The DOBlog

Tag: Information/Data Quality Issues

  • A game changer – Ferguson v British Gas

    Back in April I wrote an article for the IAIDQ’s Quarterly Member Newsletter picking up on my niche theme, Common Law liability for poor quality information – in other words, the likelihood that poor quality information and poor quality information management practices will result in your organisation (or you personally) being sued.

    I’ve written and presented on this theme many times over the past few years and it always struck me how people started off being in the “that’s too theoretical” camp but by the time I (and occasionally my speaking/writing partner on this stuff, Mr Fergal Crehan) had finished people were all but phoning their company lawyers to have a chat.

    To an extent, I have to admit that in the early days much of this was theoretical, taking precedents from other areas of law and trying to figure out how they fit together in an Information Quality context. However, in January 2009 a case was heard in the Court of Appeal in England and Wales which has significant implications for the Information Quality profession and which has had almost no coverage (other than coverage via the IAIDQ and myself). My legal colleagues describe it as “ground breaking” for the profession because of the simple legal principle it creates regarding complex and silo’d computing environments and the impact of disparate and plain crummy data. I see it as a clear rallying cry that makes it crystal clear that poor information quality will get you sued.

    Recent reports (here and here) and anecdotal evidence suggest that in the current economic climate, the risk to companies of litigation is increasing. Simply put, the issues that might have been brushed aside or resolved amicably in the past are now life and death issues, at least in the commercial sense. As a result there is now a trend to “lawyer up” at the first sign of trouble. This trend is likely to accelerate in the context of issues involving information, and I suspect, particularly in financial services.

    A recent article in the Commercial Litigation Journal (Frisby & Morrison, 2008) supports this supposition. In that article, the authors conclude:

    “History has shown that during previous downturns in market conditions, litigation has been a source of increased activity in law firms as businesses fight to hold onto what they have or utilise it as a cashflow tool to avoid paying money out.”

    The Case that (should have) shook the Information Quality world

    The case of Ferguson v British Gas was started by Ms. Ferguson, a former customer of British Gas who had transferred to a new supplier but to whom British Gas continued to send invoices and letters with threats to cut off her supply, start legal proceedings, and report her to credit rating agencies.

    Ms Ferguson complained and received assurances that this would stop but the correspondence continued. Ms Ferguson then sued British Gas for harassment.

    Among the defences put forward by British Gas were the arguments that:

    (a) correspondence generated by automated systems did not amount to harassment, and (b) for the conduct to amount to harassment, Ms Ferguson would have to show that the company had “actual knowledge” that its behaviour was harassment.

    The Court of Appeal dismissed both these arguments. Lord Justice Breen, one of the judges on the panel for this appeal, ruled that:

    “It is clear from this case that a corporation, large or small, can be responsible for harassment and can’t rely on the argument that there is no ‘controlling mind’ in the company and that the left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing,” he said.

    Lord Justice Jacob, in delivering the ruling of the Court, dismissed the automated systems argument by saying:

    “[British Gas] also made the point that the correspondence was computer generated and so, for some reason which I do not really follow, Ms. Ferguson should not have taken it as seriously as if it had come from an individual. But real people are responsible for programming and entering material into the computer. It is British Gas’s system which, at the very least, allowed the impugned conduct to happen.”

    So what does this mean?

    In this ruling, the Court of Appeal for England and Wales has effectively indicated a judicial dismissal of a ‘silo’ view of the organization when a company is being sued. The courts attribute to the company the full knowledge it ought to have had if the left hand knew what the right hand was doing. Any future defence argument grounded on the silo nature of organizations will likely fail. If the company will not break down barriers to ensure that its conduct meets the reasonable expectations of its customers, the courts will do it for them.

    Secondly, the Court clearly had little time or patience for the argument that correspondence generated by a computer was any less weighty or worrisome than a letter written by a human being. Lord Justice Jacob’s statement places the emphasis on the people who program the computer and the people who enter the information. The faulty ‘system’ he refers to includes more than just the computer system; arguably, it also encompasses the human factors in the systemic management of the core processes of British Gas.

    Thirdly, the Court noted that perfectly good and inexpensive avenues to remedy in this type of case exist through the UK’s Trading Standards regulations. Thus from a risk management perspective, the probability of a company being prosecuted for this type of error will increase.

    British Gas settled with Ms Ferguson for an undisclosed amount and was ordered to pay her costs.

    What does it mean from an Information Quality perspective?

    From an Information Quality perspective, this case clearly shows the legal risks that arise from (a) disconnected and siloed systems, and (b) inconsistencies between the facts about real world entities that are contained in these systems.

    It would appear that the debt recovery systems in British Gas were not updated with correct customer account balances (amongst other potential issues).

