I’m a voracious reader and idea gatherer. This is the problem I’m facing now. Tweetdeck/twitter has put a massive pool of people at my disposal who are sticking post-it notes under my nose every few seconds saying “Hey, you might like this. Click through and read it”. And I do. And I get lost in clicks-ville as I wander through related content.

So I use Instapaper. A lot. It synchs to my kindle (I’m such a hipster). My good friend @tupp_ed put me onto it. I also use Evernote and Microsoft OneNote (depending on what I’m reading – different files for different contexts etc.). So, when I see something on a website I like I click the “Read Later” or “Send to …” widget and ping… I don’t need to read any more than the first few lines of the article. It even works on my iphone. And on the twitter client on my iphone at that. Often I don’t even open the link when it comes into me on my iOS client. I just “Read Later” and huzzah I am done until I download a tonne of stuff to read on Saturday morning over a gallon of coffee and a sausage or six.

But not on Tweetdeck on my computer. On Tweetdeck I have to open the link in a browser. This is the problem. I pull the post-it note my friend has sent me and then I pull up the reference. And I read it. And invariably I wind up reading all of it. And any related content. And then it is suddenly Thursday and the deadline that was small and manageable has become a big hairy gurner that I need to  disengage from my family to tackle.

This is a weakness in Tweetdeck. One that I am finding it harder to work with. Other twitter clients integrate Instapaper (or Evernote or similar services). Tweetdeck is an isolated island that needs me to walk across a bridge into time-suck land to even begin to integrate it into the way that I want to work with my knowledge suck tendencies.

So. I’ll keep using Tweetdeck for a few months but will be trying out other services in the meantime. Once I find a service that can be a Platform-For-Me I’ll blog about why. But right now my general wish list is:

• Needs to let me manage business, personal, and volunteer tweeting in one place
• Needs to let me sling links to Instapaper, Evernote etc. easily (no double lifting to get the content to my kindle for reading days)
• If it can hook into the other tools I’m using to help run my business and my personal life all the better.
• In using it I need to be able to ensure that my company isn’t going to fall foul of any personal data winding up in places it shouldn’t, so Safe Harbor/Safe Country requirements under EU Data Protection laws are a consideration.
• It must not have a learning curve that requires mountaineering gear or a rocket pack to climb

Not too much to ask I hope.

At my suggestion, Dolan O’Hagan (the editor) provided the text of the clarification (which ran in the print edition two weeks ago but never made it online until today) for me to post here to close the loop so to speak. I’ve made the font bigger for the quote so that the text can be more clearly seen.

In an article published on January 16 headlined "Public decries closure of embassy to the Vatican" it was stated in the opening paragraph that  the embassy closure "was met with overwhelming opposition from the public with over 93% criticising the move".
The Irish Examiner would like to clarify that it was, in fact, 93% of those who had written to the Dept of Foreign Affairs in the immediate aftermath of the announcement who had voiced opposition to the move – a fact reflected later in the story but not in the opening paragraph due to a copy review error.

While I differ slightly on the claim that the latter part of the story reflected accurately the level of actual uproar about the Vatican closure (I feel that the section in question required some close reading to understand the actual sample size involved which the 93% referred to), I welcome the statement from the Irish Examiner that does go a substantial way to clarifying the issue. I look forward to seeing the promised amendments and clarifications in the on-line edition soon, and once that happens I’ll be gladly closing my complaint with the Press Ombudsman.

Of course, there is an important lesson for anyone producing information that is distributed through multiple outlets – an error may need to be corrected in a timely fashion in multiple locations. As such you will need to know when and where that information was disseminated and what control you have over getting the facts corrected.

(Indeed, under the Data Protection Acts if a Data Controller is informed of an inaccuracy in personal data they have to inform anyone they shared that data with in the previous 12 months who in turn must notify anyone they shared it with etc. Frankly it’s turtles all the way down until the data universe is as correct as it can be made).

