The DOBlog

Tag: Information/Data Quality Issues

  • Mobile phone registration

    The Irish Government have again trundled out a proposal to force mandatory registration of pre-paid mobile phones. It is stated that this will be a wonderful weapon in the war on drugs, organised crime and pixies.

    There are two small problems with the proposal as it currently stands.

    1. It is unlikely to work as the politicians claim it will
    2. It is unlikely to work as the politicians hope it will

    Now, technically, this is just one problem but it is such a doozy I thought it would be worth mentioning at least twice.

    The reason it is unlikely to work as the politicians claim it will is that in order to ensure that the Register of Mobiles does not become filled with Michael M. Ouses or I.P Freelys the process will require some form of validation of name and address. In order to mitigate the risk of forged or fraudlent documentation being used (which would result in Mr Freely freely getting his fone phraudulently phone fraudulently) this documentation will need to be of some ‘official’ form.

    For Bill Pay phones the usual documentation required is a passport or drivers licence (a work ID on its own is not usually sufficient in my experience) and a utility bill – these prove you are who you say you are and you live where you say you live. In order for the Register of Mobiles to meet the stringent evidentiary requirements that the stated purpose require (to deter criminals using mobiles and to assist in tracking and apprehending them via their mobile records) then a very high level of validity and verifiability will be required of the information used for identification purposes when the phone is being purchased.

    The majority of Ready-to-go customers would seem to be children and teenagers (I’ve lost track of the number of phones my teenage sister-in-law has had over the past few years). They may not have a passport, are unlikely to have a driver’s licence (until they are in their late teens) and are extremely unlikely to be in possession of a valid utility bill in their name.

    So how will they register their phones? Are the Government proposing that the phones would be registered to the parents of these children and teenagers? What then if the child is involved in some criminal activity? Does the parent become a suspect because of the mobile phone records?

    “I didn’t beat up little Johnnie… I’d left my phone at home. My ma hates Johnnie – she must’ve done it!”.

    One solution proposed to this (which according to the Irish Daily Mail came from Civil Servants in a review of this idea update– thanks to Antoin at eire.com who has a blog post which quotes the Dept of Communications on this topic) would be to implement the Register of Mobiles only after a National Identity Card was introduced in Ireland. In theory, this would give a standardised, State-backed identity (and possibly a unique identifier for the person). However there are no current proposals to implement such a card and previous proposals have met with opposition from various quarters.

    A further issue is that name and address data ages over time. People move house, get married, get divorced or die. What mechanism will the Government require to ensure that the information registered on the Register of Mobiles is maintained accurately and in a form that meets or exceeds the evidentiary requirements of the legal system? This is not an issue for bill Pay phones as if the bill ceases to be paid the phone is cut off… and if the bill is still being paid but the address is no longer valid the Authorities have other investigative avenues open to them (such the payment records). For ‘ready-to-throw’ mobiles this is and will be a critical problem. Not only can the person move address, but the phone may ‘move person’ by being swapped, loaned or shared between family members (this may happen with bill pay phones but it is reasonable to assume that in the case of a bill pay phone the ‘sharing’ or ‘lending’ of the phone would be temporary).

    Currently we have a very important national register of people which is collated and maintained for a very serious and important function in the operation of the State. It’s called the Electoral Register and, not to put too fine a point on it, it has some ‘issues’ with the quality of the information there-in and the levels of duplication and inaccuracy in the data. What confidence should we have that the Government will have learned the lessons of the Electoral Register in the design and implementation of any new Register of Mobiles?

    I am not saying we should not require registration of pre-pay mobile phones (all operators currently encourage registration through ‘free credit’ bribes). However if we are to require citizens to give up elements of personal privacy and provide information about their mobile phone usage to State Agencies then it is essential that the system work as it is intended it will and that the information captured meets or exceeds the expectations of the politicians, the police and, most importantly, the citizen. Crucially this must happen with out the information captured being excessive or irrelevant to the stated purposes for registration.

    If we require people to provide information into a system and set of processes that will eventually degrade into an unmanaged cacophony of inaccurate, incomplete, inconsistent and otherwise just plain awful data rather than a symphony of polished, reliable and policed information then we will have achieved nothing other than a layer of paperwork and a burden on mobile phone operators and their customers. Those with criminal intent will pervert the system – foreign SIMS, imported phones, stolen phones etc.

    By definition they don’t play by the rules.

  • For the avoidance of doubt…

    The first bit of doubt

    Various Dell representatives have explained to me my problem as being one of how my graphics card uses hypermemory. However that doesn’t resolve the issue that I the option I selected when building my machine was for a card with 256MB dedicated video RAM – the fact that it could use hypermemory to extend that further was irrelevant.

    Screenshot of my graphics card properties.

    For the avoidance of doubt I’ve uploaded a screenshot of the properties of the graphics card from the ATI administration utility. Maybe I’m reading it wrong but it sure looks like a 128MB graphics card to me, hypermemory or no hypermemory.