    Ms. Ferguson was told repeatedly by one part of British Gas that the situation was resolved, while another part of British Gas rolled forward with threats of litigation. The root cause here would appear to be an incomplete or inaccurate record or a failure of British Gas’ systems. The Court’s judgment implies that that poor quality data isn’t a defence against litigation.

    The ruling’s emphasis on the importance of people in the management of information, in terms of programming computers (which can be interpreted to include the IT tasks involved in designing and developing systems) and inputting data (which can be interpreted as defining the data that the business uses, and managing the processes that create, maintain, and apply that data) is likewise significant.

    Clearly, an effective information quality strategy and culture, implemented through people and systems, could have avoided the customer service disaster and litigation that this case represents.  The court held the company accountable for not breaking down barriers between departments and systems so that the left-hand of the organization knows what the right-hand is doing.

    Furthermore, it is now more important than ever that companies ensure the accuracy of information about customers, their accounts, and their relationship with the company, as well as ensuring the consistency of that information between systems. The severity of impact of the risk is relatively high (reputational loss, cost of investigations, cost of refunds) and the likelihood of occurrence is also higher in today’s economic climate.

    Given the importance of information in modern businesses, and the likelihood of increased litigation during a recession, it is inevitable: poor quality information will get you sued.

  • Software Quality, Information Quality, and Customer Service

    Cripes. It’s been a month since I last posted here. Time flies when you are helping your boss figure out how to divide your work up before you leave the company in 3 weeks. I’ve also been very busy with my work in the International Association for Information and Data Quality – lots of interesting things happening there, including the Blog Carnival for Data Quality which I’ll be hosting come Monday!

    One of the things I do in the IAIDQ is moderate and manage the IQTrainwrecks.com website. It is a resource site for people which captures real world stories of how poor quality information impacts on people, companies, and even economies.

    Earlier this week I posted a case that was flagged to me by the nice people over at Tuppenceworth.ie concerning double-charging on customer accounts arising from a software bug. Details of that story can be found on IQTrainwrecks and on Tuppenceworth. I’d advise you to read either of those posts as they provide the context necessary for what follows here. (more…)

  • Telephone numbers and Information Quality – the risk of assumption

    There is an old saying that the word “Assume” makes an “Ass” out of “You” and “Me”.

    Yet we see (and make) assumptions every day when it comes to assessing the quality (or otherwise) of information. Anglo-Saxon biassed peoples (US, English speaking Europe etc) often assume that names are structured Firstname Surname. “Daragh” = First Name, “O Brien” = Surname. The cultural bias here is well documented by people like Graham Rhind (who advises the use of “Given Name/Family Name” constructs on web forms etc. to improve cross-cultural usability.

    But what if you see “George Michael” written down (without the context of labels for each name part) with a reference to “singer”? Would this relate to the pop singer George Michael, or the bass baritone singer Michael George?

    One of the common ‘rules of thumb’ with telephone numbers is that, when you are trying to create the full ‘internationalised’ version of a telephone number (+[international access code] [local area code] [local number]) you take the number as written ‘locally’ and drop the leading zero. Of course, like most conventional wisdom a little scrutiny causes this rule of thumb to fall apart.

    For example, in the Czech Republic there is no ‘leading zero’ as it is actually part of the international access code (which actually makes more sense to me…). One might assume that Europe, with the standardisation ethos of the European Union would all have plumped for “0” as a leading digit on local area codes. Not so, as Portugal doesn’t use any leading digit on their area codes. Some countries that used to be part of the USSR (like Russia, Belarus and Azerbijan) use 8 instead of 0.

    You might not be safe in assuming that you just need to consider the first digit of the local area code. Hungary has a 2-digit prefix (06), so you would need to parse in 2 characters in the string to remove the correct digits. Just stripping the leading zero will result in a totally embuggered piece of information.

    Also, everyone assumes that a telephone number will consist only of numbers. However, there are a few instances where the code required to dial out from a country (the International Direct Dial code) is actually alphanumeric in that it contains either the * (star) or # (hash key/pound key). Our buddies in Belarus are an example of this, where to dial out from Belarus you need to dial “8**10” (which even more confusingly is often written “8~10”.
    So what does this mean for people who are assessing or seeking to improve the quality of telephone number data in their systems?

    Well, first off it means you need to have some context to understand the correct business rules to apply. For example, the rules I would apply to assessing the quality (and likely defects) in a telephone number from Ireland would be different to what I’d need to apply to telephone numbers relating to Belarus. In an Irish telephone number it would be correct to strip out instances of “**” and then validate the rest of the string based on its length (if stripping the ** made it too short to be a telephone number then we would need to tag it as duff data and remove it). With data relating to Belarus it might simply be that the person filling in the form (the source of the data) got confused about what codes to use.

