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.

IAIDQ Information Quality Blog Carnival (updated)

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A little later than we had planned, IQTrainwrecks.com is proud to publish the December edition of the IAIDQ’s Blog Carnival for Information Quality, a retrospective on blog posts that appeared in November.

[Edit: We’d actually missed one submission when we posted this. A horrendous oversight given the importance of the discussion. Apologies to Dylan Jones and the team at DataqualityPro.com for the boo boo]

Dylan Jones of DataQualityPro.com opens proceedings with an excellent and thought provoking debate about the nature of information quality and the role of Data Cleansing in a data driven business. The comments on this post are as interesting as the questions posed.

Then we had a short and sweet post from Dalton Cervo where he extolled the need for your information quality and data governance initiatives to be more than just a grab-bag of buzzwords but actually to be planned and executed with the understanding that each is a part in a machine that makes your business great and is capable of reacting and adapting to change.  My experience echoes Dalton’s very wise example that if the problem in in one process, the fix might need to be in that process and a number of other supporting processes.

I suppose, just like any other ‘manufacturing’ process, if the components of your machinery aren’t working in unison as they should, then the product will be defective and your machinery will eventually break.

(For those of you who don’t know Dalton, he’s  the Customer Data Quality Lead at Sun Microsystems, part of Customer Data Steward and a member of the Customer Data Governance team responsible for defining policies and procedures governing the oversight of master customer data.)

Next up is Charles Blyth. Charles is a veteran of the BI and MDM world from the business perspective. His blog post addressed the need to get Data Governance (and by extension, responsibility for information quality) back to the front-line:

Front line Data Governance is about driving data ownership back into the business, getting every resource at every data touch-point to ‘own’ the data. Get the people involved!

At this time of year when every magazine, TV station and pundit is producing their lists of things that happened in 2009 or will happen in 2010, Henrik Liliendahl Sørensen shares with us his 55 reasons to improve Data Quality. Each of these on their own is the seed for a business case (how many duplicate Christmas cards did you get from your suppliers this year?) and should form the basis of Information Quality New Year’s resolutions in companies around the world.

Jim Harris has also been busy in November with a range of posts on his own blog and on the Dataflux Community of Experts blog. At this time of year when a festive gent up living around the frozen North Pole (no… not Henrik, I’m talking about Santa Claus) is making lists and checking them twice, it is only appropriate that we’d pick Jim’s great post on Customer Incognita, where he talks about the challenges of defining the simplest fact most businesses need to know. Now… how would he handle “Naughty” and “Nice” as attribute definitions?.

Finally, Daragh O Brien shared some thoughts on how you need to keep your customer in mind when making changes in processes or technology so that you don’t wind up causing problems downstream and creating IQTrainwrecks in the process.

The look back on December will appear in January. Thanks to everyone who has written such thought provoking and stimulating posts on Information Quality in 2009. It’s hard to believe that there wasn’t this community of writers in existence this time last year.

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.

No smoke without ire – Life Insurance Overcharging in Ireland

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RTE News in Ireland ran a story last night on overcharging by Irish Life Assurance companies arising from a mis-classification of customers as smokers. (link to the item is here, but you may not be able to access it if you are not in Ireland).

On foot of two complaints, the Irish Financial Services Ombudsman investigated two companies and has identified up to 500 customers affected.  However more customers may be affected in other companies .

The two companies affected blamed “computer and administrative errors” for the misclassification and the resulting overcharging. In other words, an Information Quality problem.

The financial impact for the two customers who complained was between €1100 and €2500 on policies of different lengths. Taking a crude average value, this would suggest that for the 500 cases the Ombudsman suspects in the two companies he looked at the total cost of refunds will be in the order of €900,000.

The cost of the investigation of possible errors and the correction of records would, of course, be on top of this amount.

The Financial Services Obmudsman has asked the Irish Financial Services Regulator to conduct an industry wide audit of all Life Assurance companies to identify further instances of this kind of overcharging based on misclassification of customers. As a result, the total amount of refunds will inevitably rise, as will the cost to the industry of inaccurate information.

The news report makes no mention of the potential Data Protection issues arising here under Irish Data Protection law, which does require information to be kept accurate and up to date. But the Irish Financial Ombudsman used to be the Data Protection Commissioner, so I am sure he has flagged that to the affected institutions himself.

Fruit of a poisoned tree – Information Quality meets Data Protection

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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.

An Airtravel trainwreck near-miss

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From today’s Irish Independent comes a story which clearly shows the impact that poor quality information can have on a process or an outcome. The tale serves to highlight the fact that information entered as part of a process can feed into other processes and result in a less than desirable outcome.

On 20th March 2009, poor quality information nearly resulted in the worst air traffic disaster in Australian history as an Airbus A340-500 narrowly avoided crashing on take off into a residential area of Melbourne. The aircraft sustained damage to its tail and also caused damage to various lights and other systems on the runway of the airport at Melbourne.

The provisional report of the Australian Air Crash investigation found that the root cause for the incident was the inputting of an incorrect calculation for the weight of the aircraft of 262 tonnes, where as the plane was actually 362 tonnes in weight. This affected the calculations for airspeed required for take-off and the necessary thrust required to reach that speed.

The end  result was that the plane failed to take off correctly and gain height as required, resulting in the tail of the plane impacting on the runway and then proceeding to plough through a lighting array and airport instruments at the end of the runway.

It is interesting, from an Information Quality perspective, to read the areas that the Accident Investigation team are looking at for further investigation (I’ve put the ones of most interest in Bold text, and the full report is available here):

  • human performance and organisational risk controls, including:
    • data entry
    • a review of similar accidents and incidents
    • organisational risk controls
    • systems and processes relating to performance calculations
  • computer-based flight performance planning, including:
    • the effectiveness of the human interface of computer based planning tools.
  • reduced power takeoffs, including:
    • the risks associated with reduced power takeoffs and how they are  managed
    • crew ability to reconcile aircraft performance with required takeoff performance, and the associated decision making of the flight crew
    • preventative methods, especially technological advancements.

The Report by the Australian authorities also contains reference to some of the migitations that the aircraft operator was considering to help prevent a recurrence of this risk:

  • • human factors – including review of current pre-departure, runway performance calculation and cross-check procedures; to determine if additional enhancement is feasible and desirable, with particular regard to error tolerance and human factors issues.
  • training – including review of the initial and recurrent training in relation to mixed fleet flying and human factors.
  • fleet technical and procedures – including introduction of a performance calculation and verification system which will protect against single data source entry error by allowing at least two independent calculations.
  • hardware and software technology – including liaising with technology providers regarding systems for detecting abnormal take-off performance.

For those of us familiar with Information Quality practices, this is an impressive haul of information quality management improvement actions focussed on ensuring that this type of near-miss never happens again. It is doubly interesting that causes of poor quality information feature in the items that are subject to further investigation (e.g. “human factors”, risk controls etc.) and common approaches to resolution or prevention of information quality problems form 75% of the action plan put forward by the operator (process enhancement, improved checking of accuracy/validity, assuring consistency with other facts or measures etc).

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”.