It’s been a little while since our last post of an IQTrainwreck. That doesn’t mean that they dont’ still occur. Only this past weekend Irish national broadcaster RTE published inaccurate information about the winning numbers in the Irish National Lottery draw at the end of the broadcast. .We’d like to show you video footage of the error but, to avoid compounding the error, RTE have edited the last few seconds from the end of the recording which is available on the RTE website.
According to The Irish Times RTE blame a software error for the incorrect display of numbers, which the broadcaster was forced to correct through continuity announcements during the remainder of the evening. Apparently a software update was applied ahead of the draw on Saturday 17th December.
The Irish National Lottery has expressed concern that anything might affect the collection of the winning prize, a trivial amount of only €4.9 million but point out that there is more than one way for a person to check their lottery numbers.
There are a few lessons to learn here for Information Quality Professionals
- When you are presenting mission critical information in time-sensitive environments, it is imperative that you have any changes to process, software, or technical architecture well tested before ‘show time’.
- When you are relying on the quality of information for critical decisions it is often worthwhile to take reference data points from other sources to validate and verify the source you are using, no matter how trusted or trustworthy they may have been in the past. Trust but Verify is a good mantra
- When using data for decision making where accuracy is a “Critical to Quality” factor you should seek out the most authoritative source. Often this mean going to the real world object or source data creator (in this case the National Lottery itself) rather than relying on a normally reliable surrogate source (the National Broadcaster in this case) in case errors or defects have crept into the data which is being presented by the surrogate.