Author Archives: Daragh O Brien

About Daragh O Brien

Daragh O Brien is the Managing Director of Castlebridge Associates. This site has been one of his side projects for a decade. It needs some love and attention...

A minor trainwreck… the importance of quality info on live TV

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From the blog section of the Irish Times…

http://www.ireland.com/blogs/presenttense/2007/10/08/youve-won-nothing/

 ‘Tubridy Tonight’ is a popular weekly TV show on Ireland’s national broadcaster RTE.  On Saturday last, the presenter was giving away a holiday to Chicago along with an amount of spending money. A caller to the show simply had to answer a question correctly… the question was “Which actress won an Oscar for her role in the movie Chicago?”.

The caller answered “Renée Zellwegger”, one of the female leads in the 2002 movie and was congratulated on giving the correct answer (and got a fanfare from the house band). A few seconds later the hapless presenter had to correct himself (and the caller) and inform her that she had given the wrong answer and hadn’t actually won the prize but had received a lesser consolation prize instead.

My guess is that the presenter, perhaps believing the question to be so trivally easy that no-one could get it wrong, went on auto-pilot and didn’t perform the much needed vital check of accuracy before opening his mouth and putting at least one foot firmly in….

The lesson… a control check on the quality  of information (such as accuracy or ‘correctness’) needs to not just exist but needs to be actually operated in order to prevent embarrassment, injury or loss.  Having the mechanisms of a control in place but not operating it is a recipe for a trainwreck.

For the record, both Catherine Zeta-Jones and Renée Zellwegger were nominated for Oscars for Chicago. Zeta-Jones won for Best Supporting Actress. Zellwegger missed out for Best Actress, but did win a Golden Globe.

“Problems with the quality of the data” cause process traffic jam

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Hundreds of Irish motorists  (this author included) have technically driving uninsured because of delays with the National Car Test (the Irish equivalent of the UK MOT). This was reported by the Sunday Business Post on the 19th of August.

The Irish Road Safety Authority has confirmed that some motorists may not have been informed that their car was due its NCT. In Ireland you can’t insure your car with out a valid NCT certificate and not having an NCT certificate that verifies your vehicle’s roadworthiness could invalidate your insurance policy.

The root cause is identified by the company that operates the testing in Ireland as being “problems with the quality of the data” which resulted in them not getting details of all vehicles due for testing.

 Apparently the first that the company that adminsters the NCT knew of the problem was when people started to phone them asking them where their reminder letters where and seeking to make appointments.

The knock-on affect is that there is now a back log of a number of weeks for an appointment to get an NCT test. The Sunday Business Post refers to the testing centre in Donegal with a wait period of 6 weeks. My experience in the South East of Ireland has been a wait of over 2 months.

The NCT certificate on our car expired in July but due to my wife’s persistence on the phone we eventually got a test date in late August. I wonder if we would be insured if we were in a crash during that month?  Strictly speaking we would not have been as the vehicle would not have been certified as road-worthy.

In Ireland it is an offence to drive a vehicle that doesn’t have a valid NCT certificate. This offence carries with it a penalty of 5 ‘points’ on your drivers licence. 12 points results in your licence being taken away from you.  The impacts of this IQ Trainwreck were potentially significant.

IQ Trainwreck in Australian bank gives man a AU$11m overdraft

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The Register picked up on this story on Friday. Their headline describes it as a ‘scam’, but one of their commenters correctly points out that this is probably a failure of a business rule in one of the bank’s processes which resulted in Mr Victor Ollis running up an overdraft of AUS$11 million (approx US$9 million).

According to Australian news site News.com.au,

Mr Ollis had an automatic transfer facility with the bank, which topped up his business account using funds from his personal account.

The transfers should have been stopped after his personal account was overdrawn in February 2004, the court heard yesterday.

But due to an error at Westpac, his account continued to be replenished – only with money “from the bank’s own pocket”.

Between June and December 2005, Westpac honoured cheques totalling about $11 million written by Mr Ollis.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that

Over the next seven months the NSW businessman siphoned close to $11 million in Westpac’s own funds into his own affairs, taking advantage of a recurring technical error that topped up his business account.

(emphasis added by the IQ Trainwrecks team).

The bank’s own legal representative is quoted by news.com.au as  saying

“A human error meant the facility kept working, except it was drawing money from the bank’s own pocket”.

The Australian Courts have found against Mr Ollis and his partner and he has been ordered to repay WestPac AU$14,692,968.03, the original AU$11m plus interest, but that may not be the end of it as there is still to be a hearing on court costs for the case.

Of course, as Mr Ollis has pointed out, he doesn’t have long to live and the Bank may not get anything.

So, what happened here?