    Secondly, it means you need to put some thought into the design of information capture processes to reduce the chances of errors occuring. Defining a structure with seperate fields, linking the international access code to a country drop down (and a library of business rules for how to interpret and ‘standardize’ subsequent inputs) would not be too difficult – it would just require investment of effort in researching the rules and maintaining them once deployed. Here’s a link to a useful resource I’ve found (note that I can’t vouch for the frequency of updates to this site, but I’ve found it a fun way to figure out what the rules might be for various countries). Also, Wikipedia has a good piece on Telephone number plans. Graham Rhind also has some good links to references for telephone number format rules
    Looking at the data of a telephone number in isolation will most likely result in you screwing up some of the data (if you have international telephone number). Having the country information for that data (is the number in France or Belarus) allows you to construct appropriate rules and make your assumptions in the appropriate context to reduce your risks of error.

    Ultimately, blundering in with a crude rule of thumb and simply stripping any leading zeros you find because that is the assumption you’ve made will result in you making an ass out of you and your data.

    Which raises an interesting question…

    Imagine you have been given a spreadsheet of telephone numbers that you have been told are international numbers in the ‘local’ formats for the respective countries. You open the spreadsheet and there are no leading zeros (because Excel -and most other spreadsheets- assumes that numbers don’t begin with zero and strip it out). What to you do to get the data back to a format that you can actually use?

    Answers on a post card (or in the comments) please.

  • The Electoral Register (Here we go again)

    The Irish Times today carries a story on page five which details a number of proposed changes to the management of the Electoral Register arising from the kerfuffle of the past two years about how totally buggered it is. For those of you who don’t know, I’ve written a little bit about this in the past (earning an Obsessive Blogger badge in the process donchaknow). It was just under two years ago that I opened this blog with a post on this very topic…

    A number of points raised in the article interest me, if for no other reason than they sound very familiar – more on that anon. Other interest me because they still run somewhat counter to the approach that is needed to finally resolve the issue.

    I’ll start with the bits that run counter to the approach required. The Oireachtas Committee has been pretty much consistent in its application of the boot to Local Authorities as regards the priority they give to the management of the Electoral Register. According to the Irish Times article, the TDs and Senators found that:

    “Running elections is not a core function of local authorities. Indeed, it is not a function that appears to demand attention every year. It can, therefore, be questioned if it gets the priority it warrants under the array of authorities”

    I must humbly agree and disagree with this statement. By appearing to blame Local Authorities for the problem and for failing to prioritise the management of the Electoral Register, the Committee effectively absolves successive Ministers for the Environment and other elected officials from failing to ensure that this ‘information asset’ was properly maintained. Ultimately, all Local Authorities fall under the remit of the Minister for Environment, Heritage and Local Government. As the ‘supreme being’ in that particular food chain, the Minister (and their department) is in a position to set policy, establish priorities and mandate adequate resourcing of any Local Authority function, from Water Services to Electoral Franchise.

    The key issue is that Franchise section was not seen as important by anyone. A key information asset was not managed, no continual plans were put in place for the acquisition of information or the maintenance of information. Only when there were problems applying the information did anyone give a darn. This, unfortunately, is a problem that is not confined to Local Government and Electoral data however – a large number of companies world wide have felt the pain of failing to manage the quality of their information assets in recent times.

    Failing to acknowledge that the lack of management priority was systemic and endemic within the entire hierarchy of Central and Local Government means that a group of people who probably tried to do their best with the resources assigned to them are probably going to feel very aggrieved. “The Register is buggered. It’s your fault. We’re taking it away from you” is the current message. Rather it should be “The system we were operating is broken. Collectively there was a failure to prioritise the management of this resource. The people tried to make it work, but best efforts were never enough. It needs to be replaced.”

    W. Edward’s Deming advised people seeking to improve quality to ‘drive out fear’. A corollary of that is that one should not engage in blame when a system is broken unless you are willing to blame all actors in the system equally.

    However, I’m equally guilty as I raised this issue (albeit not in as ‘blaming’ a tone) back in… oh 2006.:

    “Does the current structure of Local Authorities managing Electoral Register data without a clear central authority with control/co-ordination functions (such as to build the national ‘master’ file) have any contribution to the overstatement of the Register?“

    Moving on to other points that sound very familiar…

    1. Errors are due to a “wide variety of practices” within Local Authorities. Yup, I recall writing about that as a possible root cause back in 2006. Here and here and here and here and here in fact.
    2. The use of other data sources to supplement the information available to maintain the Register is one suggestion. Hmmm… does this sound like it covers the issue?

