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  • Scrap & Rework Article

    Many moons ago I posted a piece on this blog about Information Quality Scrap and Rework in the Irish Electoral Register. This article was submitted to a number of Irish newspapers at the time (when it was very topical) and was referenced at length by tuppenceworth and others.

    Earlier this year I was invited to write for Larry English’s column in DM Review magazine, an international trade magazine for Information Management and Business Intelligence. It appeared in the on-line ‘extended edition’ of the magazine. Here is the link to this month’s DM Review… I’m on page 5 (I’m credited as a contributor but the content appeared here first, and was picked up by B-Eye-Network last year also. For real afficianados of Irish Electoral Register issues, here’s a link to the paper I wrote on the issue back in the dim and distant past.

    Thanks to Larry and his staff for helping with a minor re-write to make the article more ‘American-friendly’. (Larry’s profile that I’ve linked to above is from the IAIDQ website – www.iaidq.org)

  • Oh D(H)ell… a slight reprise

    got this email from Dell yesterday

    Dear Valued Customer,

    Thank you for contacting Dell Customer Care on 27/03/2007 with a question or need for Dell. We appreciate the opportunity to assist you and are interested in your feedback concerning our performance.

    Dell has asked TNS Prognostics, a customer satisfaction research company in the IT industry, to help us conduct a survey regarding your experience. To help ensure we are providing expert assistance, please provide your feedback in this brief survey. This survey should take approximately 5 – 7 minutes to complete.

    To complete the survey, please click on the Web address below. If that does not work, copy and paste the entire Web address into the address field of your browser.

    https://dell.prognostics.com/s.asp?ID=F3FA3D808C094F2EB997744E7861C2C5

    If you are an AOL user, please click on the following link:

    {Link to AOL version of survey removed by me}

    NOTE: Some e-mail programs may split the above URL onto two lines. If you are prompted for a PIN, please cut and paste the following into provided space:
    {pin for survey removed by me}

    We look forward to your feedback.

    Yours sincerely,

    Dell Support Team

    All fine and dandy except that I didn’t contact them on the 27th of March. On the 27th of March I had the visit from their techie who installed my graphics card and then getting an update call from tech support about my DVD drive issues (which I’d fixed myself).

    Needless to say I’ll be scoring them quite low on the quality of their products. I pity Lucy (my erstwhile Tech support maven) and her colleagues who seem to be left as much at sixes and sevens as customers.

    All I’ve previously posted still stands. And I will be filling out the survey… oh yes… I will.

  • Some good quality experiences

    I recently bought a case for my PDA from the lovely people at Proporta. Unfortunately, a few days after getting the case the belt clip disintegrated with the hinge part simply snapping off. I was dismayed.

    By co-incidence that day I received an email from one of Proporta’s customer service people following up on my order. I responded to the email and explained the situation. By return of email I was assured that some replacement belt clips were on the way and I am expecting them soon.

    Proporta have asked me if they can quote my feedback to them in their testimonials… and I say definitely they can as their process seems to be very customer focussed with a quick turn around on issues. I can’t help contrasting that with my experiences with Dell.

    The cost to Proporta of replacing the belt-clip is probably a lot less than the likely referrals or follow on sales that they will get as a result of the positive feedback (and link from this blog). I am likely to buy from them again myself.

    Good quality, be it in products or service, promotes growth and profitability. Well done Proporta.

  • Another Book Review…

    After my Dell rants of the last few posts I thought it appropriate to put up something that people might actually want to read. So I’ve plumped for another book review, particularly given the Quality Management focus of my tirades against the sheer ineptitude of Dell.

    The books I’ve chosen to review this time out are The Deming Management Method by Mary Walton and Out of the Crisis by W.Edwards Deming. I’ve also included a nod to Deming’s other major book The New Economics These are three classics of Quality Management literature and are well worth picking up if you can as an understanding of Deming is a good foundation for improving quality of pretty much anything.

