Category Archives: Embarrassing Trainwrecks

Know your customer, know yourself

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From today’s SUN tabloid newspaper in the UK comes this great story about how automated processes without adequate business rules and checks on information can cause embarrassment.

It seems that local government authorities in the UK have been fining themselves for parking offences and then suing themselves when the fines aren’t paid. Things have even gone as far as councils seeking awards of legal costs against themselves when they haven’t complied with their requests to themselves to pay themselves the fines that they imposed on themselves for parking their vehicles in places where they had decided people shouldn’t park.

It seems that none of them have yet tried to argue the defence that was put forward in Ferguson vs British Gas.

The lesson here is that when defining an objective in a process one should take the time to consider the various scenarios that might occur in that process and then ensure you have adequate checks and balances and controls to prevent embarrassing and costly errors from occurring.

Oh… and knowing that your customer is yourself is also a good idea.

You can’t make an omlette with out breaking a few Eggs

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A correspondent in the field, Nic Jefferis has sent in this story about how a “database glitch” has affected customers of the Egg on-line bank who have been trying to pay their bills using their NatWest debit cards.

The BBC describes the problem very succintly:

“The problem is that the Egg website does not recognise Natwest Visa Debit cards as being legitimate cards.”

The root cause seems to stem from the fact that key base data used by Egg’s on-line bank, the valid set of Bank Identification Numbers, appears to to not include NatWest Visa debit cards as they are only being rolled out at the moment to replace the existing Maestro Debit card facility currently in use at NatWest.

And at this point the second common component of IQTrainwrecks raises its head – who is responsible for the data.

Egg get their data from Experian. As soon as the problem arose, Egg contacted Experian to get a solution.  Natwest state that they were “aware of this problem and raised it with Egg at the outset” and were waiting for Egg to sort out the problem in their systems.

Somewhere in the process for maintaining BIN master data something has gone awry which has affected the ability of NatWest customers to pay bills using their new Visa debit cards. As the problem appears to be in the underlying base data, it is possible that there are impacts wider afield than just Egg’s payment systems.

As a source quoted in the BBC report says, this should be a straightforward process and an error like this would be highly unusual. But as we know here at IQTrainwrecks, it is often the simple errors that can have the biggest knock on impacts in downstream systems and processes resulting in loss, damage, injury, or frustration.

Why 2k?

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IT media sources are reporting that reports of the demise of the Y2k bug may have been premature. (see also here)

Systems affected included Spam control software and other security software from a leading vendor, network equipment from leading vendors as well as credit card payment systems in Germany and Australia, as well as (it seems) Windows Mobile. The bug was tweeted heavily on Twitter.

The effect of this bug seems to have been to catapult messages forward in time by a few years, resulting in credit card terminals rejecting cards as they failed date validation checks (the card expiry date was in the past apparently), valid emails being flagged as spam (because the message was date stamped in the future), and SMS messages appearing to come from the future.

The potential knock-on impacts of this error don’t bear thinking about. In the immediate term we have:

  • Embarrassment for credit card wielding shoppers who found themselves unable to pay for purchases or meals.
  • Missed emails due to them being flagged incorrectly as SPAM (although this has been fixed).
  • SMS confusion.

But, in this automated world where processes are triggered by business rules based on facts and information there are potentially other impacts:

  • Discovery of emails or SMS messages in criminal or civil litigation (will the lawyers think of looking in the future? Can the evidence be verified if it appears to be from the future?)
  • electronic transfer of data or funds based on rules
  • Calculation of interest payments or penalties based on date rules

The root cause of this problem appears to have been assumptions about dates, and the thought in 1999 that 2010 was sufficiently far in the future that (one must assume) everyone assumed that a better fix for the rules being applied would be developed by then.

Slovak Police accidentally cause Terror Alert in Dublin

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The Irish and International media have been busy the past few days covering the story of the horrendously botched security test by Slovakian Border Police which resulted in 90 grams of high explosive RDX finding its way to Dublin from Bratislava in the backpack of an unsuspecting Slovakian electrician who was travelling back to Ireland after Christmas at home. This lead to a street in Dublin City Centre being closed this past Tuesday, with homes and businesses evacuated, while police and Army bomb experts raided the innocent electrician’s home to secure the explosives.

A full timeline for the story can be found here.

This is a tale which has a number of classic elements of an IQTrainwreck about it. Continue reading →

Perhaps they should have checked their listings twice?

