Blogs

Moving domain and server

Submitted by Administrator on December 29, 2011 - 18:32

Over the coming week Castlebridge Associates will be moving to a new domain name, Castlebridge.ie and a new hosting provider Blacknight.

We'd actually hoped to do the migration this past weekend to start the New Year in our new location (and thought we had pulled it off) but a few technical glitches have meant we've had to keep this version of the site active for a little longer.

This is part of a rebranding we are undertaking to simplify things for the organisation and our customers and to allow us to roll out more services to our customers in 2012.

Electronic Privacy Regulations - a mandate for Quality Modelling and Governance

Submitted by Daragh O Brien on July 28, 2011 - 12:59

Last month I discussed the need for organisations to step back and think about information and its meaning and purpose in the context of direct marketing suppressions. On the 1st of July the Irish Government enacted its national legislation to give effect to the Electronic Privacy Directive. Unlike the UK there is no moratorium on enforcement. Rather the Irish DPC has opted to enforce but to examine each case on its merits as the application of the legislation rolls out.

One of the interesting sections in the legislation is the definition of Electronic Communications. It is interesting to me as a hybrid lawyer/data guy because of what it requires organisations to do.

 

THINK

Doing it by Design: How thinking about the things can help you build a better suppressions model

Submitted by Administrator on June 22, 2011 - 16:43

Earlier in the week I wrote about the role of Information Governance and Information Quality principles in ensuring that an organisation meets its Data Protection obligations around the management of suppressions so that customers are not contacted in a manner which is unwelcomed or inappropriate.

This Complicated Life

Back in the old days the management of customer marketing preferences was easy. You had either a postal address or a phone number. Direct marketing was largely (if not entirely) about selling to customers. So you'd send out catalogues or brochures about your product or service and hope for the phone to ring with an order.

But, as the pizza parlour example from earlier in the week demonstrates, we now live in a complicated world where individuals have a lot of personal identifying data associated with them. Also, Customer Relationship Management and the way in which organisations interact with their customers has changed very much to a relationship based approach that helps build intimacy and, effectively, raises the barrier to customer churn (because you are in their inbox every week with something new and interesting).

This can create complications, but also it can create opportunities for organisations who have thought about the meaning and purpose of their information, how they can use it to drive value, and have invested in modelling their systems and processes accordingly.

Data Protection & Marketing Suppressions: Act on Fact

Submitted by Daragh O Brien on June 17, 2011 - 12:54

One of the areas where Information Quality, Data Governance, and Data Protection overlap significantly, with a big business impact, is the area of managing an individual's preferences for direct marketing.

Before I go any further, I think it is important to clarify what is meant by Direct Marketing in this context. Direct Marketing is a communication targetted to a specific individual by any means of communication such as email, snail mail, SMS, fax, or telephone. It could be argued that it also could include Tweets or contact via social networking.

The diagram opposite shows some of the data that an individual has about themselves that they would potentially be sharing with a service provider, in this case a Pizza parlour. Joe (the Data Subject) has a variety of contact points at which he may be contacted. Some of these he may have provided to Bob in Bob's Pizza. He will have provided these pieces of information for a variety of specific purposes.

The EU Cookies Directive: An Information Quality view

Submitted by Daragh O Brien on June 16, 2011 - 12:02

The European Union has introduced a revised and updated Electronic Privacy Directive which, amongst other things, introduces restrictions on the use of cookies. Most EU27 countries have stepped up to the markon implementing national legislation to enact the cookies, with a few exceptions. Much of the commentary about the Directive bemoans the impact on businesses using the web and on behavioural marketing etc due to the need to have consent for the use of the cookies and the fact that browser-based controls are unlikely, in and of themselves, to be sufficient.

Of course, it is easy to overlook the fact that there are exemptions where the cookie is essential to the operation of the site and the delivery of the "information age service" which the individual is trying to avail of. The oft-cited example here is the need of many on-line shopping basket systems to write cookies to your computer as you move through the sales process to remind the system what it was you were buying and keep your session active so that you can place your order seamlessly (for example if you are moved to a 3rd party site such as PayPal to do the payment bit and then go back to the company site to download a receipt etc.)

So, the cookies Directive boils down to the age old Peter Drucker conundrum: "What is the meaning and purpose of the information?"

In this context then, what is a cookie? The traditional definition is that it is a text file (or a flash local object) written to your computer by a website. However, that answers the technical "what". We are more interested now in the inforamtional and process "what" aspects of a cookie.