    The Deming Management Method
    Deming_management_method_imageThis book is an excellent initial primer in the work of W. Edwards Deming. It covers off a biographical note on Deming, his 7 Diseases of Management, his 14 Points of Transformation and the infamous Red Beads experiment. It also contains case studies of a number of companies that applied the Deming methods.

    It clearly and concisely runs through a number of the key principles of Deming’s management philosophy and provides some good case study examples.

    One criticism is that it is showing its age somewhat (it was first published in the US in 1986) and some of the firms used in the case studies have not sustained the successes that they had achieved. This should not be taken as a criticism of Deming’s methodology however as it is clear from the history of Ford (for example) in recent years that they may not have maintained the constancy of purpose needed to truly embed quality practices in.

    However, as a quick introduction to the life and work of W.Edwards Deming this 244 page book is worth a look.

    Out of the Crisis
    On the other hand, if you want a more in-depth study of Deming’s management philosophy then the classic work is Out of the Crisis, Deming’s seminal work on the subject of Quality Management.
    out of the crisis image

    This book is a detailed treatise on the 7 Deadly Diseases of Management (see page 36) and the 14 Points of Management which counter those diseases. One draw back of this book is that much of the content is has its focus on manufacturing quality and less on service industry or non-physical product manufacturing. These issues were addressed by Deming in later books (which I will review in time). However the fundamental principles are well laid out and this book is a constant reference for me in my personal library.

    Overall – it is not possible to give a true assessment of Deming’s impact in just a few paragraphs. Those companies who have adopted and built on his 14 points have had great success. Dell might do well to order a few copies to see how they can constantly improve the quality of their products and services.

    The New Economics Image“The ideal companion to “Out of the Crisis” is Deming’s last book The New Economics. This is described by one reviewer on Amazon as Deming’s “spiritual legacy”. I can’t comment on that but what I will say is that this book represents a further maturing of the concepts in “Out of the Crisis”. However to fully grasp the concepts my personal feeling is that you need to read both books. Amongst other things, in The New Economics Deming changes “Plan Do Check Act” to a “Plan Do Study Act” cycle – for reasons he explains in The New Economics.

    Put this on your wishlist!

  • Oh D(h)ell… an update

    Dell Technician came to my office today. This was after a techie had called to my home last Thursday. When I was in London presenting at an Information Quality conference (does 2 speaking slots count as a keynote?).

    The fact that I was going to be away had been clearly communicated to Dell’s support people on Tuesday of last week. But a technician called to my (empty) home all the same. Even if my cat had been inclined to let him in (for only the cat was in residence), the laptop was with me because my presentations were on it.

    So a technician called to me today. He rang me and (shock) double checked where he was to go (my home or my office). Luckily I had beene expecting him and had the graphics card with me.

    So at this count, the cost to Dell of finishing (please note FINISHING, not FIXING) my laptop is at least the cost of 2 technician call outs and the cost of a graphics card. I gave Seamus (for that was his name) the 128MB card to take away as in my office, like many others, there is a resident technology guru/’liberator’ who would gladly have taken it home to put in an old machine of his. That has saved Dell a few euros.

    I will be packaging up the Desktop card and posting it to Dell at the weekend – increasing the cost to me of this laptop by the cost of that postage. However it is the honest and ethical thing to do, particularly as they have not given me any indication as to what the process is for returning things they sent me in error.

    What else would I do with a desktop graphics card in a house where my wife and I both have laptops?

    What else indeed?

    And I’ve also sorted out my DVD drive issues (on my own). As I had diagnosed back in the beginning, the culprit was the Roxio driver that Windows Vista was surpressing due to incompatibility. I uninstalled all of Roxio (for now) and everything worked fine again. I found on the Roxio site’s discussion forum that the real culprit is the Roxio “drag to CD” utility.

  • Oh (d)Hell, here we go again…

    So, prompt and efficient, Dell Post-Sales Customer Support shipped me the graphics card for my laptop -the one they should have put in while it was still in the factory. It arrived this morning at 11:00am as promised. It was shipped from their factory in Limerick – a city and County I know well. About 20 minutes before the courier arrived I’d had a call from my support team contact in Dell to set up the technician appointment to come out and finish building my laptop.

