One of the key points that overlaps between Data Protection and Information Quality is where he tells us that

Data is the pollution problem of the Information Age.  It stays around, it has to dealt with and its secondary uses are what concerns us. Just as… … we look back at the the beginning of the previous century and sort of marvel at how the titans of industry in the rush to build the industrial age would ignore pollution, I think… … we will be judged by our grandchildren and great-grandchildren by how well we dealt with data, with individuals and their relationships to their data, in the information society.

This echoes the Peter Drucker comment that I reference constantly in talks and with clients of my company where Drucker said that

So far, for 50 years, the information revolution has centered on data—their collection, storage, transmission, analysis, and presentation. It has centered on the “T” in IT.  The next information revolution asks, what is the MEANING of information, and what is its PURPOSE?

Bruce raises a number of other great points, such as how as a species we haven’t adapted to what is technically possible and the complexity of control is the challenge for the individual, with younger people having to make increasingly complex and informed decisions about their privacy and what data they put where and why (back to meaning and purpose).

I really like his points on the legal economics of Information and Data. In college I really enjoyed my “Economics of Law” courses and I tend to look at legalistic problems through an economic prism (after all, the law is just another balancing mechanism for human conduct). I like them so much I’m going to park my thoughts on them for another post.

But, to return to Bruce’s point that Data is the pollution problem of the Information age, I believe that that statement is horribly true whether we consider data privacy/protection or Information Quality. How much of the crud data that clutters up organisations and sucks resources away from the bottom line is essentially the toxic slag of inefficient and “environmentally unfriendly” processes and business models? How much of that toxic waste is being buried and ignored rather than cleaned up or disposed of with care?

Is Information Quality Management a “Green” industry flying under a different flag?

Unfortunately the partner organisation seemed to lack an understanding of the what’s, why’s, when’s, and how’s of their data. This was perplexing as, nice and all as a blank canvas is, sometimes you need to have a sense of the landscape to draw your conclusions against.
The engagement I had from the partner organisation was focussed on their need to be able to take certain steps if certain circumstances came to pass. While the focus on the goal was commendable, it served to generate tunnel vision on the part of the partner that put a significantly valuable project at risk.
Goals and objectives (why) are all well and good. But Knowledge Workers need to be able to link these to processes (how) and information needs (what). Deming famously said that if you can’t describe what you are doing as a process then you don’t know what you are doing. I’d go further and say that if you can’t identify the data and information you need to do what you are doing then you can’t be doing it- at least not without massively increased costs and risks (particularly of non-compliance with regulations).
In the end I made some assumptions about the what’s and how’s of the partner organisation’s processes in order to meet the goal that they had focussed on so narrowly.
That enabled me to map out an approach to data protection compliance based on a “minimum necessary” principle. And that got my client and their partner over the hump.
But, from an information quality perspective, not being able to answer the why/why/how questions means you can’t set meaningful measures of “fitness for purpose”. If you don’t know what facts are needed you don’t know if information is missing. if you don’t know what use data will be put to you can’t possibly tell if it is accurate enough.

So, both Data Protection and Information Quality require people to know the what/why/how questions about their information to allow any meaningful outcome to ensue. If you can’t answer those questions you simply cannot be doing business.
To paraphrase Deming – we need to work on our processes, not their outcome.

• Complying with EU Data Protection regulations
• Ensuring Data Migrations actually succeed
• Enabling timely reporting of Regulatory risks

My mantra in these contexts seems to be distilling down to two bald statements:

• It’s the Information, Stupid.
• Profile early, profile often.

But what do I mean by “Data Profiling”? For the purposes of these conversations, I defined “Data Profiling” as being the analysis of the structure and content of  a data set against some pre-defined business rules and expectations. For example, we may want to know how many (or what percentage) of records in a data set are missing key data, or how many have inconsistencies in the data, or how many potential duplicates  there are in the data.

Why is this of benefit? While a journey of a 1000 miles starts with a single step, that journey must start from somewhere and be headed somewhere. The destination is encapsulated in the expected business rule outcomes and expectations. These outcomes and expectations are often defined by external factors such as Regulatory requirements (e.g. the need to keep information up to date under EU Data Protection principles, or the need to track bank accounts of minors in AML processes) or the strategic objectives of the organisation. The starting point is, therefore, a snapshot of how close you are (or how far you are) from your destination.