Now my hope is that, with the correction on the part of the Irish Examiner, the other publications which picked up the 93% rallying cry will in turn correct their copy so that it reflects the reality of the situation, not hyperbole caused by an error in review.

In my professional capacity I am a member of a number of professional associations and have a number of professional certifications, all of which have an ethics element which, amongst other things, requires me to respect copyright and to give credit to the works of others when I am using them.

As a presenter I’ve experienced flying in economy class to far flung places to see the person in front of me on the agenda ripping off the presentation I was just about to give because he’d come into possession of an earlier version of my slides from a previous event (in that case I just changed my presentation and explained to the audience why while the guy sat in the front row looking for an emergency exit – perhaps repeatedly saying how much I agreed with his points might have been laying it on to thick).

But the SI that is about to be signed into law is just nuts, aimed solely in my opinion at propping up a dying business model in which KPI indicators that were perfectly valid 10 years ago are falling and rather than pull the levers and turn the knobs in their own business model and evolve, an industry lobby is seeking to pull levers and turn knobs in society as a whole and create a time machine that puts the smoke of 20 years of technology evolution back in the bottle.

I teach and consult on-site with clients. I have also been published in dead-tree formats. e-learning and on-line tutorials and coaching, blogs, internet based publications, e-books all challenge that business model. So is my response to lobby hard for legislation and burn cash in litigation to reverse the universe? No. I’m not a moron. I embrace the opportunities for new business models that the Web provides. I look to build a Platform Business (to borrow from my friend Phil Simon) and I seek to develop new ways to distribute and monetise my services and my knowledge. (So expect to see some things developing from my business over the next few months)

That the Irish Music Industry has strong armed the Government into rushing bad law in in a bad way is irksome in the extreme. That a mortally wounded industry has been able to bully (and yes, I do feel that the approach taken amounts to bullying) a Government into bringing in legislation of a kind that a vibrant and growing industry sector (that would be the Interwebs and Cloud) had lobbied and campaigned against successfully in the US only a few weeks ago galls me. That it is happening when the legal position in Europe has evolved and the clear message from TWO EU Commissioners (including the Vice-President of the Commission) is that Internet Blocking is not an option in Europe (ergo the Commission would be unlikely to penalise Ireland for not having it in place) just sickens me.

But what really sticks in my craw is the pantomime of a Dail debate that we saw last night which makes a mockery of parliamentary democracy in this country. A debate where a perfectly workable alternative piece of legislation that achieves largely the same objectives while balancing the needs and interests of the ISPs (who were NOT consulted or engaged with when the original SI was being prepared) was basically ignored.

The debate highlighted how out of touch with their electorate the Government is. Dismissing people who WRITE to you as “key board warriors” is insulting and disingenuous to say the least. I am a keyboard warrior and proud of it. I use my keyboard to effect change in organisations, educate and inform. It is my TOOL. Just as my grandfathers’ tools were pens and typewriters (for one) and trowels and plaster (for the other). My keyboard (and my website) is my own personal printing press with a scope, scale, and reach that Guttenberg could never have imagined.

Bad law, introduced badly, by people who don’t grasp the basics of what they are seeking to regulate and control, with an arrogant dismissiveness of comment and debate from the political class (with notable exceptions) has the makings of a total trainwreck.

As an aside, when I first raised concerns last year about the Fine Gael website I was dismissed  as being “only a blogger”. This keyboard warrior was right, so the track record of arrogant dismissiveness from Government parties has not been good on things internet related.

So I contacted my Government party TDs by phone this morning to express my dissatisfaction. If my keyboard won’t be listened to then I’d better start using my voice.

When I was Director of Publicity of the IAIDQ one of the challenges at this time of the year was preparing the end of year email blast to members and our supporters. The challenge came in the fact that we were dealing with a variety of countries and cultures as an International organisation, and as an organisation that has Community and mutual respect as core values we didn’t want to piss anyone off by expressing Festive cheer in an overly Anglo-saxon Christian-orientated manner.