      3. Could the Electoral Register process make use of a data source of people who are moving house (such as An Posts’s mail redirection service or newaddress.ie)? How can that be utilised in an enhanced process to manage & maintain the electoral register? These are technically surrogate sources of reality rather than being ‘reality’ itself, but they might be useful.

      That’s from a post I wrote here on the 24th April 2006.

      And then there’s this report, which was sent to Eamon Gilmore on my behalf and which ultimately found its way to Dick Roche’s desk while he was still the Minister in the DOELG. Pages 3 to 5 make interesting reading in light of the current proposals. Please note the negatives that I identified with the use of data from 3rd party organisations that would need to be overcome for the solution to be entirely practicable. These can be worked around with sound governance and planning, but bumbling into a solution without understanding the potential problems that would need to be addressed will lead to a less than successful implementation.

    3. The big proposal is the creation of a ‘central authority’ to manage the Electoral Register. This is not new. It is simply a variation on a theme put forward by Eamon Gilmore in a Private Member’s Bill which was debated back in 2006 and defeated at the Second Stage(The Electoral Registration Commissioner Bill, 2005). This is a proposal that I also critiqued in the report that wound its way to Dick Roche… see pages 3 to 5 again. I also raise issues of management and management culture at page 11.
    4. The use of PPS numbers is being considered but there are implications around Data Protection . Hmm… let’s see… I mentioned those issues in this post and in this post.

      5. And it further assumes that the PPS Identity is always accurate (it may not be, particularly if someone is moving house or has moved house. I know of one case where someone was receiving their Tax Certs at the address they lived in in Dublin but when they went to claim something, all the paperwork was sent to their family’s home address down the country where they hadn’t lived for nearly 15 years.)

      In my report in 2006 (and on this blog) I also discussed the PPS Number and the potential for fraud if not linked to some form of photographic ID given the nature of documents that a PPS number can be printed on in the report linked to above. This exact point was referenced by Senator Camillus Glynn at a meeting of the Committee last week

      “I would not have a difficulty with using the PPS card. It is logical, makes sense and is consistent with what obtains in the North. The PPS card should also include photographic evidence. I could get hold of Deputy Scanlon’s card. Who is to say that I am not the Deputy if his photograph is not on the card? Whatever we do must be as foolproof as possible.”

      This comment was supported by a number of other committee members.

    So, where does that leave us? Just under two years since I started obsessively blogging about this issue, we’ve moved not much further than when I started. There is a lot of familiarity about the sound-bites coming out at present – to put it another way, there is little on the table at the moment (it seems) that was not contained in the report I prepared or on this blog back in 2006.

    What is new? Well, for a start they aren’t going to make Voter Registration compulsory. Back in 2006 I debated this briefly with Damien Blake… as I recall Damien had proposed automatic registration based on PPS number and date of birth. I questioned whether that would be possible without legislative changes or if it was even desirable. However, the clarification that mandatory registration is now off the table is new.

    The proposal for a centralised governance agency and the removal of responsibility for Franchise /Electoral Register information from the Local Authorities sounds new. But it’s not. It’s a variation on a theme that simply addresses the criticism I had of the original Labour Party proposal. By creating a single agency the issues of Accountability/Responsibility and Governance are greatly simplified, as are issues of standardisation of forms and processes and information systems.

    One new thing is the notion that people should be able to update their details year round, not just in a narrow window in November. This is a small but significant change in process and protocol that addresses a likely root cause.

    What is also new – to an extent – is the clear proposal that this National Electoral Office should be managed by a single head (one leader), answerable to the Dail and outside the normal Civil Service structures (enabling them to hire their own staff to meet their needs). This is important as it sets out a clear governance and accountability structure (which I’d emphasised was needed – Labour’s initial proposal was for a Quango to work in tandem with Local Authorities… a recipe for ‘too many cooks’ if ever I’d heard one). That this head should have the same tenure as a judge to “promote independence from government” is also important, not just because of the independence and allegiance issues it gets around, but also because it sends a very clear message.

    The Electoral Register is an important Information Asset and needs to be managed as such. It is not a ‘clerical’ function that can be left to the side when other tasks need to be performed. It is serious work for serious people with serious consequences when it goes wrong.

    Putting its management on a totally independent footing with clear accountability to the Oireachtas and the Electorate rather than in an under-resourced and undervalued section within one of 34 Local Authorities assures an adequate consistency of Governance and a Constancy of Purpose. The risk is that unless this agency is properly funded and resourced it will become a ‘quality department’ function that is all talk and no trousers and will fail to achieve its objectives.

