Author Archives: Keith Underdown

About Keith Underdown

Information Architect for 20 years, working mostly in Financial Services. Currently convenor of British Isles CoP

Parents of dead children asked to choose school for them

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According to BBC News Gloucestershire County Council has sent out letters to the parents of a number of children who had died asking them to choose a school as they approach school starting age!

This has resulted in a good deal of pain and grief for the parents and a significant embarrassment to the council and is one more strand in the perception that government agencies (both central and local) have a very bad record in in Information Management. The problem seems to have arisen because of poorly defined inter-agency information requests (i.e. the council seems to have asked the local NHS Trust for details of children born between certain dates and not specified that they should be still alive) and then poor checking of results (at least that’s what the council is blaming it on).

We all know that one can’t add quality so this PR disaster shows the importance of getting the spec right. It also raises questions: “How do the Council find out about children who have moved into the the area after being born within the purview of another NHS Trust?” 

Grevious misuse of statistics

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The BBC today (2008-10-23) carries a news story about the under-reporting of serious crime due to the mis-classification of certain crimes. The story is examined in more detail in an op-ed piece “How the police missed the violence”..

The problem has come about when the intended victim manages to escape serious harm when attacked. The example given concerns a pub fight in which the assailant attempts to “glass” the victim but she suffers only minor injuries not the intended major damage to her face. The police then classify the crime not as “grievous bodily harm with intent to cause serious injury.” but as merely(?) “grievous bodily harm”.

14 forces have gone back through their statistics and reclassified GBH’s as the more serious crime where intent was clearly present but no great injury was suffered. This has resulted in a 22% jump in reported violent crime over the same period last year although it has not affected the total number of offences reported.

The IQ lesson here concerns the way in which business terms are defined and then applied. The key word in the definition is “intent” but many officers on the ground concentrate on the phrase “to cause serious injury”.Mind you as an ordinary man in the street I think I would classify GBH as a violent crime but officially in falls into the “Other personal crime (with Injury)” category which is not seemed a serious category.

Store offers TVs at £0.49

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The BBC reported in September 2005 that a well known UK retailer was caught out when a technical error led to customers attempting to buy televisions from its website for £0.49 (less than a US$1.00 then).

Why is this an IQ Trainwreck?

Why is this a trainwreck?—The store was able to repudiate the transactions because of the huge discrepancy between the offer price and the actual price. It was too good to be true. However, the reputational loss was significant. Argos was the butt of jokes for weeks and customers’ trust in their pricing was badly affected. It is easy to conceive that a simple piece of validation could have prevented the problem. “If the offer_price is less than 50% of actual_price then query value”

“Wrong Site” surgery all too common

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Jerrold S. Parker and Herbert L. Waichman, leading US attorneys specialising in protecting victims rights, have come up with a survey of cases on both sides of the Atlantic where surgeons have operated on the wrong side of the body.

Removal of the wrong kidney is quite common. The most common reason is reading the x-rays from the wrong side. Given that x-rays are produced digitally these days it would be trivial for the manufacturers of the imaging system to include some words on the film that made it obvious which way is up. Mind you, I’m surprised that a cancerous kidney cannot be distinguished by sight once they get in there.

Cumbrian Train Crash—Poor IQ Management implicated

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According to a report in the Guardian of 2007-08-27  the Cumbrian rail crash in Febuary 2007 that killed one person and injured many others had an Information Quality component which was the final link in the causal chain:

Alongside concerns over the points, the study’s focus will be a breakdown in communications among Network Rail’s Cumbria workforce which contributed directly to the crash. It is expected to state that track inspections were not carried out as planned, that records of inspections were flawed and that safety certification used by some engineers had expired.

Industry sources also confirmed reports yesterday that two different inspection teams thought the other had inspected the points prior to the crash and therefore failed to inspect a crucial stretch of track at Grayrigg. As a result, a Virgin Pendolino train travelling from London to Glasgow on the night of February 23 was derailed by a broken set of points that should have been noticed earlier by track inspection teams.

There are at least three information management issues here:

  1. The maintenance of inspection logs
  2. the maintenance of staff certification information
  3. training of staff in the importance of information and its use

The cost of the rescue effort was huge as was the cost to the NHS, the managers and maitnenance workers stand lose their bonuses and one person has been arrested. so once again we can see that Poor Information Quality can:

  1. kill
  2. cost huge sums of public money
  3. send people to prison
  4. hit individuals in the pocket