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The Irish Sunday Independent reports this past weekend that the Irish State Broadcaster RTE is facing legal action from its erstwhile privately owned competitor TV3  arising from what are described as “significant and egregious” errors in the listings published for TV3’s programmes over the Christmas period in the RTE owned listing’s magazine “The RTE Guide”. The errors affect listings over the core Christmas period and also the time of one movie which is due to be broadcast tonight at 9pm but which is listed incorrectly in the Guide.

In a wonderful example which highlights the potential downstream cost and revenue implications of poor quality information, TV3 says the error is so serious that it could have a fundamental impact on its Christmas viewing figures.

And, in TV-land, viewing figures translate into hard-to-come-by-in-a-recession advertising revenues.

TV3 have asked for RTE to pulp all copies of the RTE Guide still in shops and to replace them with reprints which show the correct listings. Failing this, they have asked RTE to give prime-time advertising coverage on TV and radio to TV3 programmes over the Festive Season, which would have the effect of reducing the prime-time advertising slots which RTE would have already sold over Christmas, hitting RTE’s revenue streams as well.

RTE, for their part, blame a 3rd party supplier for the errors.

Of course, this writer’s thoughts are with the ultimate information consumers here… the viewing public. If my house as a teenager was anything to go by, the RTE Guide will have been used as the basis for negotiations about who gets to see TV ‘live’ versus programming the video recorder.

A while ago, Daragh O Brien wrote on his blog about the likely rise in Information Quality litigation, particularly as studies have shown that people become more litigious during a recession. This looks like one of those cases and it seems 2010 will be an interesting year for Information Quality management principles in Ireland.

Information Quality – Every Little Helps

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[Thanks to Tony O’Brien for sending this one in to us recently. For those of you not familiar with Tesco and their marketing slogans, this is their corporate website.]

ManagementToday.com has a great story (from 25th November) of how six bicycles purchased by Tesco from a supplier came with an apparent£1million (US$1.62 million) price tag.

Some red faces at Tesco HQ this morning, after news emerged that Britain’s biggest supermarket accidentally paid one of its suppliers almost £1m for six bikes.

The unit cost for each bicycle turns out to be a whopping £164000 instead of the usual £164.

While the majority of the money was repaid, the trouble for Tesco is that they are engaged in a dispute with the supplier in relation to other matters so the supplier has held on to 12% of the money. So Tesco have called in their lawyers. Which means that the total cost of failure will inevitably be much higher by the time the whole mess is sorted out.

Of course, simple consistency checks on data entry could have trapped that error and saved Tesco money and embarrassment.

It seems that with Information Quality, as with Retail Grocery, every little helps.

Lost in Translation

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Not a trainwreck in the strict sense of the word or on the scale of other cases we’ve logged recently, but this story from the Irish Examiner does illustrate the importance of language and terminology in communicating important information. Breakdowns in the transfer of important information can often cause distress and a failure to meet expectations.

It seems that on an Aer Lingus flight to the US the crew were warning passengers of turbulence and advising them to return to their seats. Unfortunately, the wrong message got relayed in French, resulting in Francophones aboard the flight fearing for their lives as the message they heard was that they were to prepare for an emergency landing, which over the Atlantic could only mean ditching in the ocean.

Thankfully this was not the case, but there were a few worried minutes until cabin crew realised the error, apologised to passengers and calmed everyone down.

Similar miscommunications happen all the time in business and IT where there are subtle difference in the meaning of words used in niche disciplines. For example, to a Marketing person an SME is a Small to Medium Business, where as IT know them as a “Subject Matter Expert”.

Poor Quality Information costs money – and you can take that to the Bank

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via Keith Underdown comes this story hot off the press release engine in the UK’s Financial Services Authority.

Barclay’s Bank have been fined stg£2.45 million for “failing to provide accurate transaction reports to the FSA and for serious weaknesses in systems and controls in relation to transaction reporting”. The fine would have been higher (stg£3.5 million but for the fact that Barclay’s co-operated with the investigation and agreed to settle the matter quickly). According the the FSA press release

“Complete and accurate transaction reports are an essential component of the FSA’s market monitoring work. Barclays’ reporting failures could have a damaging impact on our ability to detect and investigate suspected market abuse.

“The penalty imposed on Barclays is significantly higher than previous penalties imposed for transaction reporting errors. This reflects the serious nature of Barclays’ breaches and is a warning to other firms that the FSA will not tolerate inadequate systems and controls.”

