Information Quality Management

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.

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.

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.

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.

So, 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.

There are many variations on pithy sayings about assumptions and the risk they present. They are unanimous in their admonitions that to rely just on an assumption when engaged in planning or executing tasks invites failure and headaches. Necessity may be the Mother of Invention but Assumptions are the Mother of all screw ups (diligent readers will recognise that I’ve cleaned that up for easily shocked readers).

The risk of assumption is no less apparent than in the area of Governance, and Information Governance in particular. Patently stupid and damaging decisions are taken every day on the basis of assumptions about information and the controls, regulations, and procedures that need to be in place around its use. For example, organisations assume they can use the PPSN (Ireland’s Social Insurance Number) as a unique identifier for customers, despite the fact that the uses that a PPSN can be put to lawfully (and by whom) are clearly set out in the Social Welfare Acts.

Within organisations seeking to define and execute effective controls over information it is often the case that things are done with data because they always have been done that way and, as a result, people assume that that is the way things should be done. This can result in data being processed or shared without valid lawful reasons (or conversely data not being disclosed where it might lawfully be done because someone assumes it can’t). It can result in a meaning and purpose being associated with a data field or recorded fact because people have assumed that is the case, resulting in confusion and degradation of data quality.

Over the past week I’ve been reminded of one example of Assumption at work in the management of fundamental data and another of Assumption’s influence in fundamental Governance of government…