Category Archives: UK Trainwrecks

Tax disc mailings… on the Double

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From our ever vigilant sources over at The Register comes this story of duplicated information resulting in confusion and costs to the UK Taxpayer.

It seems that the UK DVLA has issued duplicate tax discs to concientous motorists who renewed their motor tax on-line.

A DVLA spokesman told theRegister: “As a result of an error, a number of customers, who recently purchased tax discs on line or by phone, were issued with duplicate tax discs.

“Once the problem was identified, swift action was taken to rectify it. All customers affected are being sent a letter of apology and the erroneous discs have been cancelled.”

So. Let’s sum this one up…

  1. Poor quality information in a process resulted in the normal cost of the Motor tax process being higher than it should (because of duplicate postage and printing costs for the certificates sent in error).
  2. A further printing and postage expense will be incurred to apologise to motorists for the confusion
  3. Analysis will need to be done to identify all the affected motorists, which will require staff to be diverted from other duties or increased costs due to overtime or external IT contractor spend
  4. People might bin the wrong tax disc and find themselves technically in breach of the law.

This is a simple example of the costs to organizations of poor quality information. A classic IQTrainwreck scenario.

Dead girl given truancy warning

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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.

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.

Economic impact of Information Quality

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First off – an apology for not posting a bit more regularly. It’s not that there aren’t any IQ Trainwrecks, it’s just that there have been so many recently we’ve been spoiled for choice for the ones to use and we haven’t had time to edit and compile them all.

However, one that jumped out of the headlines this morning is the news that Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs in the UK has shelved it’s home sales statistics report until September , “adding to concerns over the quality of official data which help inform interest rate policy at a time when the economy is teetering on the edge of recession” (according the the Irish Times).

Just what you need in a time of economic crisis – inaccurate and unreliable information to support planning or even measure how good or bad things are. According to the report:

City economists and even the Bank of England have been questioning the reliability of several official date series including trade, growth and retail sales.

Apparently, inconsistencies were found between statistics to published this month (August) and last month. According to the HMRC spokesperson quoted in the article:

“All months in the statistical series are affected, with the differences showing falls in some months and increases in others. We are working to understand the reason for these differences so that a reliable set of statistics can be produced.”

Interestingly, from an Information Quality perspective, one of the main groups that ‘consume’ this information don’t seem to be surprised by the existence of errors but rather by the fact that the report has been withdrawn.

The article highlights a possible root cause of error:

“The ONS, which is also replacing its main measure of wages because it was found it did not capture the true picture, relocated from London to Newport in Wales this year in a move to cut down on costs – leading to a large number of staff changes “

Why is this an IQ trainwreck?Absence of timely and reliable information about economic performance affects the ability of the government to plan and manage economic policy to manage the impacts of an economic down turn and avoid more serious difficulties for individuals.

An electric (bill) shock

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Courtesy of Cambridge News comes this story of a shocking electricity bill.

British Electricity provider N-Power sent a Cambridge woman a bill recently for just over stg£90million (US$ 177million). This was bemusing to her because she has availed of a pre-paid electricity meter. It would seem that for the woman to have run up such a bill would have taken over 1900 years.

As an aside, the Cambridge News article also higlights a recent survey from British website www.moneysupermarket.com:

 A survey last month showed 34 per cent of people have spotted an error in a utility or credit card bill in the past 12 months, while 17 per cent were overcharged during the past quarter.

The survey by financial website moneysupermarket.com reveals half of us don’t bother to check bills.

British Gas Billing leaves explosive whiff in the air….

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The Register today reports that British Gas (aka Centrica) is taking legal action against international consulting firm Accenture after a total overhaul of their billing systems costing stg£300m resulted in customers being incorrectly billed (in some instances on multiple accounts – for one customer at the same address). British Gas claims that it has had to hire 2500 extra staff to work on fixing the problems. According to The Register, GB has already written off £200m resulting from customer complaints. This means that the minimum you should estimate for the total cost of non-quality here is a figure to the north of £500m sterling (Cost of implementation + costs of scrap and rework  = ‘First cut Cost of Non-Quality). For readers in the US, that is nearly US$1bn.

And that is BEFORE the lawyers get involved. And before you take into account the cost to British Gas of lost customer revenues when customers switch to a rival supplier to get away from the problems.

