From today’s Irish Times comes a story which shows the real significance and impact of a common Information/Data Quality problem, transposition of letters or numbers.
A Swedish couple holidaying in Italy were looking forward to their visit to the lovely sunny island of Capri.
Unfortunately a “finger flub” on their GPS put them 650 kilometres north and inland of their intended destination in the lovely Italian industrial town of Carpi.
Oh dear.
A serious complication has emerged in Leaving Certificate exams run by the Irish State each year.. An exam Superindtendent accidentally distributed the wrong paper in one exam centre earlier this week. He put out the exam questions for Paper 2 of the English examination, which wasn’t the subject being examined. The paper was, it seems, only on students’ desks for a few minutes before the error was noticed. However, in this age of twitter, bebo, myspace, facebook and such things, details of the exam questions were soon being discussed in school yards the length and breadth of the country.
To make matters worse, the Superintendent in question failed to notify the Department of Education until more than 6 hours after the paper was leaked.
As with all things governmental, an investigation is underway. Denials of responsibility have issued from various entities involved. The Superintendent in question has been dismissed. The exam is being rescheduled, causing disruption to study timetables across the land.
But an examination (no pun intended) of the facts reveals a telling IQ Trainwreck.
One of the factors that determines the quality of information is the quality of information presentation. Indtroducing ambiguity into visual information invites error. Tom Redman, in his book Data Driven, describes the presentation of information as a key step in how information is used and a key part of its complexity. Redman tells us that a number of disciplines need to come together to make even the simplest information and data useful, including:
Presenting data in ways that make it easy for customers to understand and use them. Only in this last step do data and information contribute to internal operations and decisions…
Packaging two sets of highly sensitive information in highly similar packaging which is similar enough that a warning is required makes it hard for customers (Redman uses “customers” to mean the actual consumers of the information – in this case the Superintendent) invites misunderstanding and error.
Yes, the Superintendent could have and should have double checked the paper was the right paper before handing it out, but a key contributing cause was the use of overly similar packaging for both exams.
All too often this happens in business. A laptop gets stolen, a memory stick gets mislaid, sensitive information gets left on a train. A key element of the response to this kind of problem is knowing that there is actually a problem, so early reporting to authorities of the leak is imperative. Had the State Examinations Commission had the information in a timely manner perhaps the cost of fixing the gaffe would be less.
The solution that the Department of Education and State Examinations Commission has come up with is to run a totally new exam paper on Saturday. That means:
And of course, it being a Saturday:
The SEC is finalising arrangements for a deferred sitting of English papers for a small number of students from the Jewish community after getting legal advice that asking them to sit an exam on their Sabbath, when their religion prohibits it and it is against their conscience, could have been unconstitutional. All other students will be expected to attend, in line with other timetabled exams.
For more on that particular complication, see the Irish Times’ detailed story.
So, why is this an IQTrainwreck?
(On that note of multiculturalism, one is left wondering if the ISM school in Tripoli, Libya that offers the Irish Leaving Certificate to its students will have received their replacement exam papers yet of if they are even aware of the issue.)
The bad joke in the headline aside, this story (which comes to us via Initiate Systems on Twitter, who linked to it from WBALTV in Baltimore USA) reveals a common type of IQ Trainwreck – the “sending things to dead people” problem.
As we know, the US Government has been sending out Stimulus Cheques (or Checks, if you are in the US) to people to help stimulate consumer spending in the US economy. Kind of like a defibrillator for consumer confidence.
Initiate Systems picked up on the story of a cheque that was sent to Mrs Rose Hagner. Her son found it in the mail and was a bit surprised when he saw it. After all, he’s 83 years old and his mother has been dead for over 40 years. Social Security officials give the following explanation:
Of the about 52 million checks that have been mailed out, about 10,000 of those have been sent to people who are deceased.
The agency blames the error on the strict mid-June deadline of mailing out all of the checks, which didn’t leave officials much time to clean up all of their records.
Of course, one might ask why this was such a challenge when the issue raised its head in 2008 as well when a cheque was mailed to a man in Georgia which was made out to a Mr George Croker DECD (an abbreviation for deceased). The story, which was picked up by SmartPros.com at the time (and for the life of us we can’t see how it slipped under our radar), describes the situation as follows:
Richard Hicks, a Fulton County magistrate, says the $600 check arrived in Roswell this week and was made out to George A. Coker DECD, which, of course, stands for “deceased.”