    As much of the proposals seem to be based on (or eerily parallel) analysis and recommendations I was formulating back in 2006, I humbly put myself forward for the position of Head of the National Elections Office 😉

  • Final post and update on IBTS issues

    OK. This is (hopefully) my final post on the IBTS issues. I may post their response to my queries about why I received a letter and why my data was in New York. I may not. So here we go..

    First off, courtesy of a source who enquired about the investigation, the Data Protection Commissioner has finished their investigation and the IBTS seems to have done everything as correct as they could, in the eyes of the DPC with regard to managing risk and tending to the security of the data. The issue of why the data was not anonymised seems to be dealt with on the grounds that the fields with personal data could not be isolated in the log files. The DPC finding was that the data provided was not excessive in the circumstances.

    [Update: Here’s a link to the Data Protection Commissioner’s report. ]

    This suggests to me that the log files effectively amounted to long strings of text which would have needed to be parsed to extract given name/family name/telephone number/address details, or else the fields in the log tables are named strangely and unintuitively (not as uncommon as you might think) and the IBTS does not have a mapping of the fields to the data that they contain.

    In either case, parsing software is not that expensive (in the grand scheme of things) and a wide array of data quality tools provide very powerful parsing capabilities at moderate costs. I think of Informatica’s Data Quality Workbench (a product originally developed in Ireland), Trillium Software’s offerings or the nice tools from Datanomic.

    Many of these tools (or others from similar vendors) can also help identify the type of data in fields so that organisations can identify what information they have where in their systems. “Ah, field x_system_operator_label actually has names in it!… now what?”.

    If the log files effectively contained totally unintelligible data, one would need to ask what the value of it for testing would be, unless the project involved the parsing of this data in some way to make it ‘useable’? As such, one must assume that there was some inherent structure/pattern to the data that information quality tools would be able to interpret.

    Given that according to the DPC the NYBC were selected after a public tender process to provide a data extraction tool this would suggest that there was some structure to the data that could be interpreted. It also (for me) raises the question as to whether any data had been extracted in a structured format from the log files?

    Also the “the data is secure because we couldn’t figure out where it was in the file so no-one else will” defence is not the strongest plank to stand on. Using any of the tools described above (or similar ones that exist in the open source space, or can be assembled from tools such as Python or TCL/TK or put together in JAVA) it would be possible to parse out key data from a string of text without a lot of ‘technical’ expertise (Ok, if you are ‘home rolling’ a solution using TCL or Python you’d need to be up to speed on techie things, but not that much). Some context data might be needed (such as a list of possible firstnames and a list of lastnames, but that type of data is relatively easy to put together. Of course, it would need to be considered worth the effort and the laptop itself was probably worth more than irish data would be to a NYC criminal.

    The response from the DPC that I’ve seen doesn’t address the question of whether NYBC failed to act in a manner consistent with their duty of care by letting the data out of a controlled environment (it looks like there was a near blind reliance on the security of the encryption). However, that is more a fault of the NYBC than the IBTS… I suspect more attention will be paid to physical control of data issues in future. While the EU model contract arrangements regarding encryption are all well and good, sometimes it serves to exceed the minimum standards set.

    The other part of this post relates to the letter template that Fitz kindly offered to put together for visitors here. Fitz lives over at http://tugofwar.spaces.live.com if anyone is interested. I’ve gussied up the text he posted elsewhere on this site into a word doc for download ==> Template Letter.

    Fitz invites people to take this letter as a starting point and edit it as they see fit. My suggestion is to edit it to reflect an accurate statement of your situation. For example… if you haven’t received a letter from the IBTS then just jump to the end and request a copy of your personal data from the IBTS (it will cost you a few quid to get it), if you haven’t phoned their help-line don’t mention it in the letter etc…. keep it real to you rather than looking like a totally formulaic letter.

    On a lighter note, a friend of mine has received multiple letters from the Road Safety Authority telling him he’s missed his driving test and will now forfeit his fee. Thing is, he passed his test three years ago. Which begs the question (apart from the question of why they are sending him letters now)… why the RSA still has his application details given that data should only be retained for as long as it is required for the stated purpose for which it was collected? And why have the RSA failed to maintain the information accurately (it is wrong in at least one significant way).

  • Things that peeve me on the web (a revisit)

    Vodafone have launched a Christmas e-card site with a difference called Bosco is back. On this site you can put together a custom video e-card featuring Bosco, a perennial kids TV favourite in Ireland.

    Why does this site peeve me? Well, due to the way the video is put together (pre-recorded video clips that are assembled in real-time) a lot of the process is driven by drop down menus to select names etc. This is where the problem starts.