    The other bit of doubt

    As some of you may know, I do the odd bit of teaching and guest lecturing at a university in Dublin City (rearrange the words to figure out which one). There’s another member of staff there who, lucky person that he is, shares a variant of my name. By variant I mean that the name is phonetically and aurally identical but there are a few small differences.

    • Dr. Darragh O’Brien uses his title (hard earned and well deserved) which is a title I don’t have (I’m just a pretender at this whole ‘knowing academic things’ it would seem).
    • Dr. Darragh spells his name with 2 ‘r’s. I don’t.
    • He uses an apostrophe in his surname (O‘Brien) where as I don’t)

    This is important as Dell just emailed him and phoned him trying to get in contact with me. The waves of surrealism are lapping harshly on the shores of my patience at this stage. Thankfully Dr. D (as I will refer to him to avoid confusion) forwarded me the email he got which I’ve responded to. He’s used to it – the Admin team in the particular faculty had him listed to teach my class for a while on the on-line course tools.

    I’m am heartily impressed that Dell went to the trouble of going to the university website and looking up contact details for me… I mean him… I mean me… …. drat, now even I’m confused. Particularly as they already had my personal email address in the email correspondence I’ve had and associated with my order and the support cases I’ve raised.

    All of which made me decide to dig out an old slide I use in presentations on Information Quality that shows why I got interested in the issue in the first place.
    Why i got into information quality

    For those of you who can’t use the powerpoint viewer here, I’ve converted the slide to a gif for your viewing pleasure.
    Why I got into IQ slide gif

    Dr. D — If you’re reading this thanks for the email forward and I hope you find my slide ‘amusing’.

  • Ding Dong Dell

    Deary me. Life with Dell just gets better and better. Not 2 hours after I finish writing up my experiences for the IAIDQ Q2 Newsletter then I find myself on the phone to a nice guy from Dell who is asking me about my DVD drive issues (phone call at 15:25 today approx).

    I had a feeling of dé ja vú, partly because I spoke to the same guy (or a sound-alike colleague) last Tuesday about that issue and agreed that it was resolved to my satisfaction. On Tuesday I tried to get a word in about my ongoing graphics card issue but was politely told to ‘send a email’.

    Today however I was transferred to the supervisor, whose name I took to be Samuel. Nice guy. very focussed on finding out my issues. He went into some detail explaining how ATI graphics cards take additional memory from the main system RAM as required so while it might be 128MB it can take extra from the system… then he realised I’d ordered 256MB dedicated video RAM and he became even more helpful and looked into it further.

    45 seconds later he came back to me to confirm that Customer Service had sent me a 128MB graphics card in error and that he would follow up and take care of it and would call me back on Monday.

    Now… what could be the root cause for someone in a call centre selecting the wrong thing from a list? Could it be that the systems and processes that exist for Dell service are not supportive of the staff’s best efforts to do their job right? If the system relies on a pick list or an alphabetic search then it is possible that this is a source of error in the process.

    All I know is that I have yet to talk to a Customer Service rep in Dell who sounds like they have a lot of pride in their work anymore. Samuel was the exception in recent times. Lucy (the tech support person I dealt with on day 1 about my DVD issues) was bright and perky but as a former call centre jockey myself I could sense an underlying tone of “we’ve been dropped in it again, why do I bother”.

    My experience is that Dell Customer service staff are all nice people who are trying to do the best job they can under pressure. I’ve been there myself as a call centre agent and supervisor – I know how it feels when the sytems don’t work, the data is wrong and the customer is furious at you – the representative of the behemoth. It is not a nice place to be in and it makes it hard to take pride in your work and be proud of who you work for. As a result, when you do spot the easy idea to help make things better you think “why should I bother? management don’t”

    My experience of errors and cockups from Dell suggests that the systems and processes that these people have to support them are letting them down. Poor quality processes, poor quality information and an increasing worry about the bottom line and profitability all weighs heavily on morale and pride. More importantly it drains money out of the organisation.

    I look forward to Monday. I may be naive but I am putting my trust in Samuel to follow through on his promise to sort this problem out. He sounded a bit shocked when he came back after looking at my customer service history. If they get it right this time then I might refrain from putting all of this into a conference presentation on the costs and impacts of poor Information Quality.

    Then again, maybe not. I could fill 3 hours at this stage.

    Current estimated cost of rework to deliver the laptop I ordered (ignoring warranty replacement of a defective dvd drive) is approx 44% of the purchase price of the laptop. No wonder margins are slipping in Dell.

  • DoBlog is 1 year old this month

    Last night I was doing some housekeeping on the site and I noticed that the year-ometer on the DoBlog is about to turn over. The first post on www.obriend.com (as it was then) was on 18th April 2006. It was about the Electoral Register.

    With an Election looming in the next few weeks it is worth revisiting where we are on that particular issue.

    • The Electoral Register issues are still not resolved
    • There does not appear to have been any substantive analysis of the actual root causes (apart from some work I did off my own bat as a concerned citizen)
    • The work that was done to ‘correct’ the Register was managed inconsistently between Local Authority areas, which means that we may not have improve the accuracy all that much.
    • That work was completed a while ago… the Register will have degraded in quality again since
    • It seems that entire housing estates (even in the Minister’s own constituency) may have been dropped off the Register

    Over on McGarr Solicitors site I paraphrased Paul Simon to describe the state of the Register -“Still broken after all these years”. It is. The scrap and rework was botched and it wasn’t even the right thing to do.