Money was being transferred from Account A to Account B. Account A became overdrawn. The money transfer kept running. The expectation that Mr Ollis had that the transfers would not run if he had no money in the account was not met. Unfortunately Mr Ollis formed the expectation that he could keep spending the money that was being transferred into his account as it was the Bank’s error.

Who loses here?

Everyone. The bank has the bad publicity of a court case arising out of a series of internal errors. Mr Ollis and his partner face significant bills at the end of this to repay the money. Should some or all of the money go unpaid, the Bank’s customers and shareholders will bear the brunt of lower profits and/or higher bank charges as a result.

Given the amount of money involved, the likely simplicity of the root cause and the significant impacts on Mr Ollis, the bank, its shareholders and its customers, this is a definite candidate for an IQ Trainwreck.

Oh, and before we forget, this is a case of a customer who decided he didn’t want to pay the money back and tried to fight the situation. If the source of the error was a systems failure or even ‘human error’ there is a good chance that other customers might have been affected, albeit in a much smaller (and quieter) way.

Leading Private Hospital ordered to cease Breast cancer Services

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The Irish Examiner Newspaper reports today that Barrington’s Hospital, one of the leading private hospitals in the West of Ireland, has been ordered by the Irish Minister for Health to cease all Breast Cancer services on foot of concerns from her Chief Medical Officer and the Health Information & Quality Authority about the

“adequacy of the management and care of 10 women who attended the breast disease services within the last four years”

This story is also carried by Ireland’s national broadcaster, RTE.

The background to this closure is the misdiagnosis of breast cancer in the case of a woman who had been given the ‘all clear’ on two seperate occasions, resulting in a delay of 18 months in starting treatment.

So, does this count as an IQ Trainwreck?

  1. Information did not meet or exceed expectations – when a hospital test is performed on us we expect the results to support correct and timely diagnosis of illness and enable early and effective treatment. Two incorrect ‘all clear’ results and an 18 month delay in treatment falls short of that expectation
  2. There has been a significant impact on the ‘information consumer’, the patient at the centre of the concerns. Her health has probably suffered further and she and her family have likely experienced much trauma and upset.
  3. There has been a significant impact on the faith people have in the ability of our health care professionals to make us better (or at least no worse).
  4. The Government has stepped in and, as a result, there is now a further curtailment of available services for breast cancer screening in Ireland.

Yup.. that looks like an IQ Trainwreck to me.

Any thoughts?

Hardware horrors…

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The Irish Examiner newspaper carries this story in the Business section of its website today. A UK hardware chain is having to rebate customers following an ‘administrative error’ and what the Examiner describes as a ‘system failure’ over the weekend.

Customers who paid by credit or debit cards found themselves being charged multiple times for the transactions resulting in some of them being put overdrawn on their bank accounts. The chain in question is refunding the customers their money, but given the impact this could have had on customer with direct debit payments for utility bills or mortgages the impact to customers is potentially significant. Not quite a full-on trainwreck but one might say that some of the carriages were left behind at the last station.

This would appear to be case of duplicated data (or duplicated submission of data) indicating a weakness in the processes and controls for managing information, which has resulted in an information experience for customers that failed to meet their expectations.

 While customers are being rebated, spare a thought for the additional administrative costs incurred by the hardware store in tracking down the affected customers, calculating the amount of overcharge, contacting the customer, processing the refund, arguing with the customer about the impact on their credit rating because the direct debits for their phone bill, credit card and mortgage all failed because there was no money in the account (note – there is no information to suggest that this has actually happened, but it is a risk and would be a long phone call). These are the costs of scrap and rework in the information process. Payment by electronic card (credit card or debit card) is a ‘information age’ payment process and is fraught with the risks of non-quality of information fromf poorly managed processes.

Buying tools by debit card… so good they billed you twice, no.. three times… no wait that could be four times….

An Enron Zombie rises from the grave

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The IT Compliance Institute carries a story on their website as of 6th July that like the monster in all good horror movies, Enron has had one last spurt of scandalousness.

“After nearly $89 million was paid to former Enron employees to replace money they lost in employee stock ownership and 401(k) plans when the company collapsed in 2001, nearly $22 million has been found to have been miscalculated due to a software problem.”

That’s nearly 25% of a miscalculation, so it qualifies as a trainwreck. The fact that it affected people’s wallets doubly qualifies it, and that it happened in the vicinity of the Enron blast-crater seals the deal… this is an Information Quality Trainwreck.
Intrigued, I read further to see if the story identified what the nature of this software glitch was. Was it a poor choice of platform? Was it poorly written code or a failure to test? None of the above.

The ITCI tells us that the root cause of the problem was actually an incorrect stock price used in calculations. The software would appear to have done what it was supposed to do – or rather we can’t say that the software didn’t do what it was supposed to do. Garbage was put in, and garbage was returned out.