After all, even Atheists eat turkey, visit friends and watch classic movies at this time of year.

This year, having spent a few sessions helping a client prepare a number of staff for the IQCP certification next year I sat pondering yesterday the MDM challenges posed by the concept of an end of year ritual event that is celebrated across multiple cultures and in many different ways and on varying date ranges within a reasonably defined window of time.

What is the valid range of domain values that label the thing what is being celebrated at the end of December/early January?

So, for a bit of festive fun I’m going to run a competition. Commenters to this post should leave a list (make sure to check it twice) of the domain value labels that they would consider as describing the festivities. Terms like “Holidays” and “Festive Season” are not allowed as they are labels for the domain itself, we’re looking for the values within that domain.

I welcome contributions from different languages, cultures, creeds etc., and if there is a specific date for the celebration in question please add it.

In early 2012 (after the turkey has been devoured and the batteries in my daughter’s toys have finally expired) I’ll pick a winner. The prize will be awarded for a combination of completeness and amusement-value (which is why Jim Harris will have to submit under a pseudonym), and the final winner will be picked randomly from a short list.

The prize will be a copy of The Age of the Platform by my good friend Mr Phil Simon.

Ho Ho Ho.

However, despite the statement from Facebook and the positive tone adopted by the Irish Data Protection Commissioner in media comment, this was not a clean bill of health for Facebook. This was a statement of gaps, with a clear message that the gaps need to be addressed rapidly in advance of a July 2012 rematch. Facebook may not have a bloodied lip from this encounter but the organisation has had (yet another) wake up call to the need to do Privacy better and to do it by design rather than happy accident.

Of course, the Data Protection Commissioner does not come off unscathed in this report either. On my reading of the report there were a number of instances where the operation of Facebook processes contravened either the Data Protection Acts or the ePrivacy regulations. Each of these instances represented a cluster of prosecutable events. But this opportunity seems to have been missed, or at best deferred until another day. As a Privacy professional I am somewhat disappointed by this apparent failure to push the agenda resulting in a somewhat limp, albeit broadly welcomed, outcome.

The key question is What next?

Facebook has given undertakings to the DPC to have taken certain actions by January and to have completed or be demonstrably progressing other actions by July 2012. Will the DPC issue enforcement notices in 2012 if these undertakings have not been complied with?

Will we see the David of the Data Protection Commission (total staff less than 20 and a total budget in 2009/2010 of less than €1.5million to run a Data Protection Authority in a country that is host to some of the most complex data processing companies in the world and wants to entice more in) staring down the giant of Facebook armed only with the pebble of SI336 of 2011 and the slingshot of the Data Protection Acts 1988 and 2003? Given that Facebook’s global turnover is estimated at being in the region of US$1.5 billion. Given that their recent settlement with the FTC requires them to keep their privacy nose clean, they would doubtless fight any prosecution to the fullest as it affects their core business.

So, our under resourced, under funded, and increasingly overstretched Data Protection Commissioner seems to be wisely avoiding fights that it would find costly to win. But in this it is possible that they are playing for time.

While the national government here seems to have been happy to long finger Data Protection reforms (to the point that we were 8 years late enacting the legislation to support Directive 95/46/EC) the noises from the European Commission are that the long awaited revised Directive will actually arrive in January as a Regulation. This will change the nature of the DPC’s role as they will become in effect the local outpost of a larger, more standardised and federalised Data Protection regime.

This will result in larger penalties for breaches. It will also introduce increased requirements for transparency around data processing, including clearer obtaining of consent and clearer documentation of internal controls and processes.

All of which are elements of the findings in the Facebook Audit.

The next question is What now?

