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Search results for: “"electoral register"”

  • Propogation of information errors and the risks of using surrogate sources

    ….ye wha’?

    There has been a lot written in relation to the electoral register and other matters about using information from other sources to improve the quality of information that you have or to create a new set of information.

    This makes sense, other people may already have done much of the work for you and, effectively, all you need to do is to copy their work and edit it to meet your needs. In most cases it may be faster and cheaper to use such ‘surrogates’ for reality to meet your information needs than to go to the effort of going to the real-world things (people, stock-rooms where ever) and actually starting from scratch to build exactly the information you need in the format you require to exactly your standards and formats.

    There is, however, a price to pay for having such surrogate sources available to you. You need to accept that

    1. The format and structure of the information may need to be changed to fit your systems or processes
    2. The information you are using may itself be innaccurate, incomplete or inconsistent.
    3. If you are combining it with other information, it will require investment in tools and skills to properly match and consolidate your information into a valid version of the truth.

    These risks apply to organisations buying marketing lists to integrate with their CRM systems but also could be applied to students relying on the Internet to present them with the content for their academic projects or journalists trawling for content for newspaper articles or reviews.

    Recurrence of common errors, phrases or inaccuracies in term papers is one way that academia has of identifying academic fraud. Similar techniques might be applied in other arenas to identify and track instances of copyright infringement.

    In businesses dealing with thousands of records, the cost/risk analysis is relatively straightforward. The recommendation I would make is that clear processes to manage suppliers and to measure the quality of the information they provide you based on a defined standard for completeness, consistency, duplication, conformity etc. is essential. Random sampling of surrogate data sources for accuracy (not every 100th record but a truly random sample) is also strongly recommended.

    These are EXACTLY the same techniques that manufacturing industries use to ensure the quality of the raw material inputs to their processes. If it works for industries where low quality can kill (such as pharmaceuticals), why shouldn’t work for you?

    For students, journalists and those of us hacking away in the blogosphere the recommendation is simple. Only rely on surrogate sources if you absolutely have to. If you use someone elses work as your source, credit them. If you don’t want to credit them then make sure you verify the accuracy of their work either by actually verifying against reality or by checking with at least one other source.

    That way you avoid having the errors of your source become your errors also and you don’t run the risk of someone crying foul and either suing you for stealing their copyright (and copyright does apply to content posted on the internet and in blogs) or taking whatever other sanctions might apply (such as kicking you off your college course).

    In many cases the costs and effort involved in double checking (particularly for a once of piece of writing) are neglibily different to the costs of actually starting from scratch and building your information up yourself. And, depending on the context, it may even be more enjoyable.

    The New York Times not so long ago had to relearn the lessons of checking stories with at least one other source for accuracy.

    Horatio Caine in CSI:Miami always tells his team to “trust, but verify”.

    When using surrogate sources for real-world information in any arena you must assess the risk of doing so and put in place the necessary controls so that you can trust that you have verified.

    (c) Daragh O Brien 2006 (just in case)

  • Something’s wrong – I find myself agreeing (in general) with a PD

    http://www.progressivedemocrats.ie/press_room/1812/

    Senator Minihan makes a good deal of sense in his speech to the Seanad (Irish Senate, second house of our executive).

    His is the closest I have seen in the debates and coverage thus far to an apolitical statement of purpose. Also, he has touched on a number of potential root causes for the current state of the register.

    He is espousing a long term strategy (good) and a short term scrap and rework (not so good, but necessary at this stage). He questions why there is so much variation in ‘quality’ between local authority areas and what the motivation might be for local authorities to manage the register in the current modus operandi.

    Significantly he states that the long term planning shouldn’t be put off until after the election but should start now. This is in keeping with good Information Quality Management practice where scrap and rework is commenced in parallel with process review  and improvement (ideally process improvement should start first).

    My recommendation is that the root cause analysis that is currently at anecdotal level should be formalised into a format similar to that outlined in my Draft Paper on Electoral Register Information Quality Approaches. The root causes should then be prioritised in terms of their frequency of occurence and their ease of remediation.

    Senator Minihan correctly points out that you need to provide more information when setting up an ESB account or a phone account than you do when registering to vote. Is that not a telling root cause?

