… but this story (again culled from The Register.co.uk) shows the lengths the US government goes to to stop these known terrors from getting on planes via the Terrorist Screening lists maintained by the Dept Homeland Security.
“USA Today tells the story of a Disney World-loving 6-year-old who shares a name with someone on the “additional screening” list. Little John Anderson hasn’t made it onto the cleared list because his mum finds the TRIP web site confusing.”
So Little Johnny Anderson can’t fly to Disney World without having to prove he isn’t a terrorist. Hard to do for a tired and pissed off six year old, as any parent will tell you. I can only imagine how they explain it to him:
Mommy Anderson: Now Johnny, the nice TSA man only wants to make sure you won’t try to fly a plane into the Magic Kingdom and kill Goofy
L’il Johnny: Whhaaaaaahhhhhh…. iwannagoseegoofynmickeynminniendonalducknowmommy…whahhhh (Johnny kicks TSA agent… join us next week for L’il Johnny goes to Cuba).
Processes are in place for people to get themselves taken of the list via a website… but Johnny’s mother finds the website confusing. Having looked at the site it doesn’t seem to have any clear process entry point for “The US Government thinks (correctly) my child is a terrorist but good God I can keep them under control, please let us go to Disney”. It would seem that Mommy Anderson might need to get L’il Johnny to fill out a form to allow her to make a complaint on his behalf. He’s six. He may not understand that words like pursuant, perjury or that if he lies on the form he could to prison until he is ELEVEN!!
So the process to correct errors in the information is not customer focussed. Mommy Anderson and L’il Johnny just have to put up with his being on a watch list because the process to correct the list isn’t friendly to the information consumer/creator.
L’il Johnny isn’t alone. The Register points out that he shares his story with Javaid Iqbal, a seven year old British boy who was stopped repeatedly at US airports when on holiday in Florida (which if you are seven years old translates as Disneyland). He shared his name with someone who had been deported from the US. His name was shared, not his age. L’il Javaid’s passport is now stamped that he underwent high level security checks, pretty much condemning him to a life of Eurostar trips to EuroDisney from now on. Imagine if his name had been Lee Harvey Oswald.
These are the easy funny stories that highlight weaknesses in the quality of information and processes in this important function of the US Dept of Homeland Security. A less funny story is that
- There is some confusion about how big these lists are… a government report says 7555000, but a spokesman for the TSA says that he thinks it is less than half that
- 97% of people who have managed to get through the process that Mommy Anderson finds confusing are simply namesakes of people on the lists.
- Less than half of the requests to be taken off the lists (to correct inaccuracy in information and improve quality) have been processed since the facility went ‘live’ in February. 41% are “still being discussed” or are awaiting further documentation to prove the claims of the people who complained.
Why is this an IQTrainwreck?
- The level of inaccuracy in the information causes disruption to people… L’il Johnny or L’il Javaid won’t understand what is going on. And in Javaid’s case it may actually affect his ability to re-enter the US (or other countries) in later life.
- There appears to be a lack of consolidated governance and control… not being able to answer “how many names are on the lists” and get a consistent response is like asking a company how many customers are in their CRM systems and getting mixed responses….( ohhh – bad example).
- The processes for correcting information are not ‘customer friendly’ and don’t seem to cater for the existence of children with names who might be too young to understand the processes or even the forms. The fact that parents find the process difficult to navigate suggests there is scope for improvement.
In any other context I’d be in favour of any measure that keeps screaming children off planes, particularly long flights (by which I mean any flight that lasts longer than 6 minutes).
However, I am reminded in these cases of why my father (a civil servant in the Irish Republic and, at the time, a senior trade unionist) used to hate going on trips to the North of Ireland. Every so often some British Army squaddie or RUC officer would take him out of the car or off the bus for questioning because:
- He had glasses
- He had a beard
- He wasn’t speaking with an English accent
- therefore he must be Gerry Adams, leader of Sinn Fein and his id papers must be faked.
My parents had a hard time explaining that to the snotty-nosed crying kids in the back seat…
I know someone who looks a bit like Greg from the Wiggles but so far that hasn’t caused a problem during border crossings. They are stuck between a rock and a hard place, they have a system that is imperfect and puts too much judgment in the hands of people who don’t understand the rules. The replacement system – Secure Flight – cannot get past the review boards. When they make the matching more accurate using extra passenger information they fail passenger privacy checks. When they centralize the decision making they fail data security checks. They have spent four years and over a hundred million on a replacement system and still don’t have a replacement system.
Vincent,
Thanks for taking the time to comment. I have it on my list of ‘things to do’ to get back to you on ‘Have you anything interesting to say about Data Quality’, because the answer is that I do, as does the Association I’m VP Publicity for – the IAIDQ (www.iaidq.org).