In my conversations, I advised people (none of whom were overly familiar with Information Quality principles or tools) that they should consider investing in a tool that allows them to build and edit and maintain Data Profiling rules and run them automatically. Regular Information Quality geeks will probably guess that the next thing I told them was about  how the profile snapshots could provide a very clear dashboard of how things are in the State of Data in their organisations.

Just as, when we are embarking on our journey of 1000 miles, it makes sense for us to regularly check our map against the landmarks to make sure we are heading in the right direction. The alternative is to meander down cul de sacs and dead end trails. Which equates in Information Management terms to wasted investment and scrap and rework. So, profile early and profile often seems to be a good philosophy to live by.

By applying  business rules that relate to your regulatory compliance, risk management, or data migration objectives, you can make Information Quality directly relevant to the goals of the organisation, increasing the likelihood of any changes you bring in becoming “part of the way things get done around here” rather than “yet another darned thing we have to do”.  Quality for the sake of quality was a luxury even in the pre-recession period. In today’s economy it is more important than ever to demonstrate clear value.

And that is the real profoundity of profiling. Without it you can’t actually know the true value of your Information Asset or determine if your current course of action might turn your Asset into a Liability.

It’s the Information, Stupid. So Profile Early and Profile Often.

Visit the radio station website (NewsTalk.ie, tell them your name, your address, your email address, your 3 favourite bands and your favourite foods and a piece of plastic featuring a picture of the host will wend its way to your door.

Simple.

At least it is unless you step back and think about the process from the point of view of Data Protection principles.

Personal data must be obtained and processed fairly for specific purposes. What are the purposes for which NewsTalk wants my personal data? If it is just to send me a card then we walk right into another issue – information gathered should not be excessive to that purpose.

So, if you are just sending me a card, why do you need to know my music and food preferences?

Sensitive personal data, such as data pertaining to medical conditions or political beliefs or ethnic origins is treated with more seriousness under the Data Protection Act. So, depending on the responses to those questions about music and favourite foods, sensitive personal data could be being processed.

The explanation of the loyalty card scheme that is on the NewsTalk website is great and in keeping with the light hearted nature of Tom’s show. However it doesn’t go far enough in explaining or setting out the purposes for which the data is being captured.

Other issues arise as a result of processing personal data via a website, such as the legal requirement to have a privacy policy displayed on the site and the data protection requirements of keeping the data safe and secure and only keeping it for as long as it is needed for the specified purpose. I’ll explore these in later posts.

It is all too easy to fall foul of the simple rules that exist to ensure trust and transparency in how personal data can be processed. Prior planning can ensure that Compliance is an enabler of business and customer interaction rather than a nagging fear of being caught dragging at your actions.

Taking out your Nudie Pen and mapping out what your information objectives, purposes, etc. are (see this tutorial on my company website for an example) is time well spent to make sure you aren’t creating a rod to beat yourself with. Using your Nudie pen to sign up for some Data Protection Training (such as that offered by the Irish Computer Society or my company) would also be a worthwhile step, particularly given the Data Protection Commissioner’s recent findings on the need for the management teams in businesses to be aware of the Data Protection implications of their actions.

The fun part for me of any new mobile phone purchase is playing with the new toy  tool and seeing what it can do that my old one couldn’t. For example, back in the 1990s when I did my first upgrade from my first mobile phone (an ericsson model so old that I actually can’t find it referenced on the internet), I found that the new phone was so much smaller and lighter I was actually able to carry it around.

The irritation I have is when it comes to moving my contacts and synchronising with my various other technologies that hold contact details (laptop, gmail, company address book). Inevitably I wind up with duplication and triplication of contacts. I thought I had the problem licked on the iphone though as there are a number of apps available for managing contact details and reducing duplicates.

However, having spent a few days using them I am unimpressed as they seem to be making a the traditional rookie mistake in de-duping records – assuming that name matching is enough.

My brother and father share a given name and a family name. They have different middle initials, different addresses, different phone numbers, different email addresses (all the stuff that you would have in a contact record on your phone). Each application I tried decided that they were a duplicate entry and merged the records. This was annoying.

In other cases, I have duplicate entries with varying degrees of record completeness. For example, my friend Cathal exists at least 4 times, with one entry having most of his contact details,  with spurious email addresses or social networking nicknames in the others.  The “data quality tool” very kindly merged all the records into the entry that had the least amount of data, and deleting the other records.