    As people who have come to my conference presentations know, a lot of my interest in Information Quality stems from the fact that my name (Daragh) has approx 12 alternate spellings and can be either male or female. These simple facts have motivated me over the years to be a bit pedantic about my name (1 ‘R’, a ‘GH’ at the end -silent, Male). So I was a bit dismayed when I flagged my gender as ‘Male’ on the “Bosco is Back” and looked for my name, only to find…

    bosco boobo 1

    That’s annoying. To cater for the alternate spellings (such as Daragh, Darach, Dara, Daire) it would have been easy enough just to link them to the same video insert. However, it is not as bad as if I was a woman. According to Vodafone “Darragh” (and apparently all the phonetic variants thereof) is only a guys name.

    Bosco booboo 2

    Also, some of the inserts give unexpected outcomes. I was going to send my wife an e-card describing her as a “Dreamer”. Thankfully there is a preview mode which showed me what she’d see. Given that the squeaky voiced puppet would have demanded that she “stop thinking about that girl” I decided it might require more explaining at home than I could possibly manage.

    Yes, the whole thing is a bit of fun and I’m probably being overly pedantic. However it does highlight the risk of having ‘non-quality’ outcomes when you rely on drop down menus and defined lists to operate a business process. What, if instead of producing a cheezee e-card I had been applying for phone service from vodafone?

    When I get a chance I’ll post up the slides I use about “why I got into Information Quality”… research this morning has identified another 3 variant spellings of my name at least….

  • Dell Quality Happy path

    Good news

    Keyboard arrived today (July 30th) just before 13:00. Spent lunch swapping out keyboard. Can now type Quality again without pausing….

    ….received phone call at 14:00 from Dell tech support to confirm that I’d received the keyboard and that I’d been able to swap it over without difficulty.

    Excellent ‘within-warranty’ customer service – my only issue is with their on-line form and the processes that support it which changed my name and required me to re-enter a lot of information Dell would (should?) already have about me.

    Bad news

    The question I’m left with now is why has it taken Dell 5 months to address the other more substantive issue, the one where the laptop wasn’t built to specification and they have not yet remedied that situation?

    The time and cost clock on this instance of non-quality is still ticking. The number of Dell staffers I’ve dealt with is still growing. The root cause of this whole issue is an information quality problem which could easily be avoided. Ergo, the costs involved and time-hassles involved could have been avoided if the relevant information process had functioned correctly and, failing that, if the corrective processes had operated efficiently.

    On the subject of Information Quality, I’ve attached a copy of the article Common Law and IQ Governance. It’s a break from a series I’m writing based on my experiences with Dell with regard to my graphics card. I’ll be presenting on this and related legal topics in Information Quality (or should that be related information quality topics in law?) at both the IDQ Conference and the IRM UK Conference and will most likely be using this whole issue as a case study, highlighting the various legal issues that it raises (compliance with EU Distance Selling Regulations, Data Protection, Contract Law, Negligence etc.). To read the rest of the articles in this Quarter’s IAIDQ newsletter go to http://www.iaidq.org and join the IAIDQ (if you aren’t already a member).

    As I have had no further substantive contact from Dell (John was well meaning but nothing seems to have come of it) and as it is over a month since graphics card number 5 was supposed to have been sent to me I’ll be meeting my legal advisors this week to discuss next steps.

  • Conferences and me for the end of 2007…

    Conference season is upon us in the Information Quality Community…

    At the end of September I’m off to Las Vegas to deliver a presentation at the IAIDQ’s North American conference the IDQ 2007 Conference.

    At the end of October I’m off to sunny London for the IRMUK Data Management and Information Quality Conferences. This will be my sixth year at this conference and my fourth as a presenter. This year I hit the ‘big leagues’ with a 3 hour tutorial on some of the legal aspects of Information Quality, going head to head with Larry English (amongst others)on the time table.

    Then in November the Irish CoP of the IAIDQ, the IQ Network will be hosting our IQ Forum… we’re planning it to co-incide with World Quality Day on the 8th of November to tie in with some IAIDQ events that will be taking place world wide.

    Who knows, maybe I’ll meet somebody from Dell at one of those conferences who might be able to fix my laptop problem before Christmas. 😉
    That would be nice.