The Data Protection Commissioner has stated that this report is the beginning of a longer term and long running series of engagements with Facebook. In other words, they will be working them over regularly to raise standards. With the Regulation expected to take until 2014 to come into full effect, this would give ample time to fix the problems that have been found thus far and any new balls of crazy that the Facebook cat would care to spit out on our collective shoes.

Of course, this would require the Government to step up to the plate and properly resource the DPC and begin to promote Ireland as a good place to run compliant businesses. The era of light touch/no touch regulation of Data Protection needs to come to an end as we move into the era of Balanced Privacy.

The recent publication of the Cloyne Report highlighted still further that there was a clear policy of non-cooperation and basic lip service being paid to child protection standards within many areas of the Irish Roman Catholic church, at the initiation of, with the support of, and with the backing of the Vatican State’s senior diplomat to Ireland, the Papal Nuncio. That this culture has spanned the tenure of multiple holders of the post over the past number of years (Guiseppe Lazzarotto [Nuncio from 2000 to 2007] blocked cooperation with inquiries on the grounds that ‘diplomatic channels had not been used’, Luciano Storero [Nuncio from 1995 to 2000] warned Bishops against implementing measures requiring mandatory reporting of child abuse) speaks to an institutional failure on the part of the diplomatic representatives of a foreign state to respect the laws of the Irish State and co-operate with enquiries into horrific cases of systemic and systematic abuse.

And that is why I was only too happy to help Simon out. It’s not that I am anti-religion, anti-church, anti-priest, or anti-catholic. Those who know me well know my personal beliefs. I don’t feel it is relevant to share them here, because in parallel with my personal religious and philosophical beliefs I have a very strong belief that international relations between States must be grounded on trust, or at least respect. I do not believe it is acceptable for a diplomatic representative to place themselves above or outside the law of this State without there being clear consequences for the office holder and the office itself.

Had the Danish Ambassador conspired systemically to block investigations into the alleged criminal activities of Danish citizens I’d be calling for him to be expelled as well.

The fact that the Papal Nuncio holds a special senior position in the Diplomatic Corps in Ireland is doubly troubling to me. The Nuncio is the Dean of the Diplomatic Corps, effectively feted as the most senior diplomat on the Ferro Rocher circuit. And all while the office of the Nuncio has, for over two decades, facilitated the breaking of Irish laws and conspired to block and frustrate investigations of those alleged offences.

So. What I’m asking the Irish Government to do is to take action to remove the special standing of the Papal Nuncio immediately. They should then take the necessary steps to expel the Ambassador from the Vatican City State (the legal entity not the religious body).

Finally, the Irish Government should also withdraw the invitation to the Pope to visit. Bluntly, we can’t afford it as the return on investment compared to other State visits from countries with diplomatic representation here simply isn’t there. When the Pope visited the UK it cost over GBP12 million (EURO14 million) before the policing costs were factored in. The combined visits of Obama and the Queen came to around €30 million in total.

The United States as a population of over 300 million people. Fair enough only around 15% of them have passports, but that’s still a potential pool of 45 million travellers who might stop off in Ireland on their vacations. The UK has around 62 million people sitting a 1hr Ryanair flight away from us. So, the potential pool of possible tourists who can come from the UK and US as a result of the State visits in May is around 100 million people. So, it would have cost us €0.30 per head to target that population.

The Vatican has a population of 826 people (source: CIA Factbook). Spending €12million on securing the Pope’s visit would cost us €14528 per capita to sell Ireland as a tourist destination to the population of the Vatican. Even if it cost us a quarter of what was spent on the UK visit, we’d still be spending over €3,000 per potential traveller to sell into a market that I’m sure Failte Ireland are already reaching through their advertising spend in Italy.

The process (as I understand it) is this.

