Category Archives: Pop Culture IQ Trainwrecks

Quality Information – it can be a lottery!

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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

  1. 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’.
  2. 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
  3. 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.

 

 

The importance of context

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Data is often defined as “Facts about things” and Information is often defined as “Facts about things in a context”.

From Lwanga Yonke (IAIDQ Advisor and one of the visionaries behind the CIQP certification) comes this great example of where, without consistent application of context, it is possible for the Data to give rise to poor quality and misleading information.

Sign showing population, feet above sealevel and year founded with the data totalled

Image linked from "thepocket.com"

What we see in the sign opposite are three distinct contexts:

  1. A count of the population (562)
  2. The height of the town above sealevel (2150)
  3. The year the town was founded (1951)

And of course, when we see a column of figures our instinct (since our earliest school days) is to add them all up… to give us 4663.

Of course, that figure is meaningless as information, and is also poor quality data.

I have personally experienced similar “challenges of context” in tracking back root cause analyses in Regulatory Compliance projects.. the stakeholder pulling the incident reports together didn’t consider context and as such was comparing apples with ostrich eggs (if he’d been comparing apples to oranges at least they’d both have been fruit).

I’d love to hear your stories of Contextual conundrums that have lead to poor quality data and erroneous Information.

Apple App Store IQ Trainwreck

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It appears that Apple iPhone App developers are having difficulty getting paid at the moment, according to this story from The Register. (Gizmodo.com carries the story here, Techcrunch.com has it here,

According to The Register:

A backlog in Apple’s payment processing system has left some iPhone developers still waiting for February’s payments, leaving some at risk of bankruptcy and considering legal action against the lads in Cupertino.

Desperate developers have been told to stop e-mailing the iTunes finance system and to wait patiently for their money – in some cases tens of thousands of dollars – while Apple sorts things out.

It would appear from comments and coverage elsewhere that this problem has been occurring for some developers for longer (since late 2008 according to the TechCrunch article and this article from eequalsmcsquare.com (an iphone community site))

The article goes on to explain that:

According to postings on the iPhone developer community Apple has been blaming bank errors and processing problems for the delays. Complainants are being told that payments have been made, that bank errors have caused rejections[.]

One commenter on the story on The Register, commenting anonymously, attempts to shed some light on this with an explanation that, from an Information Quality point of view, sounds plausible.

  • Two American banks merged (was it Washington Mutual and Chase?) and the SWIFT code for the customers of one had to change. The bank didn’t tell the customers and Apple had the payments refused. Apple seem to be manually changing the codes in the payment system, but that’s separate from the web interface where devs enter their bank details.
  • A lot of American banks don’t have SWIFT codes at all. Royalties from e.g. EU sales are sent from Apple (Luxembourg) S.A.. The chances of this money arriving at Bank Of Smalltown seem slim at best.

This what we have here is a failure to manage master data correctly it seems, and also a glaring case of potentially incomplete data which would impact the ability for funds to flow freely from the App Store to the Developers.

The Anonymous commenter’s explanation would seem to hold water because Apple are claiming that “bank errors have caused rejections”. Having had some experience with electronic funds transfer processes, one of the reasons a funds transfer would fail would be if the data used was incorrect, inconsistent or inaccurate. This would happen if the SWIFT codes of Bank A had to change (or if Bank A and Bank B had to have new codes issued).

However, some commenters based in the EU have reported that they have given Apple updated bank details and are still awaiting payment, which suggests there may be yet another potential root cause at play here that may yet come to light.

Apple still owes me more than $7,500 since September 2008 for US and World regions. I supplied them with a new SWIFT code and a intermediary bank they could use last month, but still nothing. Sent them tons of emails but I never got to know what is really wrong/faulty so I just tried to give them another SWIFT code that DNB (Biggest bank in Norway) uses. All other region payments have been OK.” (quote from comment featured on this article)

So, for the potential impact on iPhone Apps developers cash flow, and the PR impact on one of Apple’s flagship services, and the fact that management of the accuracy, completeness and consistency of key master data for a process, this counts as an IQ Trainwreck.

A salutory tale of poor IQ

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Gizmodo.com occasionally features ‘localisation’ problems (they spell it with a ‘z’, yet another localisation problem). As localisation raises challenges of customer expectation, information design, information presentation and a whole heap of other potential tripwires for Information Quality disasters, this is sometimes a good source of quick examples of how poor quality information can screw up processes.

Sometimes, however, there are stories that take it to such an extreme that they move out of the realm of ‘localisation problem’ and into the domain of ‘Information Quality trainwreck’. This following story is just such a tale. (the full Gizmodo article can be found at this link) Continue reading →

Leap year babies are hopping mad

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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.)

I’m wrong to the finish, coz I eats my spinach…

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Every one knows that spinach is good for you. However it isn’t as good for you as initially thought.  Vincent McBurney over at ITToolbox.com wrote a post last year about the ‘spinach iron content controversy’ and its effect on people’s thinking about the health benefits of the leafy vegetable.

This qualifies as an IQ Trainwreck for many reasons, but the main one for me is that it means most of my childhood Saturday mornings were based on an IQ error… Popeye could never have gotten that strong eating spinach.

More importantly it teaches us some valuable lessons about the impact of poor information quality. Firstly, it can happen very easily (in this case a decimal point seems to have been in the wrong place due to a miscalculation).

Secondly, there may be a more complex ‘system’ at work that might affect the real business impact of the information (1000 orders pending might sound bad, but is it bad if they are in dispatch and the order will complete once the goods are delivered?).

Finally, the ‘conventional wisdom’ that pervades through an organisation can often be difficult to overcome, even when it is based on poor quality information and an incomplete understanding of the system (or information chain).  Even today there are many people who think that spinach is a good source of iron in the diet, even though the system is complex (only 2%-5% of iron in spinach is absorbed) and the iron content is lower than many people think (90% lower to be precise).

Read Vincent’s post for more details.