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September 22, 2008
Data quality carrots
When I want to teach my dog to do something, I generally find it helps to offer her something in return. A small piece of cheese, or other tasty morsel generally does the trick. It doesn't have to be anything big or expensive and, after a short while, when she's learnt what it is I want. she'll respond without the need for anything more than a "good girl" as a thank you.
I'd say the same is pretty much true for my kids (although they respond better to cash than cheese and can generally understand more complex requests). So why is it that some data governance regimes think that everything will be alright if they issue an edict and back it up only with strong-arm tactics - "do it this way, or else."
If you want to encourage the right behaviour from your front-line staff who collect and enter information that other knowledge workers consume, why not start by offering them some incentive to do it. If you only measure their performance by crude measures, such as call volumes, or numbers of records entered, you cannot expect them to worry too much about the quality of the data they're actually typing in.
By measuring the quality of the information they're entering, and rewarding them for doing it right, you'll increase the value of that information, remove costly scrap and re-work and improve the output of the downstream processes that use the data. Just like my dog, the reward doesn't have to be big or expensive and, after a short while, you'll find that the good behaviour becomes second nature, which can be positively reinforced by regular monitoring and a polite "thank you." There's a place for the stick, but it's better to lead with the carrot.
Please note, the author does not recommend the offering of either carrots or cheese as a reward for good data quality.
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Posted by Steve Tuck at 9:18 AM
September 19, 2008
Getting their wires crossed
What on earth possessed me to transfer my mobile, office and broadband lines in the same week? How could I be so naive as to think that it would all go smoothly? 
After a lot of frustrating calls to premium rate numbers, working through countless automated menus and listening to a lot of dreadful "on-hold" musak, my office line did get successfully transferred, but the mobile and the broadband were not so successful. Both look set for a delay of at least a week.
What has frustrated me most in my dealings with the FOUR telephone companies involved is the failure of anyone to take any ownership or responsibility for resolving THEIR issues. Instead I have been passed from pillar to post in my quest to sort things out for them.
It seems that everyone I speak to has a very limited remit and is incapable of talking to their colleague or even transferring me to the next department. Why do that when you can bump the customer and give them another premium rate number to call which places them in another queue they have to endure?
I now know more about the internal workings of the ordering process at these companies than most of their staff do and certainly more than I care to. Each of them has some form of single customer view in place and references me by my telephone and account numbers, but none of them appear to be truly joined up and the customer service staff have access to information that is incomplete at best and frequently incorrect. They may have the same identifier on the records, but their systems and processes are certainly not working in a joined up way, leaving the customer to assemble their own single view of the enterprise when things go wrong. As far as I can see, the only saving grace for these organisations is that they are all as bad as the others. Perhaps they should be called miscommunication companies...
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Posted by Steve Tuck at 10:15 AM