    However, the challenge now is to ensure that the constancy of purpose that Senator Minihan calls for is achieved as if the governemnt believes that some scrap and rework is all there is to solving this problem they are sorely mistaken.

    I’ll have to read this speech a bit closer to find exactly what it is I can disagree with.

  • Phone company not employing psychic dog – shock!

    I heard about this piece of bother on RTE Radio 1 news today.

    Apparently a Fianna Fail TD is up in arms that people who had been renting a phone handset from eircom and subsequently bought a new one and didn’t return the rented phone or alert eircom that they were no longer using it have continued to be charged for the phone.

    So the reasoning seems to be that if you have finished with something you’ve rented and you don’t hand it back the company you rented it from should know through some Jedi mind trick that you are no longer using it and stop charging you rent.

    Applying that logic…

    1. That Library book that I finished when I was 12 and never returned… Dublin corporation shouldn’t have kept charging me late fees, they should have just wished me well with my new book that I bough in Easons.
    2. The rent I paid my land-lord while i was on holidays should be returned to me (b*stard land-lord)
    3. Xtravision should clear my account of outstanding charges for that copy of Kill Bill that I took out because I didn’t like it and bought Yo Jimbo from play.com instead.

    The electoral register is in a shambles and a Fianna Fail TD is taking up valuable airspace, column inches and interweb bits and bytes effectively telling us that we should have absolutely no personal accountability for ensuring that we follow simple processes in life (such as telling our local authorities when we move house so our old electoral register entry can be deleted and a new one created at our new address or contacting a service provider we’re renting something off when we decide we want to exit the rental agreement).

    Short of placing a monitoring device in your house or ringing you every month to see if you’re still using your oatmeal slaney phone from 1996 or hiring a psychic dog to sniff out changes, there is nothing that a provider of any service can do to identify if you have changed your equipment. The only way that they know is if you ring up and tell them so that they can change your contract, remove the charge and make arrangements for the phones to be returned for recycling.

    I’d be more impressed if the good deputy took up the issue raised over on Michele Neylon’s blog re: Amazon’s decision not to sell certain categories of goods to people resident in Ireland

    If you find you are paying phone rental, check out www.eircom.ie and you should be able to find out how to get the charge cancelled and get your phone recycled.

    To Fianna Fail – please stop wasting our media space with innanities! We know that there is an election looming and backbenchers need to remind people that they exist, but there are far too many important issues to be debated in this nation of ours.

    Now, I’m off to see if I can buy a psychic dog and go into consultancy with a phone company (just to keep Deputy McGuinness happy)….

     

  • Finger print scanning and Indelible Ink in the Electoral Process

    I have been distracted from compiling my post on the use of excel as a data interchange mechanism by some other snippets of what Dick Roche said at yesterday’s Dail committee meeting as reported in the Irish Times (page 9) and Dublin’s freesheet Metro (page 5)…

    1. The Census Enumerators haven’t gone away… €5 million to €6 million is being provided to Local Authorities to hire temporary staff “such as census enumerators” to carry out door to door inquiries. The Unions haven’t gone away either though and I suspect that Local Authority staff currently doing those jobs might be offended by this idea. And at the end of the day it is €6 million between 114 Local Government agencies (29 County Councils, 10 City/Borough Councils and 75 Town Councils) or an average of €52632 per agency to pay temporary staff for the duration of the scrap and rework. (that calculation assumes that Town Councils have a role to play in the Electoral Register – if Town councils can be excluded that amounts to just under €154k per Local Authority). Of course, this is still just scrap and rework – the process of gathering the information will use the same apparently broken processes to capture the new register. Once the cleanup is finished, unless there is a study of the root causes, the same defective processes will operate to corrupt the register almost immediately and taxpayers will find themselves having to fund another €6million clean up in the not to distant future.
    2. The Minister has put forward a proposal to avoid voter fraud at the Polling stations in the next election. “Indelible Ink or fingerprint scanners could be used in polling booths at the next poll” (source: Metro). Of the ink, the Minister is quoted as saying “it woudl be a badge of pride that you had participated in democracy”. Allllllrrrrrriiiiiigggggghhhhhtttttyyyyy then.

