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...

The importance of language

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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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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…
  3. 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.

A process problem with the trains [Update]

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A little while ago we shared the story of the Irish Rail train that left the platform at the correct time but somehow forgot 300 passengers, and left with just one visually impaired passenger.

From a reliable source we have recently learned of the findings of the investigation into what happened. It is a salutory lesson in the importance of processes, and the importance of controls and checks on processes.

The normal practice for the Irish Rail service is for passengers requiring assistance in boarding to be boarded last.  Due to some minor operational issues on the platform that evening, it seems that a controller took the decision to have the visually impaired passenger boarded before the other passengers – reversing the normal run of the process.

The guard on the train, having satisfied himself that the visually impaired passenger had been boarded safely proceeded to give the signal for the train to leave – on the assumption that if the last passenger had boarded it was time to go. It would seem that at no time did the presence of 300 people on the platform and the absence of people on the train register with the guard or the controller, so the train left.

A simple process short-cut, taken for a doubtless sound operational reason, gave information to the guard which, in his view of the process, meant it was time to go. At the risk of a bad pun we could say that ‘tunnel’ vision set in. Any number of small checks (such as a random check on carriages to see if there were any people in them) might have prevented the embarrassing problem.

The 300 passengers were accommodated on a different train which made an unscheduled stop on its route to connect with a special shuttle service that was laid on to bring the passengers to their destination. Efficient scrap and rework.

Our source also informs us that the revenue control ticket check statistics for the train that left the passengers behind showed 100% compliance that evening.

Leap year babies are hopping mad

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Information Quality can be defined as “meeting or exceeding ‘information customer’ expectations”.

Today of all days (the 29th February) there will be countless examples of incidents where one particular pool of ‘information consumers’ will fail to have their expectations met. I’m talking, of course, about people who have their birthday today … leap year babies.

Across the Internet, many hundreds (if not thousands) of websites fail to recognise 29 Feb as a valid birthdate (or any format variants thereof). As a result, websites either pop alerts to people telling them that their birthdate is invalid or flag the registration as an attempted automated spammer sign-on. Until recently even YouTube was affected by this bug (until the International Honor Society of Leap Year Babies lobbied them to fix it).

Add to that the fact that in many common software libraries (such as Microsoft Excel) can incorrectly identify leap years (specifically leap years that occur in a century year) and the problem for leap year babies, or people seeking to book travel online for example or arrange a birthday greeting from Toys-R-Us for their leap-year child can become frustrating.

These bugs have existed in software for years but remain unfixed. Microsoft Excel’s leap year bug has existed for nearly 20 years (or is that 5 years as it only crops up 1 in every 4?)

For more information on leap years (including the full set of business rules for defining a leap year as set out by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582), check out www.leapyearbaby.com

(We won’t get started on how you calculate how old leap year babies actually are.)

What a nice model of furniture

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Also from The Register is this story of a data quality boo boo on the Marks and Spencer website (the offending page has been removed from the site, but el Reg kindly kept a screenshot).

The text of an on-line catalogue entry described an item for sale, emphasising its “modern curves, soft-look styling and hardwood feet”. Unfortunately the text was presented alongside an image of a model clad in underwear and a smile. Readers of the Register did indeed admire her modern curves and soft-look styling, but the error in the information presented was at best embarrassing for M&S.

Super Tuesday – Gloomy e-voting Wednesday

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The Register has highlighted not one but two potential information quality problems with the ballots being cast in the pre-Presidential primaries in the US.

Firstly, Democrats Abroad decided to support Democrats living overseas by letting them vote on-line. This sounds like an excellent idea, this ‘electronic voting’. However, there seem to have been some concerns with the way the ballot was conducted. Apparently the ‘receipt’ that was produced to evidence the voter’s choice just showed the choice, with no other reference that could be used to support an audit. And to cap things off, when one voter tried to print her ‘receipt’ all she got was a blank sheet of paper.

David Dill and Barbara Simons are two experts in the field who wrote a nice piece on this precise risk on Monday over on www.news.com

Of course, it’s not just internet voting that is all a-jitter. With electronic voting being a much used technology in the US, it was timely that a report was issued by two voting advocacy groups that highlighted that six of the twenty four (25%) States are at high risk of malfunction of or tampering with their e-voting machines , with a further 5  States being at medium risk. That’s almost 50%.

Sheesh. It’s a good job that the stakes are so low with that level of risk in the process and with the audit trails not really being audit trails and the receipts printing out blank.

It is, after all, only a race for the Presidency of the United States. Surely the expectation of accuracy and completeness in those ballot counts will be low?

Irish bank sends debtor details to wrong addresses

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The Irish Examiner reports today that a leading Irish bank accidentally sent details on defaulted loans to the wrong address. Two letters were sent to the one address – which was the wrong one. The contents of the letters contained the correct name and address information for the account holders (it appears from the media report).

This echoes an issue the same bank had in November of last year when 11,000 letters containing confidential bank details were sent to the wrong addresses.

While this most recent issue relates to just two letters relating to two customers. But the real mystery is how they both wound up at the same address.

IQ Trainwrecks are kind of like buses..