This is an interesting warning that serves as an indicator of how Regulatory systems and enforcement will be changing in a post-Recession world.

Of course, the true cost to Barclays is much greater than the cost of the fine. For one, there is the reputational damage that comes from being fined to this extent by the FSA. And then there is the cost of correcting errors and fixing the defective processes, which Barclays has done “including commissioning a review of its transaction reporting process and committing extensive resources to improve its processes and resolve the errors.”

Reviews and resources don’t grow on trees you know.

This is a clear example of an IQ Trainwreck.

Did you check on the cheques we sent to County Jail?

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Courtesy of Keith Underdown comes yet another classic IQ Trainwreck  which he came across on the CBS News.

It seems that up to 3900 prisoners received cheques (or ‘checks’ to our North American readers) of US$250 each, despite the very low probability that they would be able to actually use them to stimulate the economy. Of the 3900, 2200 were, it seems, entitled to receive them as they had not been incarcerated in any one of the three months prior to the enactment of the Stimulus bill.

However, that still leaves 1700 prisoners who should not have received cheques who did. The root cause?

According to CBS News:

…government records didn’t accurately show they were in prison

A classic information quality problem… accuracy of master data being used in a process resulting in an unexpected or undesired outcome.

While most prisons have intercepted and returned the cheques, there will now need to be a process to identify,  for each prisoner, whether the Recovery payment was actually due. Again, a necessary manual check (no pun intended) at this stage but one which will add to the cost and time involved in processing the Recovery cheques.

Of course, we’ve already written here about the problem with Stimulus cheques being sent to deceased people.

These cases highlight the fact that an Information Quality problem doesn’t have to be massively impacting on your bottom line or impact significant numbers of people to have an impact on your reputation.

US Government Health (S)Care.

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Courtesy of Jim Harris at the excellent OCDQBlog.com comes this classic example of a real life Information Quality Trainwreck concerning US Healthcare. Keith Underdown also sent us the link to the story on USAToday’s site

It seems that 1800 US military veterans have recently been sent letters informing them that they have the degenerative neurological disease ALS (a condition similar to that which physicist Stephen Hawking has).

At least some of the letters, it turns out, were sent in error.

[From the LA Times]

As a result of the panic the letters caused, the agency plans to create a more rigorous screening process for its notification letters and is offering to reimburse veterans for medical expenses incurred as a result of the letters.

“That’s the least they can do,” said former Air Force reservist Gale Reid in Montgomery, Ala. She racked up more than $3,000 in bills for medical tests last week to get a second opinion. Her civilian doctor concluded she did not have ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

So, poor quality information entered a process, resulting in incorrect decisions, distressing communications, and additional costs to individuals and governement agencies. Yes. This is ticking all the boxes to be an IQ Trainwreck.

The LA Times reports that the Department of Veterans Affairs estimates that 600 letters were sent to people who did not have ALS. That is a 33% error rate. The cause of the error? According to the USA Today story:

Jim Bunker, president of the National Gulf War Resource Center, said VA officials told him the letters dated Aug. 12 were the result of a computer coding error that mistakenly labeled the veterans with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.

Oh. A coding error on medical data. We have never seen that before on IQTrainwrecks.com in relation to private health insurer/HMO data. Gosh no.

Given the impact that a diagnosis of an illness which kills affected people within an average of 5 years can have on people, the simple coding error has been bumped up to a classic IQTrainwreck.

There are actually two Information quality issues at play here however which illustrate one of the common problems in convincing people that there is an information quality problem in the first place . While the VA now estimates (and I put that in bold for a reason) that the error rate was 600 out of 1800, the LA Times reporting tells us that:

… the VA has increased its estimate on the number of veterans who received the letters in error. Earlier this week, it refuted a Gulf War veterans group’s estimate of 1,200, saying the agency had been contacted by fewer than 10 veterans who had been wrongly notified.

So, the range estimates for error goes from 10 in1800 (1.8%) to 600 in 1800 (33%) to 1200 in 1800 (66%). The intersting thing for me as an information quality practitioner is that the VA’s initial estimate was based on the numberof people who had contacted the agency.

This is an important lesson.. the number of reported errors (anecdotes) may be less than the number of actual errors and the only real way to know is to examine the quality of the data and look for evidence of errors and inconsistency so you can Act on Fact.

The positive news… the VA is changing its procedures. The bad news about that… it looks like they are investing money in inspecting defects out of the process rather than making sure the correct fact is correctly coded in patient records.