Coker obviously won’t be able to do his bit to spur the consumer economy, which has Hicks puzzled and somewhat miffed.
“There’s a $9 trillion national debt and our government’s giving away money to dead people,” he told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “As a taxpayer, it offends the hell out of me.”
The Internal Revenue Service in Atlanta told the newspaper it didn’t know how many other DECD checks have been written nationwide since the 2007 returns are still being processed.
So, the issue has existed since at least 2008 and relates to data being used for a new purpose (sending cheques on a blanket basis). It would seem the solution that is being attempted is to inspect the errors out of the cheque batches before they are sent by the June dead-line. A better solution might be to:
Building quality into a process, and into the information produced by and consumed by a process, reduces the risk of embarrassing information quality errors. Cleaning and correcting errors or exceptions as a bulk batch process is not as value-adding as actually improving your processes to prevent poor quality information being created or being acted on.
Well, the volumes of records affected and the actual cost are quite low so one could argue that the information is “close enough for government work”. However, government work tends to get political and a google search on this topic has thrown up a lot of negative political comment from opponents of the stimulus plan.
The volume and actual cost may be low, but the likely impact in terms of PR impact and time that might be required to explain the issue in the media highlights the often overlooked cost and impact of poor quality information – reputation and credibility.
It appears that Apple iPhone App developers are having difficulty getting paid at the moment, according to this story from The Register. (Gizmodo.com carries the story here, Techcrunch.com has it here,
According to The Register:
A backlog in Apple’s payment processing system has left some iPhone developers still waiting for February’s payments, leaving some at risk of bankruptcy and considering legal action against the lads in Cupertino.
Desperate developers have been told to stop e-mailing the iTunes finance system and to wait patiently for their money – in some cases tens of thousands of dollars – while Apple sorts things out.
It would appear from comments and coverage elsewhere that this problem has been occurring for some developers for longer (since late 2008 according to the TechCrunch article and this article from eequalsmcsquare.com (an iphone community site))
The article goes on to explain that:
According to postings on the iPhone developer community Apple has been blaming bank errors and processing problems for the delays. Complainants are being told that payments have been made, that bank errors have caused rejections[.]
One commenter on the story on The Register, commenting anonymously, attempts to shed some light on this with an explanation that, from an Information Quality point of view, sounds plausible.
- Two American banks merged (was it Washington Mutual and Chase?) and the SWIFT code for the customers of one had to change. The bank didn’t tell the customers and Apple had the payments refused. Apple seem to be manually changing the codes in the payment system, but that’s separate from the web interface where devs enter their bank details.
- A lot of American banks don’t have SWIFT codes at all. Royalties from e.g. EU sales are sent from Apple (Luxembourg) S.A.. The chances of this money arriving at Bank Of Smalltown seem slim at best.
This what we have here is a failure to manage master data correctly it seems, and also a glaring case of potentially incomplete data which would impact the ability for funds to flow freely from the App Store to the Developers.
The Anonymous commenter’s explanation would seem to hold water because Apple are claiming that “bank errors have caused rejections”. Having had some experience with electronic funds transfer processes, one of the reasons a funds transfer would fail would be if the data used was incorrect, inconsistent or inaccurate. This would happen if the SWIFT codes of Bank A had to change (or if Bank A and Bank B had to have new codes issued).
However, some commenters based in the EU have reported that they have given Apple updated bank details and are still awaiting payment, which suggests there may be yet another potential root cause at play here that may yet come to light.
Apple still owes me more than $7,500 since September 2008 for US and World regions. I supplied them with a new SWIFT code and a intermediary bank they could use last month, but still nothing. Sent them tons of emails but I never got to know what is really wrong/faulty so I just tried to give them another SWIFT code that DNB (Biggest bank in Norway) uses. All other region payments have been OK.” (quote from comment featured on this article)
So, for the potential impact on iPhone Apps developers cash flow, and the PR impact on one of Apple’s flagship services, and the fact that management of the accuracy, completeness and consistency of key master data for a process, this counts as an IQ Trainwreck.