Think first - what do I need to achieve the goal?

Submitted by Daragh O Brien on April 6, 2011 - 17:19

In an earlier post I wrote about Information Quality being a "measure twice, cut once" type of challenge.

Today I got yet another email from "Karen", a subscription promotions robot at a large international industry publishing company, Information Week. The email (and I get them every few weeks) invites me to sign up for a free subscription to their print magazine because I've subscribed to one or more of their email newsletters. 

The invite reads:

As a valued InformationWeek newsletter subscriber, you’ve been selected to apply for a complimentary subscription to InformationWeek magazine – the source for unique editorial and in-depth analysis for the leading business technology buyers. Others pay for this must-have publication but if you take a few minutes to apply and qualify now, you will NEVER be billed. 

Now I LOVE dead tree publishing. I like being able to read things that won't need to be plugged in if I leave them down and walk away for an hour. And I LOVE industry publications becasue I can clip the good bits and recycle the rest. More than that, as a small business owner, I abso-fricking-lutely ADORE anything that is free.

Measure Twice, Cut Once (?)

Submitted by Daragh O Brien on March 9, 2011 - 11:55

I've been reading a lot of interesting blog posts in a variety of places about the importance and value of metrics for data quality and the potential for misunderstood measurements to drive misunderstood (or just plain wrong) decisions.

At the simplest level, this is yet another iteration of the age old "Carpenter's Rule" - Measure twice, cut once.

picture of a carpenter

 

But carpenters have it easy. Irrespective of your level of experience in carpentry and woodwork you intuitively know that the measures that matter to you are length, width/breadth, and height. All of those are ultimately different dimensions of the same metric (width is length from a different perspective after all). The key challenge for the carpenter is to make sure that they are measuring in the same units of measure (inches, feet, metres, centimetres). And if they are working with other carpenters they need to make sure that they have agreement on what unit of measure they are using.

ICS Data Protection Survey

Submitted by Daragh O Brien on February 18, 2011 - 20:49

The Irish Computer Society has released the findings of a survey on attitudes and understanding of Data Protection in Ireland.

The findings are, to say the least, shocking.

The first finding that strikes me is that the respondents (286 of them) were from IT functions within organisations. No offence to my brethern in IT but if Information is an Asset why are we asking plumbers about water quality and leaks? But that is a minor concern.

A more significant concern is the fact that organisations just don't seem to get it. At least not some of them. The fact that the respondents have conflated "Data Protection" with "Data Security" is troubling. For the record: "Safe and Secure" is ONE of EIGHT principles for Data Protection (actually, they're called principles for Data Quality but that is a topic I cover in a full day tutorial so I won't bore you here). There are other principles that need to be respected just as much. As a political party discovered recently, if you haven't obtaine the data fairly (Principle 1) then the fall out from having your systems hacked and data copied is only part of the problem.

Also, respondents seemed to be of the view that compliance with the Data Security Breach Code of Practice was an optional thing. In this context I have to fall back on the words of W.Edwards Deming:

You don't have to do this. Survival is entirely optional.

IAIDQ Blog Carnival

Submitted by Daragh O Brien on February 14, 2011 - 13:16

iaidq blog carnival 2010So, it is that time of the month again when we look back at the posts which educated and entertained us from the various data quality bloggers who are part of a community that has grown rapidly in the nearly 3 years the IAIDQ has been running the Blog Carnival.

Recent media coverage and the need to evolve your Information Architecture

Submitted by Administrator on February 11, 2011 - 14:59

At the risk of being seen to blow our own horn, we've had quite a good few weeks for media coverage in Ireland.

Hopefully this marks the beginning of a maturing of the discussion about Data Protection and Information Quality away from the technology and towards the fundamental issues of how information actually adds value to organisations and how the risks associated with Information (keeping it safe, obtaining it with clear purposes, privacy, and quality) can be managed and mitigated in a way that can ensure compliance with current laws and inform appropriate evolution of legislation and regulation to come, while at the same time enabling organisations to continue to offer innovative services and facilities to customers (and citizens) that make clever use of information to add value.

The Media Clippings section of the site is where we have planned to put examples of our mentions in the media. The assumption that was made was that everything we'd want to link to was going to be on-line in some form, therefore it is just a list of links to external sites. But that has turned out to be an incomplete solution.

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