Category Archives: European IQ Trainwrecks

“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.

Hidden data, hidden dangers

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I have always been an advocate of speaking of “data” rather than of “databases”, and have always felt that hiding data within large integrated database systems is a danger not only to the quality of the data but to the owners of the data themselves: the customers.

A couple of recent events illustrate this very well.

My neighbour received an e-mail confirming that his telephone and internet cancellation request had been received and that he would be cut off in the summer of 2008. My neighbour had made no cancellation request. Calls to the call centre – as to any call centre – are to people whose access to data is severely restricted. They could not see who had made this request, why it was made, what the consequences might be. By the same token they could do little about the issue except make a note of the situation and to start a process to cancel the cancellation. These operators are never allowed to pass you on to somebody who has access to more information or who can take other actions.

Bad enough, and it makes me paranoid to think that people, for whatever reason, could take actions like cancelling my ‘phone on my behalf. But today my neighbour’s telephone was cut off, 10 months before the date and without reference to the fact that this was in error. The company’s system has been unable to make any connection between the command to cut off the line, the command to stop this and the demand of the customer to rectify the error.

In my own case, a certain person has requested a cable internet connection at my address, where she does not live and has never lived. This error is known to the cable company, yet they are unable to access their data in their systems to correct it properly. I have informed them, and presumably they now know where this lady really lives, because she would have complained about not getting the connection she requested (I sent the couriers with the hardware away with a flea in their ears). Yet letters continue to arrive from that company to the non-resident lady because of data quality and system integration issues which they seem powerless to correct.

The next step, I fear, is that the company will assume that the address correction is a house move and cut off my connection. Their system seems to allow two owners of a single connection, and nobody is aware that there is a data quality problem. Explaining this to the operators in call centres does nothing to resolve the basic problems.

My own ISP has made more errors in my account in the past 3 months than … but OK, you’re getting the picture.

By hiding the data within their systems these companies will never be aware that there is an issue to be resolved. As far as they are concerned the system is not throwing up error messages and there is therefore no reason to assume that the system is working incorrectly. The path between customer and data is long and protective walls have been built which prevent more than a limited amount of information about such errors reaching anybody who either cares or who can do anything about it. Losing my television for a period wouldn’t be a major worry. Losing my internet connection would be a much greater problem. By the same token we are all at risk of the inflexibilities of such systems if, for example, we get mistaken for terrorists because our names are similar to somebody else’s and access to the data to verify this is blocked.

How do we make companies aware that they have data quality and data systems problems? I wish I knew. Perhaps somebody from one of those companies (KPN, XS4ALL, UPC) with read this, will care, and will want to change things. If they do: contact me.

http://www.grcdi.nl

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”

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?

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

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….

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?

CSI – won’t get fooled again?

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According to The Register the UK’s police forces have a bit of an IQ trainwreck with their police DNA database (like the one that they use on cop shows like CSI to absolutely identify the criminal with flashing lights and snazzy computer graphics -only slightly slower and less ‘rock and roll’ in the user interface department).

Apparently the interface between the DNA system and the Police National Computer was rejecting a large number (100,000 identified so far) of records due to a mismatch of key information.

The Register describes the root of the problem as follows:

Police DNA samples are identified and linked to both the DNA database and the PNC with two unique numbers. One of these is automatically printed on a label, along with a barcode, in a police officer’s DNA sampling kit. The other is the Arrest Summons Number, which a police officer writes by hand onto the sample label.

The samples are sent to the forensic service firms for processing, where both numbers are inputted into a Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS). This information is then emailed to the DNAD Unit, where another computer system automatically extracts the information and sticks it in a skeleton DNA record, which would have been created when a police officer took the original sample.

If the lab technician misread the police officer’s hand writing, there would be mismatch because both numbers need to match a corresponding record in the PNC in order for the DNA record to be loaded successfully.

This resulted in between 10% and 12% of records failing to load due to a mismatch in the data due to errors in transcription of handwritten information. To compound the problem it would seem that politics reared its ugly head as the Reg tells us that “poor co-operation” between the police forces, the DNA database unit and the forensic labs meant that the problem wasn’t tackled until a Data Quality and Integrity Team arrived on the scene to sort it out.

Of course, they sorted out for the police and forensic labs without them having to get their hands dirty. We hope that a forensic review of the root causes was put in place or else this problem will recur.

The key issues here from an IQ point of view are:

  1. Proofing processes against error – the hand-written serial number was a source of error in a process that has to be water tight. What could be done to address this?
  2. Failure of governance (or of a recognition that goverance was needed) to ensure good quality information for law enforcement purposes.
  3. Politics and what seems like ‘not our problem, its your data’ type cultures.
  4. Reliance on scrap and rework by an external agency (who appear now to be seen as the ‘saviours’ of the DNA database)

Poor quality information arises in a number of different ways. Often it is as inconvenient for you as the wrong price on a packet of peas in your supermarket. Other times it is the difference between a crime being solved or a criminal getting away.

A healthcare trainwreck

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Following on from cases of people having stomachs removed in error last year, we find the following story from the Irish Healthcare system where the quality of information used to tell women whether they had or didn’t have breast cancer didn’t meet or exceed expectations (was plain wrong) and now all tests have to be reviewed.

This is an illness that, if caught early, is treatable but if it is left to take hold the treatment becomes more invasive (maestectomy) and the risk of the cancer spreading to other parts of the body increases.

The cost and risk of non-quality information here is immense.