  • Dell Hell Ireland (and other flavours) on Google

    So for shits and giggles I decided to google Dell Hell and Ireland. (The wife is out for the night, I’m bored, it seemed like a good idea at the time).

    http://www.google.ie/search?sourceid=navclient&hl=en-GB&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLF_en-GBIE226IE228&q=dell+hell+ireland

    To increase the sample size, I removed the reference to “Ireland” and instead googled for “Dell Hell Information Quality”… frack me, there I am again – the top 2 (tonight, 27 July 07).

    http://www.google.ie/search?sourceid=navclient&hl=en-GB&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLF_en-GBIE226IE228&q=dell+hell+information+quality

    So to be fair to Dell I removed the reference to “hell” to see how the DoBlog might fare with the Great Search Algorithm in the sky. This was a ‘positive control’. Wasn’t I pleasantly surprised when I was again the top 2 listed links on this day…

    http://www.google.ie/search?sourceid=navclient&hl=en-GB&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLF_en-GBIE226IE228&q=dell+information+quality

    Not yet in Damien Mulley/SkyHandling Partners/”the server cannae take it Captain, she’s goin’ te blow” territory one can always dream…

    I googled a few other combinations… for “Dell quality Information” I was results 3 and 4 out of 16,800,000. That was a very neutral query. Still other combinations were picked but I can’t be bothered typing them … the screenshots below will show you the story.

    What I learned is that I am missing a very important tag from these posts… “Dell Quality”. That will be fixed tonight.

    Also by googling for Dell Quality and Ireland I found this pdf of a Dell presentation. I was interested to read this quote from Michael Hammer (Business Process Re-engineering guru) towards the end of the slides… I’ve highlighted a few words that leapt out at me.

    “ The 21st Century Belongs to the
    Process Organization Centered on
    Customers     and…Operates With
    High Quality    , Enormous Flexibility,
    Low Cost, and Extraordinary Speed.”

    With regards to my broken keyboard Dell are hitting the marks on this one. Quickly dealt with, within the agreed time period – the failure of the delivery is down to me… (sorry Dell, I’ll sort it out as soon as I can).

    My Graphics card issue however is a result of a failed process (assembly) as a result of poor quality information (either the assembler didn’t know to put in a 256mb card or couldn’t tell a 128mb card from a 256mb card) which has dragged on now for five months (which is extraordinary speed, just not in a good way). The fact that the issue still isn’t resolved and I’ve got a second ‘Customer Advocate’ from Round Rock Texas on the case now is indicative of how wide of their goals Dell are.

    (A big shout out to Rick and John… hope you guys are reading this as you reached out and I believe you have done your best to help with my situation. Elizabeth in Dublin… if you are back in the office could you PLEASE respond to the last few emails I’ve sent you as they are quite important… the email address you gave for the person who was covering for you kept bouncing back.)

    Joseph Juran, the Quality Management guru put it very well:

    “They thought they could make the right speeches, establish broad goals, and leave everything else to subordinates… They didn’t realize that fixing quality meant fixing whole companies, a task that cannot be delegated.”

    Joseph M. Juran, “Made in the USA: A Renaissance in Quality”, Harvard Business Review, July 1, 1993

    Deming’s Point 10 tells us “Eliminate slogans, exhortations and numerical targets for the workforce since they are divisory. The difficulties belong to the whole system”.

    Firefighting does not improve quality, especially when the fire is let smoulder on for nearly half a year (and a whole new product launch).

    Dell Information Quality search results

    Dell quality Ireland

    Dell quality information

    Dell Hell Ireland

    I have others but I can’t be bothered to put them up… I think my point is made.

    Perhaps Dell should consider getting in contact with the knowledgable practitioners in the International Association for Information and Data Quality (www.iaidq.org) who might be able to share some pointers on how to address the root causes of this problem.

  • Dell Hell… but not mine, but perhaps a different circle of the same techno hell

    The other guy’s story

    Came across this on Tom Raftery’s blog. Looks like Tom’s guest writer Frank P had ‘issues’ with Dell when trying to buy some kit off them. A barrier had been created that prevented him from buying a machine from the UK Dell outlet store simply (it would seem) because the UK uses sterling and the Irish Republic uses the Euro.

    This does not seem to be a problem for Marks and Spencer, who will happily charge my credit card in Euros or Sterling when I am buying bits and bobs when on trips to London. Nor do the people in the UK I’ve bought stuff from (including a laptop and spares for my guitar) on ebay have any problems selling to the Republic of Ireland just because we use Euros… they let paypal sort the currency conversion for them and whammo the wifey has a new toy and I can get back to trying to hammer a few tunes out of my much abused fender strat.

    Quality is about meeting or exceeding customer expectations. Deming advises us in his 14 Points to ‘break down barriers between departments’. To meet FrankP’s request, Dell could have simply charged him a slightly higher fee to cover currency conversion costs and transport from the UK (chances are the machine is in a warehouse in Ireland though…). Bingo- one sale, one happy customer. The barrier might have more to do with internal accounting for products by the market they are sold to… but that is a supposition on my part.

    The economics of this ‘non-quality’

    If I’m right, that is just crazy and is an excellent example of how ‘stovepiped’ management of ‘battling business units’ is a fricking recipe for disaster in most businesses and how such artificial barriers to delivery of quality products or service should be torn down.

