Tag: The-Business-of-IQ

  • The real cost to business of poor quality Information

    The Irish Independent, the Irish Times and Silicon Republic have all carried coverage over the last days about TalkTalk, the CarphoneWarehouse fixed line subsidiary’s operation in Ireland (recently acquired from Tele2).

    According to Silicon Republic:

    Talk Talk has been ordered by the Commission for Communications Regulation (ComReg) and the Data Protection Commissioner to make a public apology over complaints by consumers who received cold calls despite recording their preference not to receive unsolicited marketing calls.”

    In addition, they have been asked by BOTH regulators (Comreg and the Data Protection Commissioner) to immediately cease all direct marketing until an audit has been carried out.

    The root of the problem is that TalkTalk talked to people who had opted out of direct telemarketing on the National Directory Database. As such TalkTalk should not have been talktalking to these people. And some of them complained, to both the Data Protection Commissioner and the Communications Regulator.

    TalkTalk have pointed the finger of blame at “data integrity issues in their internal processes” and gaps in the data that they acquired from Tele2 when they purchased it.

    In the increasingly comptetive telecommunications market, not being able to direct market to prospective customers effectively puts you out of the game, with an increased reliance on indirect marketing such as posters or TV ads, none of which match the conversion rate of outbound telemarketing.

    The Information Quality lessons here are simple:

    1. Ensure that your critical core processes (such as marketing database maintenance) are defined, measured and controlled in an environment that supports Quality information.
    2. Make sure that your Information Architecture is capable of meeting the needs of your knowledge workers. If a key fact needs to be known about a customer or potential customer (such as their telemarketing preferences) this should be clearly defined and maintained and accessible.
    3. When you are buying a new business or merging with another organisation, an important element of due diligence should be to look at the quality of their information assets. If you were buying a grocery store you would look at the quality of their perishable goods (are you buying a shop full of rotten tomatoes?). Buying the information assets of a business should be no different.
    4. “The obligation to the customer never ceases”. At some point somebody must have berated a TalkTalk Customer Service/Sales rep for ringing them during Corrie when they had opted out of direct marketing. Why was this not captured? Toyota’s Quality management method allows any employee to ‘stop the line’ if a quality problem is identified. In the context of a Call Centre, staff should have the ability to at least log where the information they have been provided doesn’t match with reality and to act on that. If these call outcomes weren’t being logged there is an absence of a valid component in the process. If the call outcomes were being logged but were not being acted on by Management there is an absence of control in the process.
    5. “Cease management by Quota”. My guess is that all the staff in the call centres were being measured on how many calls they made and how many contacts they converted. Where these measures were not met I would suspect that there was a culture that made failure to hit targets unacceptable. Unfortunately taking time out to figure out why a customer’s view of their suppressions is different to what is on the screen impacts call duration and the number of calls you can make in a night. Also, removing records from calling lists as scrap and rework slows down the campaign management lifecycle (if the processes aren’t in place to do this as par for the course).

    So now TalkTalk’s call centres are lying idle. TalkTalk has joined Irish Psychics Live as being among the first businesses to have a substantial penalty in terms of fines or interruption of business imposed on them by the Regulatory authorities for Data Protection issues. There’s a lot of call quotas not being met at the moment.

    I will be interested to hear what the audit of TalkTalk brings to light.

  • 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”.

     

  • 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!

  • Information non-quality on the blog

    Simon over at tuppenceworth has been on to me. Apparently my blog isn’t quite meeting his expectations.

    Can’t have that.

    Simon’s problem is that he isn’t quite sure what scrap and rework is. He says that it sounds bad to him, and I use it in a way that suggests it is a thing we shouldn’t do… but what exactly is it?

    Can’t have that. Must meet or exceed expecation… so what I will do is put together a page in the blog that will contain a lexicon of terms that I can link to… I’ll try to make it alphabetical as it would be ironic if I couldn’t manage that simple an Information process.

    Any terms that I use (and I suspect there may be many) that require definition please let me know. I sometimes speak a different language (dataqualitarian) and I acknowledge that I need to translate sometimes to communicate clearly.

    Thanks Simon.

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