The DOBlog

Tag: obama

  • Politics 2.0 and Information Quality

    A lot has been made of President Obama’s use of Web2.0 technologies in his election campaign. Irish political parties are falling over themselves to get on d’interwebby and send their tweets to twitter and make full use of the mygoogleyyoutubebospace.com to woo voters. After all, if you’re not in you can’t win.

    Of course, to a great extent the local zeitgeist is missing the point about Obama’s win. It was not just the technology and the interactions via the web that got him elected. It was the very carefully planned and executed gathering of information about people and their interactions with the party and with the democratic process that helped guide strategy and drive the ‘machine’ to get people out and get them voting. Obama used the technology as a tool to ensure timely and actionable information that drove effective communication. Any idiot can set up a blog (hoisted by my own petard I think here), but mass engagement on a massively personal level requires high quality data so that you can execute your plan and achieve your objectives.

    It’s just the same with businesses – the technology is one part of the equation, the people issues and the focus on the information is the magic essential that makes it all work. To put it another way, all the plumbing in the world won’t make nice tea if your water is full of effluent.

    As I’m currently working with the IAIDQ to improve our web presence and get more active in having conversations with members and potential members via Twitter I decided to take a quick look around what the main parties in Ireland are doing thus far from the point of view of figuring out what the quality of their data might be and what their challenges probably are. I was also inspired by Graham Rhind’s post over on DataQualityPro.com about web data capture. My main area of focus is the ‘sign up’ pages for each of the parties as this is the opportunity to find out up front what people are interested in.

    For full disclosure, I am a paid up member of one of these parties but rest assured I’ll put the boot in fairly. (more…)

  • Obama’s win… a win for information quality

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

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

    On the DailyKos, UMassLefty wrote:

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

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

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

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