Looking like Greg from the Wiggles isn’t (last time I checked) a risk factor for travel according to the Dept Homeland Security, so your friend should count himself lucky.
However, you have hit on a number of the key problems that can result in IQ Trainwrecks and which make resolving some of these issues complex.
1) Training, education and measurement of front-line staff is an issue.
In Call Centres (where I began my career) people are measured on speed of call answer, length of call, average wait times etc. However these things often result in a reduction of information quality as corners are cut to hit these measured targets (IQ is rarely if ever a metric on scorecards… YET).
In Passenger flight screening there may be targets and goals (“no terrorist flies” type slogans). There may be a culture of applying the letter of the rule, which means that kids with the same name as people on the no-fly lists are subject to security checks or just not let fly. One suggestion… don’t put that type of check in the system. Give autonomy to the front-line people to make assessments based on information that presents itself to them… “Yes, the name flags a hit but the person presenting is 3 years old so is unlikely to be able to restrain a flight attendant.”
2) Conflicting legal rules and objectives
Related to number 1 is the need for the project teams and people defining processes to understand and accomodate the often conflicting legal issues surrounding information. This doesn’t just apply in the case of this type of information, but can affect everything from CRM to records retention.
One way of viewing it is that law is society’s expectation of how you conduct business. As with most ‘end user’ expectations it is complex and seemingly contradictory. However the quality of your deliverable is measured against those expectations.
3) Effectiveness of process
The key problem reported by L’il Johnny’s mother was not that her son was on a list, but that she couldn’t follow the process to take him off the list. Having tried to follow it myself, I suspect that the problem is that Johnny might have to fill out a form to allow his mother to act on his behalf (or someone may be telling Johnny’s mother that he needs to fill out the form).
Quality of information stems from quality of process. It is not a fatal problem of information quality if you have mis-matches or duplicates in your data, but if your processes to correct those errors are ineffective or just don’t work you wind up with an IQ Trainwreck.
My experience has been that you can throw money at systems until the cows come home, but until you clearly define your information subjects (what is a ‘passenger’? are all ‘passengers’ adults? if passengers can be non-adults, how do we identify this?), and have defined holistic end-to-end processes for how/when the information is to be captured, updated, maintained and destroyed then you will not achieve improvements in quality of your information.
I remember a few years back I presented at a CRM conference in Dublin and a delegate from a large insurance company confided in me that they had spent €xx million on a CRM system but “for all the good it does we might as well have just set fire to the money”. The root cause he identified was that the organisation hadn’t taken the time to understand what the processes and information that were key were and as such wound up blowing their budget for a system that didn’t meet the expectations of the Business and was deemed to be ‘not quality’.
So, stakeholder expectations (legal issues), training & culture (front-line staff), processes and definition of information subjects are all critical to delivering quality information.
Until Safe Flight gets the mix right on the above it will continue to eat budget and fail to deliver. If some of these issues (such as the corrections process) were reviewed an incremental improvement might be possible on the existing processes to improve the ‘customer’ experience.
aw dang.. I should have saved all of this for an article!
I think that’s the longest entry you’ve ever written on your blog! I think you will always get airline staff who don’t understand the rules and you will always get government red tape that is anything but user friendly. We only got the online form in the first place because Senator Kennedy got hassled at airports and it took his staff over a month to get him on a safe list. Maybe we need a senators child to be interrogated at an airport for the system to improve.
My concern with these committees and reviews is that the new Secure Flight system will never be able to pass no matter what they do. For example – “what are the chances someone could hack the customer list?” “About 1 in a billion – if they had a set of supercomputers and the best hacking team on the planet” “oh, so the system can be hacked? Declined”. Never mind that the existing systems are unsafe or don’t work!
I once read a story about a plan for a new wind farm in Eastern Victoria (Australia) which was rejected by the local government because a particular type of rare bird might be killed by the blades. The environment report said that the rare bird had never been sighted in the area and even if it was it would probably not fly into the blades. However they couldn’t prove conclusively that this stupid bird wouldn’t fly into these blades and it gave the politicians a reason to shoot down the plan.
Since you cannot prove that any system is perfect it will be easy for political opponents of the new Flight software to keep shooting it down.
Vincent,
I see from your ittoolbox.com profile that you are in Oz (I’m assuming the information is accurate). If you are, then you might already know that we have a growing Information Quality Community there, growing in collaboration with the University of South Australia. The IAIDQ has even collaborated with them on the AusIQ conference.
Contact details for our Australian point man (and the webmaster for our main site) are on the IAIDQ website (www.iaidq.org) if you’d be interested in talking to him.
I actually co-chaired a conference in Sydney back in 2005. The wife still hasn’t forgiven me for buggering off to Oz for a week and leaving her in Ireland.
Pingback: I am who I am, except when I’m not. | IQTrainwrecks.com