    My first recommendation is to ban CSI and its spin off shows from the Roche household. Capturing a fingerprint at the time of a ballot would be totally useless unless there was a master data source of citizen biometric data that could be referenced – even Gil Grissom has to have a finger print in the database before he can nab the criminal.

    This is a proposal that I would suggest Digitial Rights Ireland jump all over quick smart as, in my view, this combined with the call to use PPS numbers brings us one step from a ‘big brother’ single view of citizen with biometric data. And as the Government seems to be incapable of properly managing complex technology projects I would be very concerned by this.

    I’ll get my post on Excel done over the coming days – unfortunately pesky day job is getting in the way. ;(

  • Electoral Information Quality – A Consolidating post

    As the blog is getting legs a bit now, I thought it best to consolidate the posts of the last few weeks on the Electoral Register issues into one point of reference, particularly for readers new to the site.

    I am also taken the opportunity to upload a few additional articles etc. that I have written on the issue to the blog for reference.

    Articles:

    First up is a draft paper I have put together on the proposed solutions and why they are likely to be inadequate. 

    Next up is a link to an article I have had published in an International newsletter for Information Quality Management Professionals.

    Finally there is an article based on my post on what scrap and rework is of earlier this month. This article was submitted to national newspapers as an opinion piece – and I should acknowledge the assistance of Simon over on Tuppenceworth with whipping it into shape. Click here to download Scrap and Rework article. The article is also reproduced as an appendix in the previously mentioned report.

    As regards posts – pretty much any of the posts in the Information Quality/Electoral Data Quality category are relevant. I will double check all the post categorisations to make sure that nothing is missing.

    That’s my update for today.

     

     

  • Process Design & Quality

    Quality is defined as the ability of a product or piece of information to meet or exceed the expectations of its customers/consumers.

    Quality begins in the design stage, at the white board when you are figuring out how your process should work. I won’t waste my energy today rattling on about our Electoral Register issues, rather I’ll take a different example…

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/10/ms_messenger_paradox/

    This is an example of poor quality information. The instructions presented to the customer are illogical and set up a logical recursion that would stump many a Dalek.

    Reminds me of the joke about the computer programmer who was found dead in the shower. The shampoo bottle instructions read “Wash, Rinse, Repeat”.

     

  • The Irish Times Editorial yesterday…

    The Irish Times ran a nice editorial piece yesterday (2006/05/11) on the Electoral Register that highlighted the administrative failure that surrounds the Electoral Register.

    One good line: “IF the potential for abouse exists within the voting system – and it unequivocally does – the Government’s responsibility is to protect democracy and correct the electoral register”

    The Old Lady of D’Olier Street correctly identifies that there is a “reluctance at official and political level to step outside traditional mechanisms to address the situation”.

    The reported ruling out by Dick Roche of the use of personal identification at polling stations reflects this apparent lack of willing to change processes to improve the quality of the register and improve the controls on the Electoral process. As the Irish Times rightly points out, you have to produce evidence of address to get a parking permit from Local Authorities. I can’t join a library in Dublin because I don’t have a utility bill at an address in Dublin.

    The chronic lack of leadership on this issue is appalling. Here’s a link to a piece I’ve written in an International Journal for Information Quality people… it references some reseach that was done in 2004 into attitudes to Information Quality in UK Public Sector organisations…

    … in the mean time as the Irish Times haven’t responded to the opinion piece I sent them based on my chocolate cake/scrap & rework post I suppose I’ll have to tout it around the other papers… I’ll stick up the draft for reference here later today.

  • ICT Expo

    sheeeeeeeessssshhhhh!

    I’m just winding down from the last few days of excitement around the ICT Expo Information Quality Master Class. Larry English was over to do a Master Class on Information Quality. It went very well, and I think Larry enjoyed his visit to Dublin.

    Everyone seemed to get a lot out of what was a very intense day- not least me. It is a pity that none of our politicians came along – but there were representatives from our Hospitals, the HSE, financial services and telecomms.