This resulted in “about 7,700” workers being overpaid. They’ll now have to pay back money to the pension fund that collapsed when Enron imploded. A further 12,800 are reported as having been underpaid.

This is an example of the real impacts of apparently minor information quality errors. This was also totally avoidable.As Information Quality trainwrecks go this is a good example. There are a number of levels at which sound IQ practices might not have been followed in this example. Readers are invited to comment with their thoughts on what might or might not have been appropriate here.

The article does not make any mention of the scrap and rework costs involved in identifying the overpaid and underpaid individuals or the personal trauma costs that could have resulted from people getting less money than they thought they were getting (the underpaid) or from people having to suddenly find the funds to repay their overpayments.

A timebomb or a trainwreck-in-waiting?

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The BBC website carries this story today about a looming Information Quality problem. For information to be of ‘quality’ it needs to meet our expectations. One basic expectation is that you are able to get at the information. The British National Archives warns of a “digital dark age” as a result of obsolete file formats (does anyone remember using Wordstar?)  and obsolete media formats (5.25inch floppies?).

Research by the British Library suggests Europe loses 3bn euros each year in business value because of issues around digital preservation. This is the cost of information non-quality in just one national library (but at least that cost has been measured).

The National Archives in the UK already has ‘lost’ information because “because the programs which could read them no longer existed”. The BBC reports that the National Archives are already finding “an awful lot” of cases where information is lost and are concerned to make sure that it doesn’t get any worse.

A root cause identified in the article is the range of file formats that came into being at the very beginning of the Information Age.

But this issue doesn’t just affect large National Libraries or Archives. What about the information that is stored in businesses (this so-called ‘unstructured data’) which may exist in ‘in-house’ file formats or in file formats for applications which your organisation no longer uses? On a personal level, what information do you have on old format floppy disks or now-obsolete memory sticks? What family photos or important documents might you have lost?

What might the cost be to your organisation (or to you personally)?

While this may be an Information Management challenge, the impact on Information Quality is felt when information that is required and is expected to be retrievable cannot be located or recovered. Life is not like Star Trek and, unlike Star Trek, your technicians may not be able to recover information from the ‘alien’ file formats.

What’s in a name?

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The Irish national broadcaster RTE has this story on their website this morning…

The wrong prisoner was let out of one of Ireland’s main prisons yesterday because he had the same name as another prisoner who was due for release.  It seems that there were two Mark Kennys in the prison, one serving a short sentence for a minor offence, the other serving a longer sentence for a serious offence.

For the sake of clarity and a bad pun I’ll refer to the Kenny with the minor sentence as “Mark 1” and the other as (inevitably) “Mark 2”.

“Mark 1” had been granted temporary release. “Mark 2” was the prisoner released. Nobody noticed for 20 minutes. One can only assume that the error was identified by “Mark 1” enquiring when he was going to be let out.

This is a case of a process failure triggered by poor quality management of information which resulted in a serious criminal being released in error who will now have to be tracked down and re-arrested by police (the Gardaí as they are called in Ireland).

An investigation into how this came to happen has been ordered by the Director of the Irish Prison Service. Which is a bit like locking the stable door after the prisoner has bolted.

Whither the warranty? (or ebuyer beware).

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The ever vigilant “The Register” carries a story today about on-line retail E-Buyer which appears to have muddled up the batch numbers on hard-drives they bought for resale and hard-drives that were for OEM (original equipment manufacturer)  installations. The full story can be found here, on el Reg.

The nub of the issue is that the warranty conditions for Seagate OEM drives are substantially different for drives purchased seperate to other equipment. EBuyer claimed a 5 year warranty for the drives, but customers who checked on Seagate’s validation site found that the warranty they had was only 1 year.

The information they had failed to meet the expectation of customers. One theory put forward in the story on The Register is that ebuyer mixed up their batches of OEM and consumer hard-drives, which apparently can happen if you are buying in bulk.  Other less honourable theories were also put forward…

It appears that ebuyer will have to carry the cost of honouring the 5 year warranty claimed for the drives sold.  This is the cost to them of non-quality in the information they used to manage their business which resulted in the wrong drives being sold under the wrong warranty.

 One wonders if ebuyer will review their processes for how they handle their inventory records to ensure that this type of error doesn’t happen again?

Dude, where’s my lake?

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This isn’t strictly speaking an IQ trainwreck but it highlights how information, even about things which look pretty darned permanent, can age and become inaccurate and poor quality quite quickly.

Again, it is from the pages of The Register… apparently the Chilean’s have lost a lake. Now, car keys I can understand….

However, this echoes stories which I heard about people who relied on SATNAV systems in the aftermath of storms and flooding and drove into rivers because the satnav told them there was a bridge there.

The issue here is Accuracy to Reality… sometimes reality can be a devious thing and go and change on you.