Right now I’m considering firing up talend, datanomic, or informatica tools to dedupe a dump from my iphone and reload it to the phone, and then hopefully that will cascade through the rest of my data stores when I synchronise.

But I’ll need to draw a data flow map of all of that to make sure.

Grrrrhhh.

So. If the existing tools for data quality on the iphone are not up to the jobs, what is missing? The good news is that the data sets are fairly clearly structured (once they get into the iphone), so that is less of a concern than the actual processing of matching and consolidation of records.

1. Probability scoring across multiple fields would be nice. If two people have the same name but significantly different contact details then it is very probable they are not the same person. A corollary – if there are two records with the same name and one has contact information and the other record has only a name, chances are they are duplicates.
2. Presentation of matches for review. While the machine can make good guesses where the name and contact details are the same, where there is confusion, the matches should be flagged for a review by the phone user (the “Data Controller”). This way we can avoid having to unpick erroneous matches.
3. Merging of records should be done on a more structured basis, with mapping of fields being user-customisable based on a standard template. I despair of important contact information being dumped into a notes field (it reminds me too much of when I had to try and migrate data out of a Siebel call centre system a few years ago).
4. The matching should be able to cater for multi-lingual input (as phones don’t all live and work in english speaking lands).

There may be other requirements that I am not thinking of here at the moment, but those 4 are a starting point. Perhaps an obliging Data Quality tool vendor will develop an iphone app to a web service for matching contact records.

Personally, I think that having such a service available would help raise awareness of the value of quality non-duplicated contact information to individuals and to organisations.  However, the app on its own isn’t enough as the average smart-phone user may have personal information held in a variety of places and, just like in a large enterprise with lots of data stores, creating a “Single View of Contact” will require you to understand the flow of your contact information around your tools (i.e. does the phone update the laptop and does the laptop synch to google apps and does google apps synch to the phone?) to avoid the cleanup work being undone the next time you plug your phone into your PC.

Information Quality Management poses challenges for the enterprise, but can also create friction for the individual trying to manage something as simple as a list of contacts across multiple information stores.

Do we have an app for that?

The estimated duration of the job was to be about 45 minutes to an hour to hang three fittings. The first two fittings went up in about 20 minutes. The final one, that took us about 4 hours (and as of this morning still isn’t finished. We hadn’t factored on the “creativity” of the electricians who installed the original wiring.

When we opened up the existing light fitting in the living room we were faced with a spaghetti junction of cables. When we wired them into the new light fitting, the light went on but the switch wasn’t controlling it. It seemed we’d wired the light into a loop going somewhere else. We were faced with 5 live wires which had been going into 4 connectors on a connector block. So we had to then test each of the possible live/neutral combinations in turn to find the ones that actually related to the switch (which necessitated our handyman/neighbour having to play with live 240 volt electricity, which is never a good idea).

When we traced the correct cable pair I did a very simple thing. I dug out my label maker and put a label on the cables that related to the lighting circuit in that room. It struck me that that 30 seconds of effort was something that the electrician who wired the house could have easily done when they were installing the cables, making life simpler for him (or her) and for anyone who came after.

We wired everything up and fitted it up for a quick test before finishing the job. I turned the power back on.

Then there was a loud bang and the power went out.

It turned out that there was a break in the live wire we’d just labelled (the important one for the task at hand) slightly further up the cable from where the label was which had pierced through the insulation and come into contact with the metal mounting plate for the light fitting.

As a result, the magic smoke had escaped from the circuit breaker and the light switch.

What had ensued for my neighbourhood handyman and I was instead frustration as  a task which should have taken a half hour stretching into nearly six hours (over 2 days) and additional expense (to the handyman) in replacing the blown components.

To put it another way, for the want of €0.15 of labelling on the part of the original vendor to identify the attributes of the various wires we found (such as “this one runs the lights”), I expended a full half-day of work and the handyman was unavailable for other jobs which would have paid him a lot more than the rate we’d struck for fitting the lights – and that was before the additional cost and complication of having to go to the electrical wholesalers this morning to buy replacement parts and fit them as well.

It struck me that this is a situation we encounter on a regular basis with the information assets of an organisation.

Very often the important data for a given process in a given area is not clearly identified. Management say “give us everything and we’ll figure it out” and call centre screens and web-forms are cluttered with a variety of information capture points.

