The DOBlog

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  • Spring cleaning

    The DoBlog is now in its 3rd year of existence. It’s been a busy time for me, and the next few months will (hopefully) be busier still.

    I’m not sure if it is the sunny weather here in Wexford but I was inspired this morning to spring clean the blog and put a new face on it. Please let me know what you think of the new look (thanks to the team at Jestro.com for the nice headstart on this theme).

    I’ve tidied up the categories a bit and will be writing more regularly from here on out primarily on information quality topics and how they impact people.

  • Certified Information Quality Professional

    Recent shenanigans around the world have highlighted the importance of good quality information. Over at idqcert.iaidq.org I’ve written a mid-sized post explaining why I am a passionate supporter of the IAIDQ’s Certified Information Quality Practitioner certification.

    Basically, there is a need for people who are managing information quality challenges to have a clear benchmark that sets them and their profession apart from the ‘IT’ misnomer. A clear code of ethics for the profession (a part of the certification as I understand iit) is also important. My reading of the situation, particularly in at least one Irish financial institution, is that people were more concerned with presenting the answer that was wanted to a question rather than the answer that was needed and there appears to have been some ‘massaging’ of figures to present a less than accurate view of things – resulting in investors making decisions based on incomplete or inaccurate information.

    Hopefully the CIQP certification will help raise standards and the awareness of the standards that should be required for people working with information in the information age.

  • Data Protection Awareness

    This post has been triggered by two things.

    Firstly, I had a nice chat with Hugh Jones who is running the ICS’s Data Protection training (see www.ics.ie/dp) for details. Hugh is interested in raising awareness of data protection issues both for businesses and for individuals. I wholeheartedly agree with him that this is important, not least because Data Protection has a strong Information Quality component.

    Secondly, just yesterday I saw two very clear examples of poor data protection practices. And that is not counting the dozen or so CCTV cameras I saw in the Dundrum Town Centre without any notification signage alerting me to the cameras or who to contact to get a copy of my personal image. Both of the incidents I saw related to sign up sheets for various things which were left in public places.
    The first Data Protection heeby-jeeby
    The least worrying one was in Wexford, where the sign up sheet for a contact list for a community group was left lying on a table that was unattended (although staff were standing near by). The information being captured was names, email addresses, mobile phone numbers and postal addresses. Each of those records would be worth approximately €100 to the right people. At 20 lines per sheet, each sheet would be worth €2000.

    That pays my mortgage for 2 months.

    Ideally, the voluntary organisation in question should have put someone sitting on a chair beside the clip pad to keep an eye on one of the most valuable things in the room.

    The second Data Protection Heeby-Jeeby (and this one scared the bejesus out of me)

    A car dealership has a display model parked up in the hallways of a large shopping mall in Arklow. On the table beside the car they have a sign up sheet (ho hum) inviting you to leave your personal details in order to be entered into a raffle.
    The first problem here is that this is very obviously a way for them to collect sales leads, contact details for people who they can phone or write to to offer test drives and such like. However the sign up form doesn’t say that. There is no information about what the information is being captured for, what uses it may be put to, or who to contact if you have a query about the information. So, it is not being captured fairly for a specified use – that’s the first Data Protection breach.

    More worrying is that the table (and the sheets and box full of personal data) were left unattended when I walked past yesterday afternoon. Personal data for about a dozen people was clearly visible on the table, unsecured, unprotected. I took a photograph with my phone. I had considered uploading it to this blog post, but there is some personal information clearly visible. So I won’t. But I have 19 rows of personal data, including at least 1 mobile phone number in an image on my (secure to a point of paranoia) archive drive at home.

    Unfortunately, I suspect that someone else took something more as the sheet was gone a few minutes later. 19 rows of data at €100 a pop… not bad for 3 seconds work. The sheet may have fallen on the floor. However, even in that case the data was no longer in the control of the Data Controller.

    So, to the car dealership that put that blue Hyundai I20 in the Bridgewater Shopping Centre in Arklow: you REALLY REALLY should consider sending a few of your staff to the Data Protection Lunch & Learn session or to the 1 day or 3 day Data Protection courses run by the ICS. Currently your entire marketing set up in the Bridgewater Shopping Centre is in breach of the Data Protection Act.

    Conclusion
    I would advise everyone to make themselves aware of the provisions of the Data Protection Act and to evaluate every time someone asks you for personal information. Don’t give your information to anyone who isn’t capturing it fairly, processing it fairly or treating it as a valuable asset. If they leaving it lying around in a public place unattended and unsecured… think twice.

    If you are a person or organisation capturing personal information about people, then you should put some time and effort into planning how you will capture the information, secure it, prevent it being photographed, swiped or mislaid, and ultimately put it to use. You should avoid the temptation to promote your data capture as something that it is not… yes, offer a raffle prize but let people know if you are planning to use the data to drive a marketing campaign.

  • Blog Awards 09 build up

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

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

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

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

  • Information Quality Train Drivers

    The IAIDQ is working to develop an industry standard certification/accreditation programme for Information/Data Quality Professionals (similar to the PMI for Project Managers). This is a valuable and significant initiative that will (hopefully) lead to a reduction in the types of issues we see over at IQTrainwrecks.com.

