Category Archives: Embarrassing Trainwrecks

Flight booking boo boos

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So, I’m booking my flights to the IDQ 2008 conference in San Antonio. I’m flying with Continental.

As with most airlines I have to provide a contact telephone number for them to contact me before, during or after travel.Their website allows me to select the country that my phone number is in. My phone number is an Irish one (my cell phone drinks, fights and bleaches its hair to pretend to be Alexander the Great, just like Colin Farrell.)

So I selected my country and enter my phone number (087-63xxxxx).Continental present this back to me as 01108763xxxxx. So I go again, putting in 00353, +353 and all other variants I can think of.

Continental comes back to me with variants on a 011-[long string of garbage] telephone number.

So. What happens when Continental try to ring me when I’m away? Why have they wasted my time submitting (and resubmitting) this information over and over again when they simply bugger it up on me? Why, regardless of what country I select do Continental want me to live in America?I think I’ll ring some of the variants that Continental spat out to me and see who answers…. 

Leap Year problem hits Irish bank

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The Sunday Business Post newspaper (Ireland’s leading weekly paper dedicated to business news) carried a story this week about errors in calculating mortgage interest due to the 2008 Leap Year which have affected at least one Irish bank. This is an information quality problem we discussed previously on this blog.Of course, the bank’s are simply going to apply the interest missed out to the customer’s accounts retrospectively, with the average additional charge to customers being around €28.50, according to reports. However, the fact that this error has appeared in the national media, and the Halifax’s competitors are all stating that they have had no such problems, suggests that the cost to the bank may be greater in terms of negative PR. In this case the bank made a gross error in defining its information architecture and the core business rules for interest calculations (such as assuming 2008 was not a leap year), and it would seem their systems testing failed to catch the problem until after the event. However, as is often the case, the cost of non-quality information is being passed to the customer, making the immediate ‘problem’ go away (a shortfall in interest payments and profits) while masking the underlying root cause (failure to properly define and test information processing rules for core processes resulting in poor quality information). 

It’s the end of the world as we know it… or is it?

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Yahoo is today carrying a story from AFP about a 13 year old German school boy who has corrected NASA’s calculations on the probability of ‘planet killer’ asteroid Apophis crashing into earth and causing a global catastrophe. The wunder-kind in question did his analysis as part of a regional science competition.

It seems that NASA forgot to factor in the affect of Apophis hitting one or more of the numerous satellites that orbit the earth in close proximity to the path the Asteroid will take on its next pass past the Earth in 2029. Apparently, if it hits a satellite the odds of Apophis hitting the earth in 2036 drop from a lottery-like 1 in 45,000 to a more troubling 1 in 450.

The IQ issue here is completeness of information. NASA failed to take into account the satellites in its risk model, resulting in a whopping understatement of the risk to the planet.

The short-term IQ Trainwreck comes about because the NASA scientists were corrected by a 13 year old. The long term IQ Trainwreck comes about because the 1 in 45,000 odds are probably firmly fixed in the minds of disaster recover planners around the world giving rise to degree of complacency, whereas a 1 in 450 risk might prompt some consolidated efforts to figure out how to properly manage the risk of Apophis hitting the earth or handling the ensuing global catastrophe.

However, more recent reports this afternoon suggest that the wunderkind may be a blunder-kind and may have based his model on some incorrect assumptions about the path of the asteroid. Oh dear.

In any event, the fact that a teenager is interested in this and that he researched the possiblity of the risks is commendable. Hopefully someone will take the time to reassess his work and determine if he is wrong or just not as right as he thought, improving the accuracy of the prediction models for Apophis.

Good quality information can help save the planet.  Poor quality information can send people unnecessarily into a panic.

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.

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.

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.

The focus of quality is the Customer

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I got an email into my work inbox today enticing me to attend a Gartner CRM summit in London at which Don Peppers (he of Peppers & Rogers, 1-to-1 marketing fame etc.) would be keynoting.

I won’t be going.

The email was sent to my email address from a site that espouses CRM best practices.

The email salutation was “Dear Test”. Click on the image below to see the full screenshot.

peppers and rogers email error

Yes, it is easy to make mistakes with direct mail and direct email (the IAIDQ has had its moments in the past, but we work hard to understand root causes and prevent errors). However, where information is missing from a profile a valid ‘default’ should be selected (“Dear CRM Practitioner” or something”) . Referring to your customers as “tests” means you’ve failed a test yourself.

As an aside, a substantial root cause of the 70%+ failure rate of CRM implementations has been a failure to tackle the issues of poor quality information.

