via Nic Jefferis comes this great example of the impact of a data inaccuracy, and one that is all too uncommon!

http://www.engadget.com/2016/03/24/texas-wrong-house-torn-down-google-maps/

Demolition workers relied on google maps to bring them to an address of a residential property that was to be demolished after storm damage.

The problem was that Google Maps had the location in the wrong place. The actual address was a block away. This resulted in a home being demolished, despite the owners having applied for funding to repair the storm damage it had suffered.

Yet again, the builders maxim of “Measure twice, cut once” appears to apply to a classic information quality problem.

It was widely reported yesterday that students in Scotland who had signed up for SMS notification of their results had received them a day early, giving them a jump on their less technically minded compatriots and competitors and causing stress and distress to students, parents, educators, civil servants, and politicians.

The Scottish Education Authorities began a root cause investigation as the secrecy and security of the examination results system seemed to have been compromised.

Right now I suspect you are settling in for a tale of hackers and Jason Bourne like derring do. Well, here at IQtrainwrecks we never get that lucky. After all, this is a blog that looks at information and data quality problems.

According to The Register the root cause of this problem is good old data interchange and exchange across organisations.

1. A template spreadsheet was used to perform the data interchange between the Scottish Education Authority and the company which provides the SMS gateway and related processing as a pro-bono to the Education Authority, AQL. A batch template is used rather than an on-line interface as the service is only used once a year.
2. The template was populated and saved in a later version of Microsoft Excel
3. The process of populating and saving the spreadsheet appended a white space to the end of each date stamp (the date that the sms was to be sent).
4. The ETL process interpreted the “DATE” field as text (which it was thanks to that errant space) and rejected the field on the load. Luckily AQL had developed error handling for situations where a date field couldn’t be loaded and applied a default… the day of the file load (which was the day before the messages were to go out).
5. As a result the SMS system read the file and sent the messages a full day early.

Sears, the US retailer, has been ordered to delete all customer data it obtained through the use of on-line tracking software it installed on customer’s computers.

While the programme was an opt-in programme for which customers were paid US$10, the extent of the information captured was far beyond what customers might have considered “reasonable” and included data capture that a reasonable person might class as “questionable”. The Register tells us:

The FTC said that while customers had been warned that, once downloaded, software would track their browsing, it had in fact tracked browsing on third party websites, secure browsing including banking and transactions and even some non-internet computer activity.

“The FTC charged… that the software also monitored consumers’ online secure sessions – including sessions on third parties’ Web sites – and collected consumers’ personal information transmitted in those sessions, such as the contents of shopping carts, online bank statements, drug prescription records, video rental records, library borrowing histories, and the sender, recipient, subject, and size for web-based e-mails,” said an FTC statement.

Under EU law, there are protections for individuals as regards the nature of information that can be captured and how it should be captured. These rules are encapsulated in the Data Protection regulations that apply in all EU countries.

A key part of those principles and rules is that the “data subject” (the person to whom the data relates) needs to be given a clear and upfront statement of what information is being captured about them, why, what uses it will be put to, and who it may be shared with.

The FTC specifically criticised Sears for how they presented the information on what was being captured:

“Only in a lengthy user license agreement, available to consumers at the end of a multi-step registration process, did Sears disclose the full extent of the information the software tracked,” said an FTC statement. “The [FTC] complaint charged that Sears’s failure to adequately disclose the scope of the tracking software’s data collection was deceptive and violates the FTC Act.”

So, failing to take adequate care and attention in setting and meeting your customer’s expectations about how you will use their data can seriously jeopardise your ability to capitalise on your information assets. Furthermore it can result in reputational damage and other loss. Managing that expectation improves the quality of the data you have (e.g. customers won’t input spurious data, or  you will be legally allowed to use it for other purposes) as well as meeting obligations for trust and transparency with how you manage your customer’s privacy through effective data protection.

In this case, the data gathered was fruit of a poisoned tree and Sears could not retain it or use it, negating the value of any investment they had made in the tracking programme.

Interestingly the FTC initated this case themselves, suggesting that US based Regulators may be taking data protection more seriously. Doubly interesting is the fact that the principles they are setting out are similar to EU regulations.