    The IAIDQ has set up a blog over at idqcert.iaidq.org to share news and feedback from the Certification development project. Currently there are some good posts there about the first international workshop that was held in October in North Carolina to thrash out the ‘knowledge areas’ that needed to be addressed. That workshop was a key input into the next stage of the project – a detailed Job Analysis study.

    Of course, industry defining initiatives like this need to be funded and the IAIDQ is eager that this be a Community lead project “by IQ Professionals for IQ Professionals”, rather than being driven by the objectives of vendors (although vendors are good and the IAIDQ is looking for vendor sponsorship to help this initiative as well). To make this a ‘community’ initiative it was felt that individuals might like to ChipIn a few quid. If you are in the US it is tax-deductible due to the legal status of the IAIDQ (a 501(3) not for profit). The rest of us might just need to be less generous.

    I personally think this is a great initiative that will raise standards and objectivity in the field of Information Quality. Please give generously.

  • The 12 Days of Blogger Christmas

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

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

    So, I’ll start the ball rolling….

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

    A brand new spell checking dictionary”….

    duff flyer frontduff flyer back

  • Obama’s win… a win for information quality

    Barack Obama just might be the first ‘Information Age’ President of the US.

    The Houdini Project that his team ran has highlighted the value of information, and especially good quality and timely information, when making decisions or trying to gain a competitive advantage. From the details that have leaked out (and while Newsweek get the credit for breaking the story, I found it discussed here a few days ago) it is clear that from the top down there was an understanding of the value of timely and accurate data with additional ‘richness’ of information to help focus resources (ie not calling people who’d already voted or who weren’t going to vote Obama), prioritise effort (ie putting the priority on calling in areas where voter turn out was lower than expected), and generally just getting the edge on the opposition.

    On the DailyKos, UMassLefty wrote:

    We were plugged in to the GOTV operation throughout the day, and we knew that it was working, that what we were doing mattered.

    Ironically, only yesterday I was delivering a presentation on how information quality professionals needed to work with their customers (stakeholders) to make that link between the goals and priorities of the Executive Committee and the actions, deeds and drivers of the people in the front line to give a clear and coherent alignment of information quality to strategy (and vice versa).

    The IAIDQ has issued a press release commenting on the value of the information to the success of Obama’s campaign.

    As more information emerges about how the Houdini project worked, I’m sure either the IAIDQ or I will be writing more about it.

  • Palin to Obama… why won’t the LA Times tell us when you stopped beating your wife?

    Good grief. How low and desperate are the Republicans? Newstalk radio in Ireland this morning ran a clip of Sarah Palin putting the stilletto in to Obama by talking about comments made at an event that Obama was at about Israel and US support for Israel back in 2003. Palin’s killer blow was that they didn’t know how Obama had reacted because the LA Times won’t release the video they were given.

    So Mr Obama, when did you stop beating your wife and why won’t the LA Times release the video? When did you stop taking psychotropic drugs? When did you stop torturing downed fighter pilots in the Vietnam war?

    Why is the LA Times covering for you Mr Obama?

    There is no effective response to this other than to say “gahhhh… bahhh”. To engage with a denial prompts the follow up question… “So are you denying it?”, followed by the spin “Candidate denies fornicating with fluffy bunnies”.

    It is a cheap and lazy tactic that evidences the disarry of the McCain Palin camp in my view.. Obama has such a lead in the polls now that he doesn’t have to engage with the issue.

    Mrs Palin, when did you stop beating your moose?

  • Imitation the sincerest form of flattery

    I noticed that Informatica have launched a new website called www.doyoutrustyourdata.com, to highlight issues with poor quality information from the media.

    My personal opinion on the site is that it isn’t very nice looking (but then I’m not a big fan of black on green). However, I’m biased as I moderate the IQTrainwrecks.com blog for the IAIDQ which has been doing this for over 2 years now in an occasionally tongue in cheek manner. IQTrainwrecks.com gets reasonably good search returns on google (and we’re looking at ways to improve that further).

    I’m flattered that Informatica have stumbled upon the same idea that the IAIDQ had back in 2006. I hope that we can figure out a way to have both sites working together for the benefit of information consumers everywhere. For example, the IAIDQ would love to reward members for submitting stories to IQTrainwrecks.com but our resources aren’t extensive enough to fund that (yet).

    [Update] As Vincent McBurney correctly points out, the IAIDQ wasn’t the first to try to create a resource like this. IQTrainwrecks is a spiritual descendant of www.dataquality.com and also the listing of issues that Tom Redman has been tracking over on www.navesink.com). [/update]

  • Hail fellow, well met.

    So, what’s new in Daragh town?

    Well, I was made a Fellow of the Irish Computer Society this evening. ’twas me and this guy. Apparently at one point in his career his OFFICIAL job title in the US government was “Expert”.

    Not “Expertise Application Direction and Realisation Manager”. Just “Expert”.

    Not bad for a youngfella from Limerick (him, not me).