Off with their heads! - Should data quality issues like this be acceptable?
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The Sunday Times (Business section 6th January 2008 ) reports that a couple have received a legal demand to repay £59m owed to HFC Bank! Apparently the couple did have an HFC loan for £3,000 but had paid that off! The debt agency acting on behalf of HFC is reported to have said "There has been an administrative error".
We all know mistakes can be made, but with all the experience and investment in technology we have today, is this situation acceptable?
If you have not built in the right logic in to your operational systems to capture/trap the obvious mistakes (like the one above), you should at the very least be building in alerts using standard Business Intelligence reporting tools to spot them and get the Business to fix them before Customers are involved.
Fire-fight solution:
In the case of the above where a couple running a cafe appear to have debts of anything above say "£120k" this situation should be captured in an exception report, and prompt human intervention... This at the very least will give you time to think about how you fix the Root Causes IDC...
The strategic solution is to create a "Culture of Information"
1. Make a senior/effective Business Director accountable for the quality and trustworthiness of your organisations data/information assets
2. Understand where you are in terms of Information and Data Asset Management Maturity and make sure your Business understands the short and longer-term implications of where it is today
3. Build Information Management practice/principles in to 'Business As Usual' - Establish enterprise-wide data Governance, roles & responsibilities, measures & rewards, processes, learning, etc. across every silo and mature your business
There is no exact recipe to follow and the journey will be long and at times painful, but any organisation that fails to ensure it is able to 'Act on Fact' will fail - It's just a matter of when?
If you think and act in the short term: before or after you can claim your next bonus?
If you think and act in the longer term: before or after you can claim your pension?
:-)
