Information Quality can be defined as “meeting or exceeding ‘information customer’ expectations”.

Today of all days (the 29th February) there will be countless examples of incidents where one particular pool of ‘information consumers’ will fail to have their expectations met. I’m talking, of course, about people who have their birthday today … leap year babies.

Across the Internet, many hundreds (if not thousands) of websites fail to recognise 29 Feb as a valid birthdate (or any format variants thereof). As a result, websites either pop alerts to people telling them that their birthdate is invalid or flag the registration as an attempted automated spammer sign-on. Until recently even YouTube was affected by this bug (until the International Honor Society of Leap Year Babies lobbied them to fix it).

Add to that the fact that in many common software libraries (such as Microsoft Excel) can incorrectly identify leap years (specifically leap years that occur in a century year) and the problem for leap year babies, or people seeking to book travel online for example or arrange a birthday greeting from Toys-R-Us for their leap-year child can become frustrating.

These bugs have existed in software for years but remain unfixed. Microsoft Excel’s leap year bug has existed for nearly 20 years (or is that 5 years as it only crops up 1 in every 4?)

For more information on leap years (including the full set of business rules for defining a leap year as set out by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582), check out www.leapyearbaby.com

(We won’t get started on how you calculate how old leap year babies actually are.)