Courtesy (yet again) of The Register comes this case of poor Information Quality. It seems that US web hosting company DreamHost accidentally overbilled its customers for services due to what has been described as a “fat finger error”.
Full details of the good intentions that paved the path to this Information Quality Hell can be found on the company’s blog – they are refreshingly honest, if perhaps misreading the seriousness of tone that these type of issues require. Also some questions appear to be still unanswered (like how did some customers get billed twice for future dates). The ‘official story’ can be found on their Status site. On both sites the comments illustrate the impact on their customers.
Why is this an IQ Trainwreck? Well, by the company’s own admission, nearly every one of their customers has been overbilled. Many of these customers may have incurred additional bank or credit card charges if they have exceed overdraft or credit limit thresholds – which will probably have to be refunded by Dreamhost.
The root cause – a fat finger that created parameters for manual rebilling checks that were in the future… 2008 was the year keyed in, not 2007. And their billing software did not contain a business rule to either prevent or validate any attempt to bill for a future date.
Dreamhost fail to identify the need for a proof reading check to ensure that data going into a process (such as dates) fall within reasonable bounds for the process (choosing of course to blame the software). Of course, many of the 415 commenters on their blog have picked up on this simple step that could have avoided this IQ Trainwreck.
However, Dreamhost’s handling of the situation reveals another ‘cultural’ issue that means that these types of problems will recur. Their focus has not been on the customer – while some may appreciate the jokey tone of their blog post explanation, many of the commenters on their blog have condemned their ‘jokey’ if honest posting about the issue (it is perfectly OK for IQ Trainwrecks to joke about these things – we want people to laugh and then think – ‘oh, that could happen to me’). As one commenter put it
“Hey, sorry your rent bounced, but here’s a picture of Homer Simpson and some lulzy hipster prose. Joking around might not be the best technique when you are messing with people’s money”.
Finally, it is an IQ Trainwreck because Dreamhosts competitors have jumped on the opportunity to steal business from them. One of their competitors has created a discount code for people switching hosting to them from Dreamhost which gives them savings on their hosting costs (with no guarantee they won’t be as clumsy with their billing I suspect).
This will be a costly one to put right.