1. A person goes onto torrent site and seeds a torrent with copyright protected material.
2. As part of seeding the torrent, their IP address is published in the torrent service.
3. A 3rd party company monitors torrents and flags to eircom IP addresses and details of copyrighted materials that are being seeded.
4. eircom checks the IP addresses provided against the IP addresses in use by customers at the time of the seeding and a letter is produced informing the customer that copyright protected content was being distributed illegally via their account. They are given three chances to prevent this distribution before their account is suspended.

So. What is happening here? An illegal act is being committed in a public place (IP addresses are published in the torrent service). This public data is passed to an ISP who seeks to associate the IP address with a named ‘controller’ of the service, who is then advised that an illegal act was committed using their service and advising them to ensure that the activity ceases.  Music labels are not told of the offenders. Personal data of eircom customers is not transferred to music labels.

No data is passed about individual customers to any 3rd party by eircom. eircom acts on public data compiled and processed by a 3rd party on their behalf. Eircom processes this information in order to enforce sections 5.5 and 5.6 of the Terms and Conditions which govern their Broadband service.

The analogy I would draw is with the system for enforcing speed limits using traffic cameras. If your car is on the motorway doing 135kmh and you are snapped by a traffic camera in a GATSO van operated by a private company working on behalf of the authorities, your car registration number and the record of the speed you were doing when snapped is sent for processing against the vehicle licensing database which associates the registration number with a named person (the registered owner of the car). A few weeks after you are snapped you receive a letter in the post with a copy of the photograph, details of the speed, and details of the fine you will have to pay.

An illegal act, in a public place, where a publicly visible identifier can be recorded, which can then be associated with other information to identify the nominated responsible person for the conduct of that vehicle. The parallel is, at least to me, very clear.

It is also very clear that in both the Broadband case and the Traffic camera case that there are certain evidentiary controls that need to be in place to ensure that data is being processed fairly and accurately and appropriate safeguards need to be in place to ensure that data is not processed or disclosed unlawfully.

For example, eircom recently had an issue where a number of customers received warning letters about downloading which did not relate to them. The root cause was a failure of a server to update to Summer Time from Daylight Savings time, meaning the timestamps associated with IP addresses were out by an hour. Accurate timestamping and recording of location data of traffic cameras is also important, as the Australian State of New South Wales and the US  city of Long View discovered recently.

Of course, it is important to point out that eircom did not send personal data about Customer A to Customer B. They simply attributed, erroneously, the actions of Customer A to Customer B.

The Data Protection Acts do not provide a shield behind which people who commit offences can hide. The right to Privacy is not an absolute one and must be balanced. So long as the processing of the data is done in a manner which does not infringe privacy or result in unwarranted disclosure of personal data companies have a legitimate interest in ensuring that they can enforce the terms and conditions of contracts that are entered into.

Where people chose to commit an illegal act in a public manner, or where through neglect or lack of domestic control they allow such acts to be committed, then a polite but firm reminder of their duties as parties to the contract is to be expected. Where that reminder is provided without personal data being disclosed to 3rd parties (as was the case previously) then this is a half-way house that balances competing rights but which must be kept under constant scrutiny to ensure that there is no scope creep, function spread, leakage or abuse.

At 12:32 today Vodafone Ireland contacted me on Twitter (after I’d posted a few tweets back to this post) and Daz on that team is looking into the situation. As of 13:09, apparently they have managed to secure stock in a local Vodafone store for me.  (Why they couldn’t do this on FRIDAY or any other time I’ve rung them over the past few weeks, or when I went into that shop on Friday, baffles me).

I’ve indicated I’m holding off going switching until 13:30 today.

But it appears that to get Vodafone to actually give a shit you have to be either a non-customer who they wish to woo or a high “cost-to-service” complainer who goes very public with problems. That too is just plain insane CRM, which results in people like Steven (who I spoke to on Friday) and Daz having to bear the brunt of customer issues that COULD BE AVOIDED with a bit of sanity.