    The sun was shining. My dentist hadn’t come over all Marathon Man on me. I am starting a short holiday with my wife… all was well with the world.

    Until I opened the package. To find that it included a graphics card, which I assume is a 256MB card. So far so good…

    … it is a card for a Desktop machine not a laptop. It will not fit the computer I have. It is as useful to me as a chocolate fireguard, an ice teapot or a kosher sausage roll. I expect a technician to call me soon to confirm their appointment. I will only be able to confirm my disappointment.

    So what information might Dell in Limerick have had available to them to ship the correct thing?

    1. They might have had the asset tag of the laptop, from which the model and configuration details could be determined.
    2. They should have had the model of the laptop
    3. Perhaps they had details of the complaint, including the original order number and my customer number

    Any of those items of data would have enabled someone picking the components out of the storage bin to say “We want a graphics card (check) for an Inspiron Laptop (oh… wrong thing)”.

    If that information was not available to the people in Limerick, then it is inevitable that a mix up would happen. In this Information Age almost all processes that we run in business or that we encounter in life require complete, consistent, accurate and timely information to run as we expect. At assembly, there was information available that my laptop should have had 256MB video RAM. The quality failure in that instance was that that information was not referred to to make sure that the real world thing that it described met that expectation.

    Once the support people understood the problem, a graphics card was dispatched to fix the issue. However, due either to unavailable information (did the request to ship the replacement card specify the model of the card and that it was for a laptop?) inaccurate or inconsistent information (does the pick-list master data show that the desktop card I’ve received is the correct card for my laptop?), or inaccurate interpretation of the information, I wound up with the wrong card – a solution to my problem that does not solve the problem.

    This is a significant cost issue for Dell. It has to be. So far, to get my laptop to the specification I actually ordered it, they’ve incurred the cost of an additional graphics card (estimate €100) plus the cost of the courier (estimate €30 for overnight delivery) plus the cost of the support call center person (estimate €10 so far) plus the cost of the technician (estimate €120 based on ex-warranty call out charges) and so far it has cost Dell an additional €260 (my estimate) to perpetuate a screw up. If Dell can ship me the correct graphics card before the technician arrives then their cost will only be around €390.

    To put that in perspective… that is 25.2% of the cost of the laptop I purchased so unless Dell are operating at 30% margins on their business (in which case they have some leg room their competitors don’t or their machines are over-priced) they have lost money on my purchase. A fortnight in and already I’m a below-zero customer in terms of my lifetime value to Dell (and that’s before you factor in that I might not buy another Dell given the difficulties I’m having).

    Even with the cost of finance over 3 years to me (god bless the never-never finance), Dell are just about breaking even on me as a customer. Based on my estimates of course. And assuming they get it right before the technician arrives to try and fit a square peg (desktop graphics card) in a round hole (laptop). If Dell’s costs for hardware are 50% of retail, they are still looking at around 20% ‘evaporation’ of their margins… that is an unsustainable business overhead that seems to be accepted as the ‘cost of doing business’.

    Assuming Dell shipped 1000 laptops last week and 10% of them were mis-assembled and have had similar issues with replacement components, Dell could be burning 100 X €390 = €39,000 a week in avoidable scrap and rework. That equates, in my industry, to around 40 to 45 full-time-equivalent staff in ‘clerical’ roles. The cost of non-quality is easy to measure. That’s a direct cost to the Business that is avoidable. It’s just harder to measure than headcount and not as easy to cut. You can’t fire your data.

    The root cause of all of this cost is the quality of information and the quality of the culture in which that information is used… if the metric for assembly teams is how fast something is shipped versus how quickly the right thing is shipped then corners will get cut at 16:45 on a Friday to get that product boxed and out to shipping before the shift ends. If the customer complaint follow ups don’t have sufficient information about the product that is being complained about then screw ups are perpetuated.