A failure to understand (or label) the purpose of that information, where it comes from and where it goes to, and its critical path in the business can result in undesired outcomes as soon as anything starts to change in the business, business processes, or technology platform (such as replacing your front end systems with a new one, the nearest analogy I can think of for changing a light fitting).

This results in expended effort on scrap and rework trying to get the blasted thing to work right with the desired outcomes (such as throwing illumination on a problem), and quite often can result in a critical information path way being blown and needing replacement or an internal control process in the business stopping a process.

Of course, things can often be worse in the Information Quality space where the internal controls on quality may not function as efficiently as a circuit breaker and a light switch which have planned failure built in to them to isolate the end user from the dangers of domestic electricity supply. When controls like circuit breakers fail, the results can be… shocking.

Sometimes it is the simplest things that are important, such as knowing what wires relate to the circuit you are fitting a light into, or what items of information are actually critical to the success or failure of a process (both the immediate process and down stream -remember  there were 4 other live wires relating to other circuits that had to be dealt with as well) is a key contributor to the success or failure of any change effort.

What controls do you have to protect your business knowledge workers from the dangers of a high voltage low quality information? Are the mission critical data in your organisation clearly labelled?

I found this on http://www.motivatedphotos.com and it struck me that it is a wonderful metaphor for data integration, information quality, and data governance in many organisations where they are reacting to issues, sustaining silos, or viewing all of this as an IT issue rather than a business challenge, or trying to solve the challenge with series of fragmented department level initiatives.

Thoughts?

For those of you in Ireland who reside under a rock or in a cave or readers from outside of Ireland, Your Country Your Call is a competition/website which has been set up on (apparently) a Charitable basis with backing of  number of organisations who have, until recently, been happy to be completely behind the scenes for what one must assume are laudable reasons grounded in humility, modesty and a sense of service.

The goal of YCYC is to find the magic bullet idea that can trigger a renaissance in the Celtic Tiger. Two prizes are on offer for the people who comes up with two ideas and a fund has been established to help develop these mould breaking concepts into  real industries (not a business… an industry).

Simon has made a number of cogent arguments on Tuppenceworth about the terms and conditions of entry which basically mean that the promoters of YCYC own the winning idea and control the purse strings for the development and direction of the idea. That’s bothersome enough.

My issue with YCYC is that it is actually a wasted opportunity that has the hallmarks of  the level of thinking that got us into the current financial mess that the country is in.  If we hype it it will happen. If we generate a general sense of it being built at some point in the future they will come. The general gist of the response to criticism thus far has not been a million miles from the comments made about people who raised concerns about the Irish economy just before the wheels fell off. Apparently it is unpatriotic to question who is behind this and how they are being funded.

Apparently if we all hold hands and think happy thoughts then, just like Peter Pan, we’ll be able to fly, never grow up, and pick pointless fights with our own shadows.

But I digress. My problem with YCYC is that a large amount of money is being poured into it. It has been confirmed that €2 million is being poured into this, when you take prize funds, the development kitty and the general costs associated with a big media splash.  Even if we are as generous as people are seeming to be and assume that the media splash is being done pro bono, we still have a  figure of around €2 million attached to YCYC (see discussion around this comment on ValueIreland’s website)

What other type of model might YCYC have pursued to more effectively make use of this pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, other than a competition model the terms and conditions of which read to me like the ones associated with a Battle of the Bands or a phone in competition to win a car?

How about beefing up funding to EXISTING supports for entrepreneurship in Ireland such as the County Enterprise Boards, LEADER programmes, or the enterprise incubation programmes associated with the various Universities and Institutes of Technology?

• The upper limit for a feasibility study grant from a CEB is around €5000. That €2million could support 400 studies into new business ideas, each of which would need to have a business model slightly better than “Underpants- Question mark – Profit” to get the funding.
• Funding for graduate entreprenuers through the CORD scheme provides up to €30k in funding to participants on an enterprise incubation scheme through an Institute of Technology or University. The €2 million would fully fund 66 additional CORD places around the country, with enough over for a big bang press launch. Even if the money was only to partially fund these places, it would help support real innovation and entrepreneurship.

I would have to ask why the promoter and financial backers of YCYC decided to by-pass the existing support structures that exist for new business ideas in this country. Is it that the organisers thought the existing structures to be inefficient or broken in some way?

This question is all the more pressing to me given that it seems that a chunk of this money (15%) came from the Irish Government, specifically, it seems, the Dept of Enterprise Trade and Employment. The Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment is the Irish Govt. Department which is responsible for County Enterprise Boards. So, rather than fund them more the Dept seems to have been happy to transfer taxpayer’s money to a private initiative.

