about structure and communication.

To that end I’d like to nominate a combination invention… the dry-wipe whiteboard and the non-permanent marker. With these I can

• do complex analysis of problems
• define project structures
• prioritise work plans for my team
• diagram for my Masters students the complex set of transactions that resulted in the collapse of enron
• Map root causes of process failures
• Draw funny faces
• Write project acronyms or codenames that will never see the light of day, but which everyone in the meeting finds hilarious
• and so many more…

And then when I’m done or when I find we’ve gone down a dead end I can just wipe the whole lot off. When I have a notes worth doing something with they can then be transcribed to Word, MSProject or PowerPoint and a fully formed idea can then be communicated to others.

Also, I must not forget the smell of the markers.

A close second place would be flipcharts and post-it notes, for similar but less ecologically friendly reasons.

Yes, there are lovely technologies out there that I could nominate. However most of them simply technologise the type of creative process that can be had with a humble whiteboard and marker.

Just for the LOVE of GOD and ALL THAT IS FRICKIN’ HOLY please don’t use permanent markers on the whiteboard. People who do should be shot, treated with the best medical care until they are able to stand up again and then be shot a second time.

Curses. I missed the deadline for yesterday’s competition over on Mulley.net to win a Wii in National Science week.

I will not make the same mistake twice. Today’s question is “What invention would you like to see most in the future?“.

Given I missed yesterday’s deadline I was tempted to go for a TARDIS or similar time travel machine (not a De Lorean as Simon would probably try to open the gull wing doors to make it fly, thus not breaking the “rules of the game”). However I dismissed this as that would open up the whole time travellers paradox… If I’d posted and been in with a chance to win the Wii would I have wished for a time machine to bring me back in time to post and win the Wii and if I hadn’t would I have won or would the original timeline have continued on.. (ohhh my brain hurts after that).

I then thought about Giant Killer Robots (ideally made of gold). However Roosta beat me to it. Curses. Perhaps I should ask for my time machine?

However a more mature pondering of the question made me consider my commuting and the implications for future family life (I live in Wexford, work in Dublin) and my carbon foot print (I tend to travel to the UK and US a few times a year to speak at conferences) and the fact that it took a colleague 2.5 hours to get from Swords to the city centre yesterday due to the buses - or specifically the lack thereof.

So the invention I’d most like to see in the future is a transporter like wot they have on Star Trek. My commute to the office would be a lot shorter (speed of light vs speed of bus eireann), I could zip back to wexford for lunch with the family, work late for my wage-masters and be back home for tea and tucking in etc. And my colleague would be able to get from Swords to Dublin before he has to turn around again and retire.

And I’d never have to deal with Ryanair’s baggage allowance or Baggage manglers handlers ever again.

Yup. Transporters it is. And interestingly we are getting closer to this technology… extend the range and move from simple matter to slightly overweight bloggers.