I fully accept that Vodafone have supply issues with the iPhone4 (which no other network seems to have BTW). It makes sense to ration the supply and impose some restrictions. But to completely block existing customers from the upgrade makes no strategic sense (unless Voda want to get rid of existing iphone customers to other networks). This is particularly the case for Voda who will soon have a lot of customers who took the 3Gs when it came out on Vodafone looking to upgrade after 12 months on an 18month contract (thereby locking them in to another contract).

A better approach might be to:

• Require new customers to enter into a longer contract (“Hey, you can have it. But it is in short supply so you’ll need to give us your soul for 6 months longer to get it”).
• Allow customers who have been with you less than 24 months to get it but only if they go for certain tariffs.
• Allow existing customers who are over 24 months on contract to upgrade as normal.

Supply is rationed. Everyone can GET the phone, but existing customers in good standing have a reward for not churning out to competitor.

Of course, Vodafone now have the issue that I’m pissed off. And publicly so.

Just getting me the iphone isn’t going to be enough now (I know I can get it with 3). So there will now be an additional retention cost to be built into the deal (which would be on top of the 1 month credit I’d already been offered due to other screw ups on my account).

THIS IS AN AVOIDABLE COST, or would have been if they hadn’t had such crappy customer service up to this point. Now it is pretty much required as I can get the same phone for cheaper cost and similar cost per month on the other network, with whom I have no current frustration (Vodafone on the other hand have

• left me with the wrong SIM card type for the phone I have
• failed to properly activate my mobile broadband dongle when I upgraded it late last year
• failed to keep my personal data accurate and up to date as per the Data Protection Acts
• failed the attitude test about the iphone upgrade)
• send me direct marketing pieces addressed to “Ms Daragh O Brien”

By having a screwed up CRM strategy for existing customers, Vodafone have put themselves in the position where they are now negotiating with me to stay, not simply handing me some forms and taking my money.

I give you “DATA” by Derek and the Dominoes.

What will you do when you get data

Loaded into your new BI?

You’ve been running reports

that don’t make sense for too long

but you can’t blame your poor BI.

Data, you’ve got me on my knees

Data, I’m begging darlin’ please.

Data, darlin’ won’t you ease my worried mind.

I tried to get some information.

But the data lets me down.

Like a fool, I fell in love with you,

But the duff  data turns my whole world upside down

Data, you’ve got me on my knees

Data, I’m begging darlin’ please.

Data, darlin’ won’t you ease my worried mind.

Let’s make the best of the information.

Before I finally go insane

please don’t say we’ll never find a way

or tell me that all BI’s in vain

Data, you’ve got me on my knees

Data, I’m begging darlin’ please.

Data, darlin’ won’t you ease my worried mind.

Of course, if we look further into the archives we can find references to poor quality information dotted through the master works of the blues greats.

• BB King’s under rated “The referential integrity’s gone”, later rereleased as “The Thrill is gone”
• John Lee Hooker’s “I’d got my data workin’ (but it just don’t work on you)”, a song about a failed data migration later reworked and re-released as “I’ve got my Mojo workin’”.
• Robert Johnson’s lost recording “I’ve got Data on my mind”.
• The Blues Brothers “Everybody needs some data (to love)”.

Even older than that, a 7 year old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote the timeless classic “Twinkle Twinkle little infomraiton record, how I wonder how complete and consistent you are“. Unfortunately his father made him rewrite it as a childish ditty about the stars. Astronomy’s gain was our loss.

The list is endless, proving that the struggle with quality information to drive business value is as timeless as good music.

It is a timely topic given the contribution that poor quality information played in the sub-prime mortgage collapse in the US. While a degree of magical thinking is also to blame (“what, I can just say I’m a CEO with €1million and you’ll take my word for it?”), ultimately the risks that poor quality information posed to down stream processes and decisions  were not effectively managed even if they were actually recognised.