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…none for ages then a lot of them at once.

Yesterday and today have been bumper days for trainwreck reporting in the media. From the two culled from Damien Mulley, and one suggested by Nick Thomas to the ones I’ve picked up on today, it looks like February will be a busy month on the IQTrainwrecks site.

Here’s a listing of today’s issues:

Perhaps the organisations referred to should consider taking a peek over at www.iaidq.org to see if they can pick up any tips on how to avoid these types of error in future.

Thanks to all the people who have visited the site and contributed examples of IQ Trainwrecks since we went live in April last year…. keep them coming!

Monkey See… Monkey Do

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Courtesy of Nigel Thomas comes this story of an IQ Trainwreck that eminates originally from the hallowed halls of Harvard University, where monkeys swing freely through the Ivy (original story previously published at www.thedailywtf.com as “I’ve Got the Monkey Now”).

The Harvard Business School Publishing redeveloped and relaunched their website back in 1999. Part of the QA was a series of test packs for their various search scenarios, including a test for ‘single result returned’. Being concientious people, the Harvardians regularly ran tests on the live system using the test packs to verify that the system was running correctly. Their single result test case was expected to return just one result.. for the search term “monkey” it was to return one article called “Who’s got the monkey?”. They put it in the shopping basket and completed a dummy sale to a dummy account (Mr 123, 123 one hundred and twenty third street… that kind of thing)

One day, in 2002, that test failed. An update to the paper “Who’s got the monkey?” had been commissioned and published called “Who’s got the monkey now?”. Why had that been commissioned?

 Well, it seems that the folks in the marketing department were looking at sales trends. How many of what was bought when? That kind of thing. Basic Business Intelligence.

“Hey Mike”, said a fictionalised HBSP marketing analyst, “there’s a lot of monkeys being sold on the site. Maybe we should upgrade the monkey”. “Yes Jim”, said Mike (who we must imagine as being a pipe smoker with a moustache for the necessary air of gravitas to be tangible), “that’s a lot of monkeys. Time to activate Marketing plan Ultra-Overdrive A!” (that conversation probably never happened like that, but in my head it made me laugh, so I thought I’d share it).

They produced summaries of the paper, pamphlets on the paper, knicknacks with monkey themes, widely publicised the success of the paper, and commissioned an update.

Which one day in 2002 wound up appearing in the single result search test cases run by the website team, causing the test to fail.

Why is this a trainwreck?

Well, Harvard spent a lot of money publicising a paper as a best seller that had reached that point most likely through test data being read as ‘valid’ when taken out of context. The ‘dummy’ addresses and dummy accounts could have (and should have) been excluded from the reports being used by the Marketing Analysts.

As an aside… I regularly get snail mail marketing from Harvard Business School addressed to Daragh O. Brien (note – part of my surname has become an initial).  Those of you who read the trainwreck about direct mail and direct email I posted last week can probably guess what happens to those letters.

Media trainwrecks (two of two – aka Presentation Quality is everything)

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Again, with thanks to Damien Mulley we present quite possibly the best example of Information Overload in a press release. It appears that an unnamed media organisation in Dublin passed a press release on to Damien (who apart from blogging intensively and organising the Irish Blog Awards amongst other things is also a journalist).

Unfortunately they forgot to turn off ‘track changes’ in Microsoft Word and the published release contained all the drafting edits that had been done to the document since it was created. My eyes hurt me trying to read the scan of the press release that Damien posted on his blog.. if you look closely enough I swear to you that you can see dolphins or a face or something buried in the text.

Why is this a trainwreck? The press release is garbage. The ‘foot in the door’ to news agencies who might cover the event was entirely ineffective. First impressions are important and the quality of information is ultimately affected by the quality of presentation of that information. A general rule of thumb is that if your head hurts trying to figure out what the actual information is in the midst of the ‘noise’ then it’s poor quality.

Update: To cap it all off, Damien makes clear in comments on this blog post that he shouldn’t have received the release in the first place as he is a Technology journalist, not a music journalist. Again, poor quality information contributing to a trainwreck press release being sent to the wrong person (who then put it up on his blog).

Media trainwrecks (one of two)

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Courtesy of Irish uber-blogger and technology journalist Damien Mulley come two excellent examples of poor quality information getting loose.

The first concerns an article published in the Irish Examiner Newspaper. They published a story this week which puported to show that Irish employers were losing millions of euro due to staff members using Social Networking sites like Bebo or Facebook. Mr Mulley found no fewer than five errors in the article, ranging from the fact that the survey they were referencing was a UK survey, and 50% of the respondents were interviewed in one location (which wasn’t in Ireland) to basic errors in mathematics in working out the cost to the Irish economy. As Damien helpfully points out (when he fixed his own factual errors due to miscalculations), that for the Irish Examiner’s figures to make any sense the average salary in Ireland would need to be over €120k a year.

 …take it from me… it’s not.

As Damien’s site is a blog there are some interesting comments which correct his calculations and provide alternate ways of calculating the costs to the Irish economy of Social Networking. None of them reach the same conclusions as the Irish Examiner.

 The second example will follow in the next post.