Category Archives: European IQ Trainwrecks

Another Amazon Trainwreck

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This story appeared on The Register website last week. Our eagle eyed Information Quality Crash Investigators only spotted it today. To read the original story please follow this link .

This is not the first time that Amazon has appeared in an Information Quality trainwreck – pricing issues on their sites a few years ago resulted in TVs and IPaqs being listed for substantially below their market price (link and citation for this to follow).

##########Amazon pushes sex toys to random punters########

As we all know Amazon push ‘recommendations’ to customers via their website and via email based on past purchases and browsing. It would seem that a ‘technical error’ resulted in an email being sent out just before Easter that very definitely failed to “meet or exceed end customer expectations”.

Customers received an email advertising (ahem) sex toys which featured images and text that some recipients found offensive. In particular recipients found the email offensive as at least one of them (and probably a lot more) had never actually shopped for items like that on Amazon. Amazon.co.uk’s apology makes interesting reading:

Amazon.co.uk promotional mailings are based on previous purchases and should only go to customers who have previously purchased items from a particular store. We are aware, however, that a ‘Sex & Sensuality’ promotional mail was erroneously sent to a small number of customers who have never purchased anything from our ‘Sex and Sensuality’ store.
We sincerely apologise to any customer who has received this promotional mail in error and for any offence it may have caused. We trust that the customers in question will continue to use Amazon.co.uk for their online shopping needs.

Amazon’s recommendations are, it seems, based on data they hold about your browsing and buying patterns on their site. While it is an irritation when they recommend a book you only bought a few months ago it can be highly offensive and embarassing when they quite simply get it wrong with their information.

Have any readers had experience with Amazon either recommending things they have already bought from Amazon… or even worse things they would never in a month of Sundays buy?

More people registered to vote than live in Ireland

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The background

An Irish Sunday Newspaper broke the story in 2006 that there were up to 860,000 more people registered to vote in the Irish Republic than actually lived there. To put that in perspective, the number of persons resident in Ireland who were of an age to vote was only approximately 2.6 million or so. This represented a significant issue.

The approach of the Irish Government to the issue was to dispatch personnel to go door to door checking voter registrations. This was a form of scrap and rework. It was conducted over a period of approximately 3 months in late 2006. The work practices involved in this review varied betweenlocal government areas . In the electoral constituency of the Minister for the Environment (who has ultimate responsiblity for the Electoral Register) at least one entire housing estate (of a few hundred houses) ‘disappeared’ off the Electoral Register.

The litany of issues is too long to go into here… check out my personal blog site for some more background.

Why is this a trainwreck?

There are a variety of reasons why this is an Information Quality Trainwreck:

  1. It has a fundamental effect on a key process in democracy.
  2. It would appear that divergent processes, poorly defined processes and a failure to define and manage processes in a way that reflect ‘life events’ that might change the electoral register was part of the root cause for the problem.
  3. There was a focus on scrap and rework to address the issue. There has been no substantive or tangible official review of the root causes for these problems. There are some anecdotes however of Electoral Register clerks in some parts of the country using the Obituary pages from local papers to identify people to be taken off the Register as they didn’t know that there was a central register of Deaths who could provide them that information.
  4. The ‘tone from the top’ was one of creating fear and spreading blame. The Government Minister in charge berated local authorities for not doing a good enough job. However it seems that there was a fundamental failure to provide the local authorities with the tools and processes they needed to do that job.

Current State

In Ireland we are less than a month away from a General Election. Our Electoral Register is now known to be flawed and innaccurate. The root causes have not been addressed and whatever ‘clean-up’ was achieved through the manual scrap and rework will have degraded as it is now over 6 months old.

The information does not meet or exceed our expectation and there is a fundamental risk to the quality of our elections.