Stumbled upon this lovely pictorial IQTrainwreck today on Twitter. Thanks to Angela Hall (@sasbi) for taking the time to snap the shot and tweet it and for giving us permission to use it here. As Angela says on her Twitpic tweet:
Data quality issue in the neighborhood? How many street signs (with diff names) are needed? Hmmmm
In the words of Bob Dylan: “How many roads must a man walk down?”
Steve Tuck, writing over at SmartDataCollective, shares a tale of an embarassing IQTrainwreck involving his brother. The root cause of Steve’s tale is ‘false positives’ in matching, but it goes to show how simple assumptions or errors in the management of the quality of information can lead to unforeseen and undesired consequences.
Steve’s brother had checked into a hotel for a trade conference. He went and had a shower and was quite surprised to come out of the bathroom to find another man standing in his room. It turned out that they both had the same name and were both attending the same event and the hotel had (despite all the other evidence to the contrary, like different companies and different credit card details) decided to merge the two reservations so two people wound up being booked into the same room.
The second Mr Tuck had to take his bags and go to a different hotel in the end, causing unnecessary aggravation for him (it is always nice to be staying in the hotel a conference is on in… the more relaxed pace over breakfast can help ease you into the day). Steve’s brother had the embarassment of being caught in little more than a towel.
For the embarassment factor and customer service impacts, this meets the criteria for an IQ Trainwreck.
Thanks Steve.
This isn’t the first time we’ve covered this type of false positive IQ Trainwreck though. A scan of our archives brings up this story from 2007.
Courtesy of #dataquality twitterers Steve Tuck and Stephen Bonner comes this story from the BBC about a school in Cheshsire whose parents received a truancy notice about their daughter which threatened to ban her from her end of year prom for being over 30% below the target attendance rate for students.
The young girl, Megan, had possibly the best excuse ever for playing hookey from school however. According to her mother:
“Megan doesn’t go to that school any more. She’s been dead for two months now so it’s not surprising her attendance is low.”
It appears that inconsistencies between two computer systems in the school resulted in the school’s left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing with regard to student information.
Megan’s name had been taken off the school roll when she died, and removed from the main school database,” the spokeswoman said.
“However, unknown to the school, her details had remained in a different part of the computer system and were called up when the school did a mail merge letter to the parents of all Year 11 students about their prom”.
Reading the comments from the software providers in the BBC story, it would also appear that the software lacks a “dead student” flag to enable them to exclude deceased students from administrative mailings.
This is a classic IQTrainwreck because it resulted in distress and upset to Megan’s parents, landed on the BBC News website (with video no less) , has been flashed across Twitter, and has now wound up here.
Also, this failure of the computer systems to allow the left hand of the school (the student register systems) to know what the right hand (the Capita system) was doing is not dissimilar to the circumstances of the recent court case of Ferguson v British Gas where the defences put forward by British Gas that erroneous debt collection letters were ‘computer generated’ and so they couldn’t have been harassing the plaintiff were dismissed by the Court of Appeal in England and Wales.
So we can add a potential legal risk to the list of reasons why this is an IQTrainwreck.
Techcrunch, via The Register, tells us of an information quality error by a small software company based in Redmond, Washington called Microsoft. You may have heard of them.
It would seem that Microsoft has written to some of the former employees it recently made redundant to inform them that they’ve had too much money paid to them in their severance lump sum and demanding the money back.
Commenters over on The Register have speculated as to the root cause, with a calculation error in Excel being flagged as the likely culprit. In their letter, Microsoft blame the whole kerfuffle on “an administrative error”. What’s that software that administrators use to make calculations on rows and columns of data on a computer? Continue reading
Yesterday’s Irish Times carried a story of how, after some extensive detective work, the Irish Police finally tracked down the most dangerous driver in Ireland, a Polish gentleman by the name of Prawo Jazdy.
This individual was given hundreds of speeding tickets and parking tickets over the past few years, and by June 2007 he had over 50 separate entries in the Irish Police computer system. So slippery was this offender that he kept giving police a different address almost every time he was stopped and ticketed.
He was finally brought to book by a quick thinking officer in the Traffic Corps of the Irish Police who tracked him down using a structured Master Data source. Surely this is an example of Information and Intelligence lead policing at its best? Continue reading
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?”