    Larry’s take on our electoral register issues was interesting, especially given the work that he has done with the Carter Foundation for Electoral Reform in the US. The use of Census Enumerators is just scrap and rework. It will establish a cleansed register at a point in time but unless the processes and root causes are addressed the register will degrade again from that point forward.

    I refer readers to my previous posts on that topic….

    By the way… 16 days left to the expiration of Census Enumerator contracts (and counting).

  • Why Scrap and Rework isn’t good enough

    Simon has thrown down a bit of a challenge…  can I show why Information Scrap and Rework isn’t good enough because it seems like a sensible starting point…

    First off… let me provide a reference that should educate and delight (at least some of you) that explains what this Information Quality yoke is all about… THERE we go. The reference is a little old (2002) but for an update come to ICTEXPO on Friday.

    Now… why isn’t Scrap and Rework good enough?

    Who likes chocolate cake? Isn’t it a pain when your face gets covered in chocolate from mashing handfuls of cake into your gob? But you can wipe your face (usually in your sleeve) and carry on. That’s scrap and rework. A better solution is to wipe your face and take a smaller division of cake (a forkful). That is a change in the process based on an analysis of why you keep getting a chocolatey face, coupled with a scrap and rework task to set a baseline of cleanliness for your face that you will seek to maintain.

    Simon is right – scrap and rework looks like a good place to start, and when you say “Data Quality” to most people that’s what they think, under the labels “data scrubbing”, “data cleansing” or similar. However, it doesn’t address the actual source of the poor information quality, much as wiping your face in your sleeve doesn’t stop your face getting covered in chocolate.

    Therefore, once you clean your database, you will very quickly find it filling up with duff data again. Which eventually results in another round of scrap and rework to fix things again. Which then leads people to say that Information Quality management doesn’t work and costs lots of money. But scrap and rework isn’t information quality management. It is a process step to improving the quality of your information but it is just one step in many that range from culture change (from apathy to active interest) to process change to training etc.

    Tom Redman is one of the co-founders of the IAIDQ. His metaphor is that databases are like lakes. No matter how many times you clean the lake, if you don’t address the sources of ‘pollution’ (root causes, cake-eating processes) then you will never achieve good quality.

    To put it in professional terms that Simon (law-talking boyo that he is) might understand, scrap and rework is like apologising and offering some compensation everytime you punch a complete stranger in the face. A far better solution is to examine why it is you punch strangers in the face and stop doing it. Your apologies and offers of money to the injured fix the historical damage but do not prevent future occurences. And I doubt Simon would counsel any of his firm’s clients to continue punching strangers in the face.

    Scrap and rework is costly. Scrap and rework on a repetitive institutionalised basis is futile, creating a sense of doing something about your Information quality without actually getting anywhere but burning a pile of cash to stand still. It is an important step in any information quality management programme. However, understanding your data capture processes and the root causes of your poor quality data and then acting to improve those processes to address those root causes are the components that contribute to a sustained improvement in quality.

    Scrap and rework solves the problems of today at a short-term economic cost. However, it serves to bury the problems of tomorrow unless it takes place in tandem with process improvement to address root cause and the development of a ‘Quality culture’.

    To tie this back to the Electoral Register, to rely on scrap and rework would mean that we would get a clean register this time around at a point in time. However, over time the register would degrade in quality again, in the same way as your face gets dirty again if you don’t change the way you eat your cake.

    Now put that chocolate cake down and get a fork!

  • Reponse to Damien Blakes’ post on irishelection.com

    Damien Blake written a good piece on IrishElection.com regarding his view on how to address the Electoral Register.

    Much of what he says has merit as a short term solution. He suggests that we scrap the register (no problem there) and rework it from scratch (again, no problem there) rather than limp on with a defective register.

    Damien suggests that my writings will eventually find their way into undergraduate or post graduate theses.  I too look forward to the day that clear thinking about the fundamental best practices of Quality Management applied to Information form part of University curricula at undergraduate level and post-graduate level, much like the practices of Manufacturing Quality Management gained acceptance. In the US this is already beginning to happen, and I have been involved in curriculum development work with an Irish University in a similar vein.