    With most elections or polls in Ireland now being decided by the narrowest of margins it is more important than ever that everyone of us who can vote in the forthcoming General Election does vote. It was once said that in a democracy you don’t always get the government you want, you get the government you deserve.

    So vote. Vote diligently.

  • 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?

  • Count down to an Information Quality clash?

    Daylight Savings time starts in the US on the 11th of March – that’s next week. DST doesn’t start in Ireland or the UK until the 25th of March. The US change comes about under an Energy Protection Act passed last year.

    Microsoft are warning people in the US that their PCs won’t automatically update (not that mine ever did) and are assuring people that VISTA already handles it.

    So what will happen if your PC has the incorrect locale settings (data)? Will that have triggered it to download the various patches for Windows and Outlook? Have European firms checked that they have no dependencies on US daylight savings time in other software or calculations?

    I’m probably fretting over nothing but seemingly innocuous base data can, if not managed correctly, have a big impact on business processes and on people’s lives.

    My advice – check your locale settings even if you’re using a Mac.

  • Electoral Reg (A slight return)

    OK. In an attempt to make this interesting to the kids, I’m ripping off Jimi Hendrix lyrics.

    The Sunday Business Post reported over the weekend that up to 170,000 people may have been taken of the Electoral Register in error. Apparently politicians of all hues are trading war stories of bungled clean ups on the electoral register. Apparently, amongst other things, entire housing estates have been taken off the register and dead people have resurrected and re-registered to vote. The Minister in question, Dick Roche, has even had to acknowledge that he knows of an incident of a disappearing housing estate in Wicklow (wouldn’t it be ironic if it was up on Turlough Hill muses the author, mixing his Irish geography).

    The Fianna Faíl TD for Meath, Johnny Brady, has commented that:

    • huge numbers of elderly voters have been removed from the Register in his area
    • no letters were left to inform people they were being taken off the Register (or at least people don’t recall getting such a letter).

    According to Mr Brady “Some of the field officers who called to houses decided that if they were not at home, they were taken off”. This suggests a degree of inconsitency in the approaches between local authorities… in my earlier post on when the people came knocking I pointed out that they hadn’t spoken to me, but as of today I’m still on the Register. Therefore it would seem that different rules are being applied in Meath and Wexford.

    Divergences in work practices in maintaining the Register is one of the contributing root causes to the whole original mess. Anecdotes of Local Authorities using the Obituraries in the local and national papers to identify dead people were mentioned in dispatches not so long ago.

    And the treatment of the dead is clearly one of the key root causes for the original shambles… with 30% of Waterford’s voters being members of the daisy pushing brigade. Of course, this discrepancy is matched by the inconsistency between the numbers on the register now and the population as measured by the Census.

    Good grief. What a mess.

    Way back in the summer I wrote that the proposal to rebuild the register by going door to door would not address the actual deficiencies in the register. The key approach should have been to tackle the root causes – such as wildly varying work practices in different local authority areas and then to push out cleansing of the register. This should have been done in a clear and transparent manner.

    However, at this point it is important to bear in mind that often the answer you get to a problem isn’t necessarily the answer you want. The Opposition parties seem to have had an expectation that there would be no collateral damage in the clean up of the register. A cliche involving eggs, omlettes and breakage springs to mind. Rather than engage in debate based on anecdote the Opposition parties should try to ‘speak with data’ and to identify clear examples of where people have been taken off the register in error and get evidence of what process or inaction on the part of the Minister or Local Authorities lead to the error.

    For example, Gay (Gabriel) Mitchell (Fine Gael TD) reported his personal experience where he wrote to the Local Authority officers responsible for the Register to tell them that there were two people resident at his address with the same name (his son is also called Gabriel). However only one Gabriel Mitchell was left on the Register. Why? Did Deputy Mitchell forget to include the respective dates of birth? Did his letter fall through the cracks?

    Dick Roche attempted to clean the register by running en masse a broken process. Throwing people at it to perform door to door checks did not address key root causes (like the fact that you can’t change your name on the Electoral Registration form – it only allows for changes of address). When you throw into the mix that the door to door checkers:

    1. Don’t hang around long enough to talk to people (in my personal experience)
    2. Call during the day when people are at work (might that explain why entire estates in the commuter belt of Dublin have disappeared off the Register?)
    3. Seem to have an inconsistent practice as to how to deal with people who don’t answer the door

    then this whole process is a phenomonal white elephant that may have served to make a bad situation slightly worse.

    However – with regard to people who have been taken off the Register in error… there is a question of personal responsibilty here. If they wish to be registered to vote then they should check the register at their local libraries or Garda stations or online (if they are in the 50.7% of people who have internet access) and get themselves registered.

    If you are not in you can’t win. If you’re not on the register you can’t complain about the government you get. And by my reckoning that’s what we have at the moment.