    Dell are feeling the analysts pinch on the short term numbers (quarter on quarter growth and profits). In my opinion, it is time to bite the bullet and look at the root causes of their information supply chain problems before they cut head count – because who knows what other information ills headcount might be masking. They need to build quality in, both in terms of the product and in terms of their information management. They need to do it now. Cutting headcount will fix the bottom line. For now. Fixing these fundamentals fixes the bottom line for ever – while increasing efficiency and (perhaps) avoiding the need to prune back headcount as aggressively as currently forecast.

    The management approaches needed aren’t rocket science and they aren’t an unproven quantity. Neither is the failure of a business because it costs them their profit margin to inspect defects out of a product after it has shipped. Hopefully some Dell manager will happen across this blog post and might put the simple Excel spreadsheet together that shows the true cost to Dell of non-quality information and poor management of information. Perhaps that might prompt some thinking about how best to meet market analyst expectations in a sustainable way.

    Failing that, Dell will inevitably enter a head-count reduction death-spiral of managing by the easy numbers which is difficult – if not impossible – to pull out of.

  • Dell and their cost base

    Some jitters amongst the Celtic Tiger cubs this week as a number of hi-tech firms trimmed back the tent a little here. In net terms, it is no real issue as there is a skills shortage in the types of job that have been pruned.

    One organisation rumoured to be looking at pruning their Irish operations is Dell. As I type this I’ve been on the phone to Dell (both Tech support and Customer Service) for 90 minutes.

    Dell Tech Support (hi Lucy – if you are reading this) were brilliant. Issue couldn’t be resolved without internet access or a boot CD (neither of which I remembered to pack this morning) but a call back for Wednesday has been arranged. I suspect that this call will happen as promised.

    Dell Customer Service was a different story. Transferred in from Tech support… explained issue (wrong graphics card installed in the laptop) for 10 minutes to be told that I need to contact Tech support. Explained that I had been transferred from there. Was told that I was through to the pre-sales/pre-delivery customer service team and I needed to get on to the post-deliver Customer service team. Nice Indian lady transferred me. Was on hold for 10 minutes. Call eventually answered… by the Indian lady who had originally transferred me. When I gave my customer reference number the call ‘mysteriously’ dropped.

    In fairness, I was phoned back a few minutes later with an apology for dropping the call and was transferred through to the right department – after another 15 minutes on hold. They dealt with my no-brain query very efficiently – new graphics card to be sent out to me, and could I install it myself? Could I b*ggery (despite my experience and qualifications in techie things the lawyer lizard hind brain told me that self-install was the path to invalid warranty). So a technician is being dispatched to install the card. Hopefully the technician will arrive after the card and before I toddle off on a long weekend break with the missus.

    So, here’s a suggestion for Michael Dell and his team to help address their cost issues and resource issues that analysts are pointing to:

    1. Build quality in. Make sure that products shipped match the order. That will reduce the instances of calls into Customer Service/Tech support. Have a QA checker check the order against the manfactured good to make sure that no errors exist. This avoids having the CUSTOMER do it for you when the product arrives and would reduce the number of calls to yoru Customer Support line.
    2. Break down barriers – why the (d)hell do you need two categories of Customer Service team? Wizard based work flow etc. would allow staff to be equally competent across both your presales and post sales Customer Service. This would reduce the numbers of staff you would need as your Call Centre could be truly blended.
    3. Invest in training. CSRs should never have to tell a customer that they “haven’t been trained in that”. Either through on-going training and/or wizard based Knowledge management the CSR should have the skill to address the issue
    4. Address Information qualtiy issues – my Dell order has TWO order numbers. This caused unnecessary confusion with the Customer Support people. It is probably the root cause for the error in the build.
    5. Analyse common causes of tech support or Customer Service calls. The impression I got today was that there are a lot of issues with Roxio Software running on Vista. Perhaps a test of software that will be bundled with laptops is in order so only software that works with the OS is shipped – again reducing likelihood of calls to Customer Support/Tech Support in the first month.

    Toyota is rapidly overtaking General Motors by following these type of quality principles. Far from being a fad, management of quality and management of information quality is just a bloody good way to run your business. While GM are shutting factories, Toyota are opening more.

