In my November newsletter I discussed how an error that appears small at the time it occurs can have a big result down the line. Gordon Bagot replied as follows:

I too have come across this problem with a former client. A currency exchange rate was wrongly transferred from one electronic data file to another, manually, and with numbers transposed. The whole firm used the transposed number, in all their systems, until I was asked to do some consultancy work where I used my own source of exchange rates. The firm argued with me, delayed payment too, until I spent the time trying to resolve the problem with one of the client’s staff. Result, I was right, client wrong, no apology,but I did get payment then more promptly.

There is so much in the way of statistical analyses done, on which quite major investment decisions are made, that I can’t understand why time, money, resources is not allocated to ensure data is 100% correct as is possible.

I do hope items such as this are noted by your clients.

Me too!

Widespread delays to the London Underground this week were caused by one of the Tube’s infrastructure operators installing new software.

The new software was loaded over the weekend, presumably to minimise any disruption.  There’s no indication of what actually went wrong, or whether it could have been prevented by better (or more, or any) testing.

A misplaced decimal point has cost Clerical Medical £17m. Apparently a wrong decimal point was input to some unit pricing data in 2002.

Laptops can contain confidential information, and are inherently less secure than large machines: it is easier to take physical possession of them.

Nationwide building society recently had one stolen that contained customer information; and 3 laptops containing police payroll information were stolen from LogicaCMG, the UK IT services firm.

You have to wonder whether it was absolutely necessary for this information to be on the laptops in the first place. It appears that it may not have been, as Nationwide are saying that the employee who had the laptop stolen may not have been complying with the firm’s security policy. Of course, it’s one thing to have a policy and another for it to be complied with.

“The Shuttle was never expected to be in orbit as one year gives way to another”. Unbelievable.

This time it’s the Department of Work and Pensions, in particular their contact centres.

Contact centre employees have to use a number of different systems containing client information. These systems are not properly joined up, so that people applying for benefits or pensions have to give the same information on a number of occasions - when much of it is already held on a system in the department.

Not only is this frustrating for the member of the public, as well as the staff member concerned, it’s also a very good way of ensuring that inaccurate and inconsistent information gets into the system(s).

“There are at least 55 different telephone numbers for contacting the DWP and, quite incredibly, if you contact the wrong service, the department’s technology will not enable your call to be transferred to the right service.”

I suppose that if you make it really hard for people to claim benefits then you save money, as fewer of them will stick it out, but it’s expensive in terms of productivity and staff morale.

It’s been reported that yet again sensitive information has been posted on the web because people don’t understand the difference between what you see and what you get. A pdf document posted by the Civil Aviation Authority contained blacked out sections that were about airport security. However, the sensitive sections could be read quite easily: they just used black on black, or something similar.

Pdf documents contain all the text that was in the document from which they were produced; just because it’s not immediately visible (black on black, or a black block superimposed) it doesn’t mean that it’s disappeared. Just select the text to see it, or if necessary copy and paste into another application, or view the pdf file with a text editor.

Emails: love ‘em or hate ‘em, they’re here to stay. And that’s the point. Many emails are written as if they are ephemeral, and then cause problems when they turn out to be permanent. It’s so easy just to dash something off, in the same tone as if you were chatting to a colleague at the water cooler.

A recent piece in the FT discusses how the message just doesn’t seem to have got through to many organisations and their employees. Most organisations have appropriate policies in place, but do little to enforce them, whether through training or otherwise. There is software available to check outgoing emails (a bit like reverse spam filtering) but it isn’t widely used. It also suffers from the some of the same problems as spam filtering: in particular, people don’t like it when a perfectly acceptable email doesn’t get through