Courtesy (yet again) of The Register.co.uk comes this salutory tale that highlights the importance of language in Information Quality, after all it is information that is being transferred when ever we communicate and the expectations of the sender and receiver of any communication can often affect how that message is understood.
The synopsis of the tale is this…
A young girl from London town was seeking to get a taxi to the airport so she could go on holidays. She rang directory enquiries and asked for a “Joe Baxi” (slang for Taxi apparently). The telephone operator was confused (No Mr. Baxi was listed in the area) and sought a clarification. “It’s a Cab, innit” said the young lady.
So she was put on to a company that specialises in Retail display Cabinets (Cab-inet… Cab innit… you can see how this happened). And she ordered a Cab (abbreviation for Cabinet) for 10am the following morning, price £180. She paid by credit card and the cabinet was delivered the next morning as requested.
The Register quotes the marketing manager of the cabinet company:
“We thought it was a joke at first but the girl was absolutely livid. Because she spoke in ‘Ali G’ style slang, her order was mixed up somewhat. She was absolutely baffled as to why she had a big glass display cabinet delivered outside her house, when all she wanted was a taxi to take her on holiday.”
So the IQ Trainwreck angle:
- The information was garbled because it was ‘non-standard’ – the use of slang with the directory enquiries company started the chain of events and prevented anyone from catching the confusion earlier… everyone thought they knew what the other person was talking about.
- The impact on the Cabinet company was they incurred the cost and time of a van and driver and taking a sale that wasn’t a sale…
- The young girl in question wound up not having transport to the airport and (we must assume) missed her flight and possibly her holiday as a result.
Similar things to this happen every day in organisations, particularly where there are no standards for information formats, standard definitions of what the things that are being managed by the business are (“what’s a customer?”) etc. etc.