Of course, this isn’t the only email I’ve received recently where an Information Quality issue makes me discount the value of the email. Gartner continually send emails to my work account addressed to Ms. Daragh O’Brien. This is not correct.

Of course, when I click on the link in the email to update my profile with Gartner, I should be able to change this and fix what appears to be an error caused by some data cleansing tool. Unfortunately not, I can only change my marketing suppressions.

Another organisation in the UK continually changes the address they have for me to an address in a building the company I work for isn’t based in anymore and which I never worked in or gave as a contact address. This is obviously master data they’ve bought from somewhere but try as I might they don’t seem able to correct it.

Errors will creep into processes and into data. The best approach is to make sure you don’t have a process that creates poor quality information (inserting “Test” in the salutation rather than a name) or that you provide opportunities for people to correct your information (such as correcting name prefixes that are wrong).

Home Removals – literally.

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Fox News has this story from the AP Newswire today.

It seems a Russian woman returned from a visit to the country to find that her city home was gone, demolished by mistake by over-eager builders who were supposed to be tearing down a different building.

Ooops.

Of course, errors in demolition can only happen in Mother Russia. Surely.

Apparently not. Looking back to August of last year, it seems that in the US, there is a bit of a muddle in New Orleans about what buildings damaged in Hurricane Katrina should be on the demolition list. According to Associated Press/MSNBC,

“Homes that were only damaged have wound up on a list of 1,700 condemned properties. Some houses on the list have been gutted for rebuilding or are in move-in condition”.

According to a spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers, there have been cases of ‘do not demolish’ notices issued for buildings that they’ve already bulldozed because they were on the ‘demolish’ list.

The American Bar Association also picked up on this issue in August last year (which means the lawyers are circling… always a sign of a trainwreck). And in a case cited in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) a homeowner was told by city employees that their home wasn’t on the demolition list and then, effectively, went home to find it demolished after she had spent money clearing the property for renovation and rebuilding.

My grandfather was a master plasterer and carpenter. One of the most important rules of thumb he taught me as a kid was “measure twice, cut once” to avoid waste and rework. Does that rule apply to demolitions as well?

Customer data boo-boos in Carphone Warehouse & Talk Talk

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For a change, we didn’t find this one on The Register (oh, hang on , here it is on el Reg as well…). However, it would seem that UK communications retail Carphone Warehouse and its telco subsidiary Talk Talk have been given a stern reprimand from the UK’s Information Commissioner for problems with the quality of their customer information which resulted in breaches of the Data Protection Act. In addition incorrect information was sent to credit referencing agencies and debt collection agencies.

The full details can be found here: http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/news/2207387/carphone-warehouse-breaches

This echoes similar issues in the Irish Republic a few years back where Talk Talk’s Irish operation was reprimanded by both the Irish Data Protection Commissioner  for their information management practices. In that instance they were ordered to refrain from any direct marketing until they had sorted the problems out.

Trainwreck or Bus disaster?

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From the “This is london” website there is this story about the dangers of relying on satnav and the unexpected outcomes that arise from decisions taken on incomplete or inaccurate information.

Summary… 50 people take a shopping trip from Gloucester to Lille (France). Driver of coach relies on SatNav. He selects “Lille” from the menu. He neglects to check if it is the right Lille as there are two within 100 miles of each other – one in France and one in Belgium. Coach tour winds up miles off course in the wrong country.

The passengers notice this as they are travelling, particularly when they see signs for Eindhoven (not in France) and (possibly) “Welcome to Belgium”, but when they brought this to the driver’s attention they were ignored. The end result was they wound up in the wrong country and, by the time they got to the right Lille (France) there were only 2 hours of shopping time left.

The shoppers stayed overnight in Lille and the next day the driver turned off his SatNav so as not to make the same mistake again. Unfortunately that resulted in him getting stuck under a low bridge and having to go back and find an alternative route, adding an hour to the journey.

What is the moral of this story?

  1. When using technology in a process, pay attention to signposts along the way that could tell you you are going the wrong way.
  2. Listen to your customer… sometimes they see signs of error you don’t
  3. Don’t blame technology for errors originating with people or incomplete information. Rather than throw out technology, first look at the process end to end and see where the problem actually originated. It might mean you can use the existing technology more effectively and avoid future delays and problems.

Is it an IQ Trainwreck? 50 people affected, poor quality information involved, a double whammy of issues…. if not a trainwreck then perhaps a Bus Disaster?