British Gas claim that Accenture are responsible for implementing  a system which didn’t work and which had “fundamental errors” in its design and implementation. Accenture, for its part, rejects the British Gas claims saying that:

“Centrica directed the design, build and implementation of the Jupiter system and insisted on many of the features they now find problematic. At their own choice, after extensive testing, in March 2006 Centrica took over total control over all aspects of the system about which they now complain and has operated the system themselves for over two years.”

Accenture will be ‘vigourously defending’ the High Court action. To translate this:

  1. It’s in the English High Court (“ka-ching” says the lawyer’s cash register)
  2. It will be an aggressive case (meaning lots of lawyers with cash registers going “ka-ching”).
  3. Customers (of Accenture and/or British Gas) will wind up paying the price in the end (the ‘Lawyers who like to say “Ka-Ching”‘ will require paying).

So, is this an IQ Trainwreck?

Yes it is. There is a significant cost to British Gas already incurred, with further costs to arise for both British Gas and Accenture. However the real impact has been on British Gas customers, who have wrestled with incorrect billing issues and related frustrations since the system went live.

Andrew Brooks, (one of our IAIDQ members in the UK and a man with some experience in these types of projects it would seem) has a nice post on his blog about the real root cause here. He makes some very valid points about who was (or should have been) driving this particular train when it went off the rails. His short post is well worth a read.

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The importance of language

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Courtesy (yet again) of The Register.co.uk comes this salutory tale that highlights the importance of language in Information Quality, after all it is information that is being transferred when ever we communicate and the expectations of the sender and receiver of any communication can often affect how that message is understood.

 The synopsis of the tale is this…

A young girl from London town was seeking to get a taxi to the airport so she could go on holidays. She rang directory enquiries and asked for a “Joe Baxi” (slang for Taxi apparently). The telephone operator was confused (No Mr. Baxi was listed in the area) and sought a clarification. “It’s a Cab, innit” said the young lady.

So she was put on to a company that specialises in Retail display Cabinets (Cab-inet… Cab innit… you can see how this happened). And she ordered a Cab (abbreviation for Cabinet) for 10am the following morning, price £180. She paid by credit card and the cabinet was delivered the next morning as requested.

The Register quotes the marketing manager of the cabinet company:

“We thought it was a joke at first but the girl was absolutely livid. Because she spoke in ‘Ali G’ style slang, her order was mixed up somewhat. She was absolutely baffled as to why she had a big glass display cabinet delivered outside her house, when all she wanted was a taxi to take her on holiday.”

So the IQ Trainwreck angle:

  1. The information was garbled because it was ‘non-standard’ – the use of slang with the directory enquiries company started the chain of events and prevented anyone from catching the confusion earlier… everyone thought they knew what the other person was talking about.
  2. The impact on the Cabinet company was they incurred the cost and time of a van and driver and taking a sale that wasn’t a sale…
  3. The young girl in question wound up not having transport to the airport and (we must assume) missed her flight and possibly her holiday as a result.

Similar things to this happen every day in organisations, particularly where there are no standards for information formats, standard definitions of what the things that are being managed by the business are (“what’s a customer?”) etc. etc.

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.

Media trainwrecks (one of two)

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Courtesy of Irish uber-blogger and technology journalist Damien Mulley come two excellent examples of poor quality information getting loose.

The first concerns an article published in the Irish Examiner Newspaper. They published a story this week which puported to show that Irish employers were losing millions of euro due to staff members using Social Networking sites like Bebo or Facebook. Mr Mulley found no fewer than five errors in the article, ranging from the fact that the survey they were referencing was a UK survey, and 50% of the respondents were interviewed in one location (which wasn’t in Ireland) to basic errors in mathematics in working out the cost to the Irish economy. As Damien helpfully points out (when he fixed his own factual errors due to miscalculations), that for the Irish Examiner’s figures to make any sense the average salary in Ireland would need to be over €120k a year.

 …take it from me… it’s not.

As Damien’s site is a blog there are some interesting comments which correct his calculations and provide alternate ways of calculating the costs to the Irish economy of Social Networking. None of them reach the same conclusions as the Irish Examiner.

 The second example will follow in the next post.

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.