The DOBlog

Tag: Uncategorized

  • Interesting post on Tuppenceworth

    There’s an interesting post on Tuppenceworth from Fergal reviewing “Inside the Emerald City”, which is an expose of the shenanigans in the Green Zone in Iraq. I like the term “Green Zone”. It reminds me of of the recorded PA you often hear in US airports:

    “The White Zone is for loading and unloading.”

    I wonder what the PA would be for the Green Zone?

    “The Green Zone is for hiding under you bed and praying they don’t come for you”

    But I digress… Fergal points out that much of the book is an expose of how the American Management Consulting ‘culture’ which has been exported to Iraq has contributed to the rolling disaster there. W.Edwards Deming described American management thinking as the most dangerous thing that America could export. It wasn’t until the Japanese took Deming seriously and started making inroads into automotive market share that Deming (and other manufacturing quality gurus) were taken seriously in the US… and even then the biggest problem with making quality management and quality improvement stick has been a failure to have a clear constancy of purpose…

    … for example, General Motors was one of the first US car makers to take quality of manufacturing seriously. Jack Welch famously told his staff that if they didn’t crack that challenge they’d all be out of work. Fast forward to 2007… GM is closing factories in the US while Toyota (whose CEO last year said that quality was his number one problem for the coming year) have opened four new plants.

    But again I digress…

    CelticTigger (who is that masked man?) has commented on the post – from the sounds of it he (or she) has been in the trenches with management consultants. Poor soul.

  • Information Quality in the news

    The gang over at Tuppenceworth have done some crude but somewhat scientific study of the quality of information being presented by Irish print media. The basic hypothesis (rephrased somewhat to Information Quality terms) is that purchasers of newspapers have an expectation that the stories presented will be properly researched pieces of journalism and not advertorial, infotainment or just plain rehashing of press-releases from vested interests and newspapers should meet that expectation.

    The findings are disturbing in that the percentage of actual ‘real’ journalism would seem to be a lot less than one might expect, as this graphic of the content in the Sunday Independent shows… http://www.flickr.com/photos/editor_tupp/298828264/

    So what does this mean? If quality information is defined as information which meets or exceeds the expectations of information consumers, and if the expectation we have of our print news papers is to… well print news… and to find out the things that we need to know rather than, as it would appear, to bury real news in wrappers of advertorial or ‘reports on reports’ that fail to ask incisive but obvious questions then that expectation is not being met.

    If, however, your expectation is for substantial opinion pieces masquerading as reportage then the statistics suggest that your expectation is being met in spades.

    For example, why have no Irish newspapers followed up on the link between the State Claims Agency/HSE report on medical errors and the shocking cases of unnecessary surgery that popped into the media just a few weeks before hand? This is an easy link to make, easy to communicate and doubtless a mine of stories. And the costs of non-quality to the Irish Healthcare system are potentially immense, which makes it a political story in the run up to a Budget and a General Election. Did they bother… if they did, could someone send me the clipping because it passed me by.

    Also, why, given that the Electoral Register issue is still trundling along have none of the journos that I sent information to during the summer thought of contacting me or the Association I represent looking for a different angle? The clean up currently underway isn’t actually fixing the problems, it is simply treating the symptom. I’m blue in the fingertips writing on that particular topic, but previous posts can be found in the archives

    I hope that the boys and girls over at Tuppenceworth take stock over Christmas and refine their methodology to be a bit more scientific and objective. I’d welcome the chance to assist them in that review, including steps to increase the statistical ‘soundness’ of the assessment. This is valuable research that should be the subject of media coverage somewhere. So far the nearest thing to coverage that it has received is this from the Irish Independent. Apparently if the message isn’t worth listening to you should try to attack the credibilty of the medium if not the messenger.

    Ironic given that it is the credibility of the print media that has been called into question.

  • 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.

  • Please buy Expedia an Atlas…

    Following on from Michel Neylon’s on-going battle with Amazon, it looks like the illness has begun to affect Expedia (who may need to buy an atlas from Amazon).

    A colleague of mine just tried to book a hotel room in London for a weekend away. She got her itinerary number and had confirmed availability and price and was trying to give her credit card details to pay for the booking.

    On Expedia, you have to tell them if you are a UK address or a non-UK address (I suspect that this is to present different address format templates). My colleague selected “Non-UK” and proceeded to fill in her address details.

    Until she got to the part where they wanted to capture Country. Ireland wasn’t listed. Neither was Éire, Republic of Ireland, Irish Republic or Southern Ireland (all common alternatives that are sometimes used).

    Nepal and the South Mariana Islands were available options though. Lucky for them.

    Let me put it another way… the drop down list of countries was significantly incomplete for a company that is operating within the European Union (25 states and counting). Ireland hasn’t been part of the UK since 1922.

    My colleague rang Expedia to find out what was going on and to see if the order could be completed over the phone. To her surprise she was told that “expedia can’t take orders from Ireland”. Which is the equivalent of “the computer says no” from Little Britain.

    I wonder if the legal eagles who hang out over at tuppenceworth would have an opinion on the legality of Expedia’s business model, which to my mind smacks of an unjustified (and unjustifiable) restriction on free movement of services within the European Union and the European Free Trade Area.

    In the mean time, my colleague will be using a different site to book her accomodation in London. Until, of course, “the computer says no”.

    (editor’s note: I’ll stick the links ‘n’ stuff into this later).

  • Things you shouldn’t do

    Folks, amongst the things you shouldn’t do is mess around with your blog theme on a borrowed laptop at 01:00 in the morning when you should be sleeping. It causes you to make a booboo and a have to revert to a different template that doesn’t look as good.

    Nut bunnies.

     

    Update at 2006/05/11: I have tinkered around with a few templates and this one is my favourite so far, so i think I’ll be sticking with it….

  • An Irish Open University….

    Saw this on the Labour party website:

    Coughlan calls for the establishment of Irish Open University

    Interesting. What about:

    Oscail (www.oscail.ie) DCU’s distance learning school?

    What about UL’s courses in Project management that are offered over distance learning.

    And above all else… what about the Open University in Ireland?

    Perhaps what is needed is some funding to develop Irish universitites existing distance learning programmes?

    …

    …

    Oh, hang on.. the speech/press release was posted on 1st April 2006. I hope I’ve been sucked in by a prank. I really do.

  • 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.

     

  • An aside…

    http://uk.news.yahoo.com/28042006/344/fallout-slur.html

    In the snippet above, Irish Minister for the Environment Dick Roche ( see Electoral Register posts below) suggests that the portrayal in a TV drama about the impact of an incident at Sellafield on the east coast of Ireland was “bizarre” because it suggested that there would be riots on the streets of Dublin.

    Yes minister. That is bizarre. It has never happened before…

    http://www.indymedia.ie/article/74507