Listening to the NAMA (twitter hash-tag #nama) debate on-line yesterday (and following it on the excellent liveblog.ie I couldn’t help but think about the “Happy path” thinking that seems to be prevailing and how similar it is to the Happy Path thinking that pervaded the CRM goldrush of the late 1990s and early 2000′s, and the ERP and MDM bandwagons that have trundled through a little place I call “ProjectsVille” in the intervening years.

(note to people checking Wikipedia links above… Wikipedia, in its wisdom, seems to class CRM, ERP and MDM as “IT” issues. That’s bullshit frankly and doesn’t reflect the key lessons learned from painful failures over the years in many companies around the world. While there is an IT component to implementing solutions and excuting  projects, these are all fundamentally part of core business strategy and are a business challenge. )

But I digress….

Basically, at the heart of every CRM project, ERP project or MDM project is the need to create a “Single View of Something”, be it this bizarre creature called a “Customer” (they are like Yeti.. we all believe they exist but no-one can precisely describe or define them), or “Widget” or other things that the Business needs to know about to, well… run the business and survive.

This involves taking data from multiple sources and combining them together in a single repository of facts. So if you have  999 seperate Access databases and 45000 spreadsheets with customer  data on them and data about what products your customers have bought, ideally you want to be boiling them down to one database of customers and one database of products with links between them that tell you that Customer 456  has bought 45000 of Widget X in the last 6 months and likes to be phoned after 4:30pm on Thursdays and prefers to be called ‘Dave’ instead of “Mr Rodgers”, oh… and theyhan’t got around to paying you for 40,000 of those widgets yet.

(This is the kind of thing that Damien Mulley referred to recently as a “Golden Database”.)

NAMA proposes to basically take the facts that are known about a load of loans from multiple lenders, put them all together in a “Single View of Abyss” (they’d probably call it something else) and from that easily and accurately identify underperforming and non-performing loans and put the State in the position where it can ultimately take the assets on which loans were secured or for which loans were acquired if the loans aren’t being repaid.

Ignoring the economists’ arguments about the approach, this sounds very much like a classic CRM/MDM problem where you have lots of source data sets and want to boil them down to three basic sets of facts:

• Property or other assets affected by loans (either used as security or purchased using loans)
• People or companies who borrowed those monies
• Information about the performance of those loans.

Ideally then you should be able to ask the magic computermebob to tell you exactly what loans Developer X has, and what assets are those loans secured on.

This is Happy Path.

Some statistics now to give you an insight into just how crappy the crappy path can be.

• An Accenture study a few years ago found that over 70% of CRM implementations had failed to deliver on the promised “Single View of Customer”
• Bloor Research in 2007 found that 84% of all ERP data migrations fail (either run over time, over budget or fail to integrate all the data) because of problems with the quality of the data
• As recently as last month, Gartner Group reported that 75% of CFOs surveyed felt that poor quality information was a direct impediment to achieving business goals.

Examples of problems that might occur

Address Data (also known as “Postcode postcode wherefore art thou postcode?”)

Ireland is one of the few countries that lacks a postcode system. This means that postal addresses in Ireland are, for want of a better expression, fuzzy.

Take for example one townland in Wexford called Murrintown. only it’s not. It has been for centuries as far as the locals are concerned but according to the Ordnance Survey and the Place Names commission, the locals don’t know how to spell. All the road signs have “Murntown”.

Yes,  An Post has the *koff* lovely */koff* Geodirectory system which is the nearest thing to an address standard database we have in Ireland. Of course, it is designed and populated to supprt the delivery of letter post. As a result, many towns and villages have been transposed around the country as their “Town” from a postal perspective is actually their nearest main sorting office.

Ballyhaunis in County  Mayo is famously logged in Geodirectory as being in Co. Roscommon. This results in property being occasionally misfiled.

There are also occasionally typographical errors and transcription errors in data in data. For example, some genius put an accented character into the name of the development I live in in Wexford which means that Google Maps, Satnavs and other cleverness can’t find my address unless I actually screw it up on purpose.