    What I have written is based on a number of years (best part of a decade) working in complex Information Management environments and on the shared experiences of other practitioners in the Information Quality Management space with whom I have spoken at conferences (internationally), and with whom I work on a regular basis as a Director of the International Association for Information & Data Quality. The techniques, methodologies and approaches I put forward are based on my real world,practical experiences in applying best practices that have been proven in other industries and disciplines.

    Damien’s further goes on to suggest using the PPS Number and associated data to register people – preferably automatically. What Damien has suggested here is a process change to address root causes of poor data quality. Excellent. That is what I have been writing on… well at least as far at the review/change of processes goes. I’ll come ot my concerns with his proposal in a moment. Well done for thinking about the root causes of the problem and how the processes can be changed to address it. Top of the class that man.

    Damien’s suggestion doesn’t address the fact that there is no legal obligation on anyone to register to vote, and it could even be argued that one has a constitutional right not to register to vote. Automatic voter registration based on a “Single View of Voter” may not be a runner. Also, the Data Protection Commissioner has limited the uses that a PPS number can be put to – however I am sure legislation could get around that. The Digital Rights Ireland site has a nice paper on it about the ‘scope creep’ in the use of PPS Numbers that I’ve referenced in an earlier post.

    Ultimately, even if we scrapped the Register in the morning and rebuilt it in a shining pristine form, the simple fact is that name and address data degrades at a significant rate. In the absence of clear controls and processes to manage and maintain that data at an acceptable level of quality we will find ourselves rapidly returning to a situation where the Register is unreliable – Scrap and Rework is not the route to a high quality Information asset. It is a step on the journey, and an important process – but in the absence of process re-engineering to address root causes of defects and deficiencies the inevitable result is more scrap and rework.

    Damien’s proposal to use the name/address/citzenship data associated with the PPS number would serve to reduce redundancy of data (multiple copies of the same data held in multiple data stores) but it may run into Data Protection issues. But as a change of process for the management of Electoral Register data to address deficiencies in the existing process it has merit. But should you have to be a tax payer or a recipeint of State benefits in order to vote?

    Damien’s suggestion for a Statutory agency or a reallocation of resources/roles to task someone with maintaining the Register. Again, I am in wholehearted agreement. What Damien proposes here is a review of the Governance model for this data to give clear accountability, authority and mandate and (I would surmise) a standardisation of processes, controls and toolsets for managing and measuring the quality of Electoral Register data. I fully agree with the general thrust of Damien’s proposal here, although the specifics of what that Governance model in my view should be aligned with the requirements of the process and the requirements of the controls necessary to ensure the quality of the electoral register – simply assigning a role with a stroke of a pen does not deliver quality improvements.

    I agree with Damien that the process for voter registration and for maintaining that data should be a simple as possible. Clear definition of processes and business rules to support ‘flow-through’ registration and data maintenance are part of the Information Architecture design that should underpin any long term solution. Simplicity of process  could be part of the ‘customer expectation’ against which the quality of the process (and the information it produces) could be measured. However a simple ‘customer’ interface that sits on top of chaotic processes riddled with deficiencies and absences of controls to ensure the quality of the Information will not achieve the full objective of a simple to operate set of processes or functions that deliver reliable and high-quality Electoral Register information.

    Damien is right. We need to start again. We need to start again in terms of the information in the Register. We need to start again in terms of the Governance model that is put in place to manage this Information Asset. We need to start again in terms of the processes that people follow to create, update and maintain that information to ensure that we achieve our objective of a reliable, accurate (within a margin for error) Electoral Register. We need to start again in terms of how we think about the ‘architecture’ that this Electoral Information is held. We need to start again in terms of ensuring that we adopt appropriate technologies and strategies to address identified weaknesses in the processes for managing our Electoral Register data.

    However, to focus just on scrap and rework simply solves the problem of today. Addressing the root causes in the processes and governance as well as conducting scrap and rework on the data solves today’s problems and prevents those of tomorrow.

    I’m glad Damien and I are in such agreement on the principles, even though we may differ in our view on specifics (specific solutions aren’t my goal here – raising awareness of Best Practices was my intention). I hope he can find the time to attend the Information Quality Master Class that is being held in the RDS on Friday where a person with even more years experience in this domain than I will be sharing his knowledge with delegates

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