    Go figure.

    Dell – don’t do the easy number cuts… tackle the real issues of quality.

    ####A slight aside###
    During the course of the call I was asked if I’d like to install the replacement graphics card myself. Here’s an idea for Dell. Sack your assembly people. All of them. Send the customer a box full of components and a nice user friendly assembly guide, like you get with furniture from Argos. That would reduce head-count and would put the onus for quality of assembly on the customer. Of course, it would induce people to go and buy Acer or Apple instead, but them’s the breaks.

  • Windows Vista and my new Dell – some thoughts

    Blogging this in some frustration.

    Ordered a new Dell a few weeks back because my previous “Aldi-Special” (a ‘Gericom’ brand) had died.

    As I was going to be sticking the new purchase on the never-never (finance) I decided to pimp my ride a bit and ordered the best spec I could get for the price I’d paid 2 years ago for the venerable Aldi-special. Ever the bastion of customer choice, Dell gave me the option to have either Windows Vista or Windows VISTA, depending on what typeface I preferred.

    Spec I ordered was 2.0ghz dual core centrino processor, 2ghz ram, 256mb graphics and a hard-drive the size of Wyoming. After some kerfuffle with Dell’s systems losing my order somewhere on its way to Finance, the paperwork was processed and the machine shipped.

    First problem – the courier who was delivering the goods point to point decided that, as I wasn’t in, he’d deliver the €1000+ of computer to a neighbour. I wouldn’t have minded that except I had specifically told him NOT to do that as I wanted to inspect the goods when they arrived so I could be sure that there was no problems or anything missing. Courier obviously felt that doing the job he was being paid to do (ensuring that the purchaser of the expensive things actually got them) was too much hassle and dumped them on a neighbour. I found out the next day (a Friday), when after sitting in for the morning I rang the courier to see when he would (as per my instructions) deliver the goods to me.

    Suffice it to say that I was unimpressed.

    Laptop seemed to be working fine for the first few days. Vista is beautiful to work with, in my opinion. But you do need the extra oomph of a good processor and ram and a top notch video card with a chunk of V-Ram (more on that in a mo). I used it last week for a presentation in Dublin – worked fine. Due to commuting it stayed home untouched for most of this week however.

    One thing however niggled almost from Day 1… Roxio software that Dell bundled with the laptop contain a driver (which I assume is a CD rom driver) that Vista blocks as it might make the machine unstable. No driver updates nor patches can be found, even though it seems that a similar driver issue affected Inspiron laptops under XP prior to Christmas.

    Another thing that niggles now is that there appears to be an on-board music critic who decided that my taste in blues/jazz/funk was not suited to this laptop and has managed to switch off the ability of the DVD drive to read any CD media – even the CDROM driver disk that came shipped with the laptop. This kicked in yesterday midway through a listen to a Jools Holland CD my wife got me for my birthday. Also spurned are The Blues Brothers (cheesy but good), Clapton, and Rory Gallagher.

    I decided to go on a trawl of the system to identify where the music critic resided. I uninstalled the DVD drive drivers and rebooted the system (to see if that would evict The Critic). No joy. As my machine rebooted for the second cycle of uninstall/reinstall I noticed that the BIOS was registering my Video RAM at 128MB… “hang on a minute”, said me as I reached for my copy of the order specification attached to my finance agreement, “I ordered 256MB Ram”.

    Now the installed video Ram is not easy to identify by a physical inspection of the machine. Indeed, unless you actually specifically go looking to find the details under the Display Settings of Vista then you’ll never know if you have 128MB or 256MB – not unless you notice a really severe hang on your machine. Certainly it is not something that the technically unaware would automatically think of checking straight away.

    Annnnnnyyyyyhhhhhooooooo…… now I had 3 issues with Dell.