At least that is what seems to be suggested by Padraig McKeown’s Twitter reply to Tuppenceworth.ie about which department’s budget the €300k was coming from (warning, you’ll need to scroll down on this to see all the relevant comments). This is also an interesting question given recent comments and posts elsewhere speculating about the future of the County Enterprise Boards.

• €300k from the Department equates to 60 Feasibility study grants or 10 CORD funded Incubation centre places.

I’m sure that someone will row in about now with the argument that the Dept can’t just transfer €300k to the CEBs or to the Incubation Centres willy-nilly. But that is exactly what seems to have happened to facilitate a transfer of €300k to YCYC with no (at least as far as I can see) announcement or fanfare that this was being done.

As for the remaining €1.7million that is in the kitty for YCYC? As each CEB operates as a seperate limited company, there would have been no impediment (that I can see) to these backers simply making the fund available as an Innovation Fund which the CEBs or Incubation Centres could draw on to fund grants and other supports for start-up businesses.

So. I’m left with a sense that Your Country Your Call is:

1. A poorly thought out muddle with a worrying lack of clarity about where issues such as Intellectual Property rights to any idea sit (the Terms & Conditions do seem to be clear that the IP vests to the promoters of #YCYC).
2. An initiative that may be laudable in its intent, but perhaps has not been properly thought through – perhaps the use of existing supports that exist under the auspices of the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment and Enterprise Ireland.
3. An initiative that the Government Dept (Enterprise Trade & Employment) responsible for promoting enterprise and employment thought worthwhile investing a significant sum of money into an initiative which keeps the IP to any idea, at what can only be the expense of existing programmes for Enterprise support that exist in the country or, at the very least, at the expense of beefing up those programmes in a structured and sustainable way.
4. YCYC is a wonderful feat of PR puffery with little real potential to deliver the economic kickstart that is required in Ireland, but doesn’t the website look pretty.
5. The priority of the government and the sponsors of this initiative is to promote a forum for fuzzy thinking and “end of the rainbow” speculation at the expense of the existing supports for business start-ups which have a track record of supporting local SME development around the country.

At best it is a noisome distraction and puffery that might, by some sheer accident of chance, uncover a true gem of an idea (that the innovator of which cannot grasp the value of) which will restart the economic engines. At worst, it is a noisome distraction that has diverted funding from existing enterprise support frameworks that exist in the country, apparently with the blessing of the responsible government minister.

Of course, I could be totally wrong.  Maybe the Department of Enterprise had €300k that was sitting around doing nothing and which the CEBs and University Campus incubators had said no to when it was offered to them. Maybe the €1.7 million war chest was touted around the Campus Incubators and the CEBs but was politely declined as well. Perhaps the President of DCU could shed some light on this as he is on the Steering board of YCYC?

Maybe the terms and conditions of YCYC will not put off serious thinkers with real viable ideas to shake things up in the economy which they’ll be happy to part with for a hundred grand.

Personally, I’ll continue with my strategy of knuckling down to graft on my business plan, keeping an eye on costs, and working to build a set of services and products that, while not changing the world, will change that part of it that I’ve spotted needs changing, with a view to creating value and generating employment for others over time.

It’s my country. It’s my call.

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.

After more than a decade of falling points and expanding career options, all signs were that getting into a reasonably fulfilling college course would be just a matter of filling in the forms. But the great recession has put paid to that. Certain courses are no longer attractive at all, such as those leading towards a career in property or construction. The inevitable swing towards the sciences or any course that might feed into Brian Cowen’s beloved “smart economy” will increase competition for places. This year more people will sit the Leaving Cert than ever before. And now there’s talk of a wave of the newly unemployed going back to college.

Oh. To put that another way:

Over reliance on the benign nature of an economic model in which effectively turning up and having a pulse assured you of a foot on the entry level (at least) rungs of an asset acquisition ladder has resulted in a shock adjustment when the dynamics of that economic model change due to external factors and internal market forces.

To me, this sounds a lot like what happened in the property bubble and crash in Ireland, when lots of people chased moderate amounts of property with apparently bottomless pots of mortgage money available from banks, resulting in prices rocketing. A lot of people over stretched themselves financially to buy a property and then found themselves in a state of shock when the arse dropped out of prices and they were left paying a gallon sized mortgage on a half-pint asset value. Which is interesting, given that she is the Property Editor of the Irish Times.