    It’s like having a football team with defenders who won’t pass the ball to their strikers who are in the box with a clear shot on goal and the keeper off his line just because the strikers are paid in Euros while the defenders get their cheques in sterling. (Jaysus, I think that was a football metaphor.. not sure what it means or if it makes sense but it reads well).

    If you have ‘seconds’ stock or ‘returns’ you have inventory on hand. That costs money to store and if not sold costs money to dispose of. The longer it is stock on hand (in a warehouse gathering dust) the faster the resale price is dropping (due to obsolescence and the entry of newer/better products into the market at the original price point) and the less likely you are to recoup the cost of production, cost of storage and other related costs. Eventually the inventory becomes ‘below-zero’ in that it will have cost you more than you’ll make by selling it… resulting in declining profit margins.

    In order to reduce the costs to your business you should really be trying to sell that fecker to anyone (within the bounds of the law) who comes knocking/calling/writing as soon as possible without putting seemingly petty administrative barriers in the way. Doing so results in a business process that does not meet the expectation of the customer and as such is not a process that delivers ‘quality’. Furthermore it creates a risk of negative profit margins in the business.

    Instead Dell got a blog post on a highly trafficked blog (Tom Raferty’s)written by a respected professional pundit on the IT industry and Web2.0 trends (not an amateur by any stretch) where through various comments the customer service issue is discussed at length. And then that post is in turn linked to by me, with my particular perpsective on the issue.

    And for all we know the laptop still sits unsold in its cold warehouse shelf, unloved and spurned by the new Vostros and Inspirons that swank by with their swish coloured lids and ‘more bang for your buck’ specifications. Stick a red nose on that laptop and call it Rudolph. It won’t be let join in any laptop games I can tell you.

    My saga continues

    I have had and continue to have my issues with Dell. Currently I’ve been dealing with John, one of their Customer Advocates, Elizabeth (a Dell Ireland person) and half a dozen others over the past 5 months. At this rate I’ll probably have spoken to more Dell employees than Michael Dell himself by the end of the year.

    To cap things off (no pun intended), the ‘Q’ key on my keyboard broke off on Tuesday (too much angry typing of ‘Quality’ I fear and the end of my career as a ghost-writer for James Bond novels unless I do some business re-organisation of MI6 or cut back on the gadgets).

    HAPPY NEWS

    I contacted Dell support and was dealt with promptly. I was informed I’d have the keyboard today. I arranged to work from home to be available to take delivery here. Unfortunately I missed the call from the courier and will need to try to rearrange delivery (hopefully I can get it tomorrow rather than having to work from home Monday as well).

    Crappy News

    This is the GOOD NEWS. The BAD news is that some strange things happened to my information as it bounced around Dell Customer Support. For one, they changed my name.

    Here is the email I received yesterday informing me of delivery:

    Dear Mr. Brien,

    Thank you for your reply.

    Your call has been logged, and your reference number is [edited out by me]. Keyboard will be with you on next business day, between 09.00 and 17.30 (or other local working hours). If you are office based then please advises your reception of the expected Courier visit. You will be contacted in the event of any unforeseen delays.

    Thank you for giving me the opportunity to assist you. Your case number for this interaction is [edited out by me].

    Thank you again for contacting Dell Hardware E-Support.

    “BRIEN” That’s not my name. That annoys me. That’s not good information quality. Why not?

    Well, Dell’s on-line Tech Support form looks like this (once you key in the asset tag that identifies your machine)

    Dell’s Support Site

    I’ve blocked out the asset tag for my machine (for privacy) and you’ll need to click on the thumnail to see the full image but you’ll need to for the rest of this to make sense…
    Note the first two mandatory fields:

    • First Name
    • Last Name

    I won’t go into why this is a bad labelling convention that is Anglo-centric (Given Name/Family Name are better)… for now it is enought that Dell’s form has distinct fields for my Firstname (given name): DARAGH and my Lastname (Family Name): O Brien. That’s what got typed in there. So why/how did Dell decide that the “O” in my name was surplus to requirements?

    Attention to the little details (like getting my name right or ensuring that my laptop ships with the correct graphics card installed) are evidence of a coherent and congruent quality culture. Soundbites, slogans and self-contratulatory marketing materials don’t build such a culture. The IAIDQ is a professional organisation that exists to support the development of ‘Information/Data Quality’ as a management discipline. Their website is www.iaidq.org and Dell employees (or anyone for that matter) will find some useful information there about the root causes and real impacts of these types of problems

    But back to the happy path

    That said… the tech support guy Guaran was great in sorting out the replacement keyboard and I am kicking myself I missed the couriers call when it came bang on schedule.. when you’re good you’re good.