    1. Roxio Drivers not working under Vista (as an Information Quality aside, the error message doesn’t refer to Roxio but to Sonic Systems, who it turns out own Roxio)
    2. DVD no readie de CD – (perhaps this is related to 1 above?)
    3. The sloppy f*ckers hadn’t built my machine to the spec I’d ordered and I probably would never have noticed if the other stuff hadn’t started going wrong

    So today (a Saturday) I tried to use Dell’s on-line Customer Service (because their Consumer Call centre doesn’t work Saturdays.. Why not?). Apparently Dell’s email process into Customer Service doesn’t work on Saturdays either. Nor does the email process to Technical support. Apparently their email system is unavailable. Also Dell’s support doesn’t have VISTA listed as an Operating System on their drop down list… so how do I get support for VISTA?

    Maybe they have a Literary Critic installed who has tired of reading cranky missives in poorly phrased English?

    To summarise:

    1. The Courier failed to meet expectation as he didn’t follow instructions and did not provide me with information as to what he had done with my goods. Given that the evidence of delivery is the signature he captured I could have been left in an awkward position. Couriers are used to ensure delivery to the correct address and person, particularly where the goods are valuable. Otherwise, we’d all just use the post, which is very reliable.
    2. Vista meets expectation – it looks good but has some issues. Hopefully these will shake out as the adoption rate increases
    3. Roxio’s software does not WORK under Vista. Dell should have tested it before bundling it and if there was an issue under XP they should have made sure a patch was available that works under VISTA (the XP patch can’t be installed as it doesn’t recognise Vista as an OS).
    4. The product delivered to me does not meet expectation – Dell’s post-build quality control obviously didn’t catch that the Graphics card installed is not the Graphics Card ordered. Why?

    Of course, I’d tell them that if their email systems were available.

    The brother bought a laptop in Lidl yesterday morning. It has exactly what was on the specification sheet. It differs only slightly in terms of RAM and CPU speed from mine. It was nearly half the price of mine (it uses an AMD processor, I have an Intel). The brother’s laptop has met, if not exceeded his expectations. I’m left fuming on a Saturday because mine falls short of my expectations.

    Lidl or Dell – who has better Quality when it comes to laptops?

  • Information Quality in the news

    The gang over at Tuppenceworth have done some crude but somewhat scientific study of the quality of information being presented by Irish print media. The basic hypothesis (rephrased somewhat to Information Quality terms) is that purchasers of newspapers have an expectation that the stories presented will be properly researched pieces of journalism and not advertorial, infotainment or just plain rehashing of press-releases from vested interests and newspapers should meet that expectation.

    The findings are disturbing in that the percentage of actual ‘real’ journalism would seem to be a lot less than one might expect, as this graphic of the content in the Sunday Independent shows… http://www.flickr.com/photos/editor_tupp/298828264/

    So what does this mean? If quality information is defined as information which meets or exceeds the expectations of information consumers, and if the expectation we have of our print news papers is to… well print news… and to find out the things that we need to know rather than, as it would appear, to bury real news in wrappers of advertorial or ‘reports on reports’ that fail to ask incisive but obvious questions then that expectation is not being met.

    If, however, your expectation is for substantial opinion pieces masquerading as reportage then the statistics suggest that your expectation is being met in spades.

    For example, why have no Irish newspapers followed up on the link between the State Claims Agency/HSE report on medical errors and the shocking cases of unnecessary surgery that popped into the media just a few weeks before hand? This is an easy link to make, easy to communicate and doubtless a mine of stories. And the costs of non-quality to the Irish Healthcare system are potentially immense, which makes it a political story in the run up to a Budget and a General Election. Did they bother… if they did, could someone send me the clipping because it passed me by.

    Also, why, given that the Electoral Register issue is still trundling along have none of the journos that I sent information to during the summer thought of contacting me or the Association I represent looking for a different angle? The clean up currently underway isn’t actually fixing the problems, it is simply treating the symptom. I’m blue in the fingertips writing on that particular topic, but previous posts can be found in the archives

    I hope that the boys and girls over at Tuppenceworth take stock over Christmas and refine their methodology to be a bit more scientific and objective. I’d welcome the chance to assist them in that review, including steps to increase the statistical ‘soundness’ of the assessment. This is valuable research that should be the subject of media coverage somewhere. So far the nearest thing to coverage that it has received is this from the Irish Independent. Apparently if the message isn’t worth listening to you should try to attack the credibilty of the medium if not the messenger.