The points system is a very crude mechanism for managing supply and demand in the Irish 3rd level education system. The purpose it serves is simply to set a price on a particular path of learning based on complex factors such as:

• Supply
• Demand

Other factors which historically influenced the price included the actual price of going to University. When I started in UCD back in 1994, I had to pay a few thousand pounds in fees as well as administration charges. In the late 199os the then Labour government removed fees in an effort to open up access to education. It was a flawed idea as financial ability is not the driver or motivator to going to college in areas historically affected by high unemployment. Not actually having any role models or examples of success in education and a variety of other factors are as powerful (if not more powerful) inhibitors towards someone from a poorer socio-economic area going to college (particularly where grants and scholarships might otherwise be available for the financial aspects).

So, in the absence of fees we are left with just supply and demand.

In the absence of fees, universities are struggling to provide services and have had to cut back on course numbers and on numbers of courses to manage costs. Many University heads have argued for the reintroduction of some form of fee so that they can maintain their ability to keep the lights on and the blackboards primed for action. Ultimately, this has affected the available supply of places on courses.

Ms. Mulcahy is correct to point out that the arrival of 12000 or so mature students (23 years or over, not an army of the middle aged ) into the equation has increased demand for places. But she starts to diverge from reality a little when she begins to argue that they shouldn’t be allowed to go back to college, particularly when she implies explicitly states that they are “leaving the job search” to spend time “ogling young ones”.

This phrases are pejorative and prejudiced in the extreme. It is equally as likely that, having spent a number of years working and paying taxes and developing practical skills and experience, these mature students have identified that to achieve career progression in their field they need to have some additional qualifications on their resume.  Perhaps they had finished college with an Arts degree back in the 1990s but have found that after spending 10 years working in a particular industry they want to study in that field instead? In that case they won’t qualify for free fees or maintenance grants and will be paying their way to “learn something new”.  Or perhaps (like some relatives of mine) simply decided that while they had the points to get into a good course in college back in the early 2000′s, they were much happier making money in real estate or telecommunications or any other ‘boom’ industry.

My personal experience of having mature students in my class at undergrad level in the 199os and when I was teaching at postgrad level is that they tend to be more motivated, less inclined to focus on how they will be graded and more inclined to focus on whether they actually know their stuff, and more willing to engage in discussion about topics for the benefit of the entire class.  Perhaps the fact that they have actually had to either give up work or take on a big financial commitment to come to college means that they actually don’t mind working hard. And this was not a “grey workforce”. Remember that a mature student is anyone over 23.

Ultimately, what it meant for me as an undergrad was that I had to pull my socks up as these motivated people were my competition for grades. For the Leaving Cert class of 2010 it means that that competition for grades has started a few months earlier than it would have, because Supply and Demand and market forces has meant that the price of going to college is going up.

Because 3rd level education is not a right or an entitlement. It is an opportunity, an investment, a prize for hard work and ability. Free fees has masked this because there is no pain point before you get to college. Other than the points race.

If the offspring who inspired Ms Mulcahy’s rant  cannot motivate themselves to work for their Leaving Cert and not have to be given grinds and cramming classes, then perhaps they are not yet ready for the self-directed grown up world of 3rd level learning. My personal experience of  ’hot-housed’ students in 3rd level who lack intrinsic motivation to learn and work has been that they often wind up struggling once the stabilizers and training wheels of grinds are no longer available to them.

But I’m sure that most of the 12000 mature students who are coming in from the cold are going to be motivated and ready for self-directed learning. I’m also sure they are more than willing to take responsibility for their own learning.

Other than that, perhaps Ms Mulcahy will start arguing in favour of the development of new funding mechanisms for 3rd level institutions that will enable them to scale their available supply of places to meet demand in future, but will also allow them to avoid carrying inefficient overhangs of resources which have no work to do (e.g lecturers with no courses to teach).  Of course, that might mean her and her friend having to actually pay a bit more for junior’s University education. But then… that’s economics for you.

Dear Leaving Cert Class of 2010: 3rd level education is not a right. It is a privilege. You need to work for it. If you don’t, someone else will and it will not be Mammy’s fault, or the Government’s fault, or the CAO’s fault. 2010 is when you need to learn that you are responsible for your future. Just like all the mature students applying for the CAO are taking responsibility for theirs.