In a story that is bound to bring tears to the eyes of at least one regular contributor to on-line discussions about information quality, news reaches us from Jan Erik Ingvaldsen of a series of information quality disasters in the Danish EU elections which take place on Sunday.

Denmark is also holding a referendum on the same day, which some are viewing as a root cause for these problems.

Here is the story in Danish (big thank you to Jan Erik for this link via twitter)

Here is a rough translation in Google English. As google’s machine translations are never 100% accurate, we’d welcome any links to this story in English.

The problems (as we can make them out from the translation)

• In Ikast-Brande, a municipality of 1700 people, voters received polling cards directing them to the wrong polling stations (wrong people, wrong ballot boxes)
• In Stvens, the polling station is correct (right people going to the right ballot box), but the address given for the polling station is wrong.
• In Vejle the wrong zip code was included in the map of the electoral district (i.e. people entitled to vote in a given polling station)
• 2700 voters in three constituencies have been instructed to vote in two different locations
• Some voters who are entitled to vote in both the Referendum and the EU Parliament elections have only received polling cards for one of the two ballots
• Some postal voters report that they have  not received any information on the candidates running in the area their vote is being counted in.

Danish speaker – please correct my listing of the problem (admitting your problems is the first step on the road to recovery).

Jan Erik Ingvaldsen has a great post which summarises the problems in English.

Despite all of this, some elections commentators say that the preparations for the election are good, and they will sort out the problems when the complaints come in. Hanging Chads anyone?

While the fact that the Danes are running an EU election and a referendum on the same day, with different voter eligibility rules for each, goes some way to explaining the challenges that might have contributed to these problems, the defence is weakened by the fact that Ireland is running two ballots as well this week for EU Parliament elections and Local Government Councils and has not had reports of similar problems (yet).

Of course, the problem in Ireland is that our electoral register is wonderfully inaccurate.

For the impact that poor quality information can have on democratic processes, the view that the errors and impact can be “inspected out”, and because investigating this story made me have to figure out Google’s attempts at translation, this is being classed as a definite IQ Trainwreck.

Also, as Jan Erik points out in his blog, if this was happening in a South American or African nation there would be widespread media outcry.

Thanks to Jan Erik  (@jeric40 on twitter) for flagging this one to our attention.

Ireland’s Evening Herald newspaper carried a story recently about the costs and impacts of address data quality.

To cut a long story short, the family at Address A made enquiries with a heating contractor/plumber about the cost of a home heating system. A short time later, the plumbers arrived at Address A (who had only made an enquiry) and proceeded to rip up floorboards and fit radiators etc.

After 4 hours working, the plumbers in House A got a call. They were at the wrong address. They should have been at House B, which was an address that differed by one word from House A.

The owner of House A subsequently sued to have her home restored and to compensate her for distress. Going to the wrong address (and not noticing it for four hours) cost the plumbing firm €5000 plus legal costs.

In a story that, in this reader’s view says as much about the lack of imagination of modern youth as it does about information quality management, comes news that a teenager in the UK has found himself stg£300 in debt after using an ATM card his bank sent him.

When the young man went to take some cash out, he was pleased to find that he could take out the maximum £300 and blew it all on the things teenagers blow their money on – iPods and such like. When he later checked his balance he found he had a bank balance of (apparently) stg£2 Million.

The boy had been waiting on payments due to him under the UK Government’s education maintenance allowance (EMA) scheme, under which students get 30 pounds a week to encourage them to stay on at school, so he didn’t initially question how he had sufficient funds in his account for the £300 withdrawal. He was, it seems, overjoyed to find the seven figure sum in his account, apparently as a result of his having gone to school when he should have (although one might suggest he should pay closer attention in maths classes so he can work out how many weeks he’d have to be in school to earn £2 million – the equivalent of 1282 years).

Subsequently the bank corrected its error and the young man found himself £300 over-drawn.
While the bank has suggested that the boy “should have known better” (and it is hard to argue with that), it is clear that the bank did make an error in the information associated to this boy’s account, and that is the IQ Trainwreck here. Some process within the bank erroneously put a large amount of money in the wrong account, resulting in a foolish teenager digging themselves into debt they could not afford (and the lad’s contribution to his own woes cannot be ignored).