    Ironic given that it is the credibility of the print media that has been called into question.

  • ka-BOOM – the Information Age Explosion is upon us.

    CNN.com has an interesting report on a study that was conducted by IDC, an industry think tank and research company, into the volume of information that we are creating and storing – and more importantly who is creating that information.

    IDC estimates that the world had 185 exabytes of storage available last year and will have 601 exabytes in 2010. But the amount of stuff generated is expected to jump from 161 exabytes last year to 988 exabytes (closing in on 1 zettabyte) in 2010.

    IDC estimates that by 2010, about 70 percent of the world’s digital data will be created by individuals. For corporations, information is inflating from such disparate causes as surveillance cameras and data-retention regulations.

    The growth in ‘long tail’ activities like blogging and YouTube are contributors to this. Explosions can wind up as one of two things – an impressively awe inspiring fireworks display of elegance and beauty… or a shock and awe filled detonation. The fact that this explosion of information is being driven by individuals raises a significant risk that as the quantity increases the quality decreases. We are seeing elements of this risk in the recent story about the Wikipedia expert who was making it up as he went along and had lied about his credentials.

    However, this issue of alleged experts with either non-existent qualifications or qualifications which may not be what they appear to be is not restricted to just the Internet – it is an off-line issue too. We really can’t ignore the Diploma mills churning out PhDs who might not have the level of skills one might expect from the title.

    What can Information Quality professionals and Bloggers do to help maintain quality levels and keep collateral damage from this explosion to a minimum?

    • When blogging, first do no harm. Make sure you verify sources for your stories as much as you can and respond to any comments that report errors or innacurracies in your posts – in short act with the sort of standards we would expect from journalists (although which we might not always get)
    • Try and develop an understanding of good practices in terms of structuring your content (categories in WordPress are metadata for example)
    • As Microsoft said in a recent advertising campaign here in Ireland – “Information that cant be found is information that can’t be used”. Quality of information includes the quality of how that information is presented – designing your sites so they are accessible to people with visual problems is a good practice. Likewise having a logical structure on your site and your content is also important.

    Reading the figures that IDC have produced (which incidentally used some proprietary internal research so might not be capable of being replicated in an independent study) makes me think of the advice that Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben gives him in the first Spiderman Movie… “With great power comes great responsibility”.

    WordPress, Youtube, Wikipedia and similar tools have placed a great power in the hands of the wired individual. However just because it is on the web (no poor pun intended) it does not mean that the rules of the real world have switched off. Under the Common Law Tort of Negligent Misstatement there is a duty of care on all people who are providing information to ensure that that information is correct. Admittedly to succeed in suing someone for negligent misstatement you need to show that your reliance on the information and any loss you incur were reasonably foreseeable and that the person publishing the information owed a duty of care to you specifically (are you their ‘neighbour’ in a legal sense? Are you a class of person that the publisher of the information should have considered might be a consumer of their information?).

    With great power comes great responsibilty. Dr Ben Goldacre, a columnist with the Guardian Newspaper in the UK, who’s article about questionable qualifications I’ve linked to above, ends that particular article in a very eloquent way that sums up why we need to ensure that we maintain quality standards as the volume of information available grows. I unashamedly pinch it because it is very good – I’ve just added some emphasis (please read the full article to put this in its original context)…

    “I am writing this article, sneakily, late, at the back of the room, in the Royal College of Physicians, at a conference discussing how to free up access to medical academic knowledge for the public. At the front, as I type, Sir Muir Gray, director of the NHS National Electronic Library For Health, is speaking: “Ignorance is like cholera,” he says. “It cannot be controlled by the individual alone: it requires the organised efforts of society.” He’s right: in the 19th and 20th centuries, we made huge advances through the provision of clean, clear water; and in the 21st century, clean, clear information will produce those same advances.“

    Blog wisely. Blog well.