Citroen and their Balkan confusion

I was sent the link here, which shows a scan from a publication which appears to come from the car manufacturers Citroen and to date from 2009.

All looks fine until one looks more closely at the Balkans on this map.



Slovenia has expanded southwards, absorbing Croatia proper (including the capital, Zagreb) and Istria. Croatia has become but a rump of its former self, but has absorbed about half of Bosnia-Hercegovina, which is but a memory, as it's nowhere to be found on this map.

Citroen have succeeded where Slobodan Milosovic failed, and created a greater Serbia, including the Croatian area of Slavonia (and thus giving it a common border with Slovenia), Montenegro, Kosovo and a big chunk of Bosnia. In fact, only Macedonia is shown correctly, and even then the border has been drawn very approximately.

In fact, it looks as though somebody has taken a pre-1991 map showing Yugoslavia, and drawn in some borders where they think they might be, clearly more in hope than in expectation. Is a reminder needed of the number of people who died or were pushed out of their homes to fix the current borders of those countries? Should Citroen be thoroughly ashamed of publishing such a map?

Should road users everywhere be worried that the level of quality control during the manufacture of their cars matches that applied to their publications?

I do wonder how such errors get through the net - are people too lazy to reach for an atlas?

There goes another one

My initial reaction to hearing that AddressDoctor was being taken over by Informatica was a sinking feeling - another one bites the dust.

Acquisitions of companies specialising in international name and address data are hardly new: Postalsoft (as First Logic) went to Business Objects before that was subsumed into SAP, who also snapped up Fuzzy! Informatik. QAS went to Experian and Global Address to Harte-Hanks.

For me, the best outcome of a takeover is that the acquired company is allowed to continue to run its business as independently of its owner as possible. Small companies tend to be more dynamic and react more quickly to change than their larger rivals. Global name and address data quality is a specialised business, and it requires the freedom to concentrate upon it without worries about the needs of a mother company.

The worst outcome is the absorption of the company into the mother company, so that it becomes a cog within a much larger corporate wheel. In my experience, when this happens the focus is lost, and, I have to say, the quality of the solution suffers. The needs of the larger company and its customers take precedence. I weep when a mature product disappears in this way. Even when it becomes part of the mother company's data quality suite, access to it is lost from the vast majority of small- and medium-sized companies who have the need for data quality but not the budget.

The vacuum created by the disappearance of a good global data quality company is not quickly or easily filled. Global address processing is an extraordinarily complex business. It takes years of knowledge collection, development of algorithms, trial and error before a product even approaches acceptable levels of quality in international data. There are quicker and easier ways to make money in the data world. It is eternally frustrating to witness this cycle of re-inventing the wheel as companies form, develop, are taken over and are absorbed into other companies, effectively disappearing.

I sincerely hope that the independent global data quality company, producing good and affordable solutions, don't become an endangered species.

What about the rest of the data?

I'm currently reading a most worthy book about data quality, and, like most other books about data quality I've come across, its gaze is fixed completely on data held in large corporate entities. Large companies where data is amassed across myriad systems, current and legacy; where there is a separate IT department; where there are enough staff to create a data quality working group; where money is no object when it comes to tools to assess, process and cleanse that data.

But is that really where most of the world's data is held? Obviously it's where we most come in contact with it - when a large utility messes up its invoicing procedure, we know about it very quickly - but I would guess that more data is held in small spreadsheets and databases and documents in small- and medium-sized companies than is held in large corporations. I'm obviously not typical, but my own databases hold around 40 million records. In these small companies, there is unlikely to be distinct marketing or IT departments, no budget for data tools, not enough staff to create DQ teams.

Has anybody ever estimated how much data is held outside large corporations, or written about how they will go about improving their data quality? It must be the sun, as this is playing on my mind ...

How Microsoft Access can damage your data quality

OK, so I've bitten the bullet. Much against my better judgement I'm making a concerted effort to learn Microsoft Access 2007, to allow me to produce some data tables with Unicode characters.

Plugging away, I found an interesting aspect of field input masks which is guaranteed to produce data quality issues. When adding a field mask to Access 2007, it "helpfully" provides a number of ready-made options:



Having a UK edition of the software, Microsoft have helpfully provided a telephone number mask and a postal code mask that it thinks covers the UK. Looking at the postal code mask itself:



and we see how it is made up. '0' indicates a required digit, 'L' a required letter, and '>' forces upper case.

Now, in the UK, AA99 9AA is indeed a valid postal code format. It is, however, only one of seven valid formats:

A9 9AA
A99 9AA
A9A 9AA
AA9 9AA
AA99 9AA
AA9A 9AA
AAA 9AA

Thus, whilst this mask can take OX19 6RY, it can't take OX9 6RY or SW1A 4WW or S1 1AA or N45 1AP or .... well, most of them.

Microsoft may feel that they are being helpful by adding this sample mask, but we all know that programmers, like most of us, will take any route that make their life easy, and are unlikely to make any attempt to alter this input mask to make it valid for the UK, let alone valid for postal codes in every other country. And we know that this happens - my God, don't we all suffer regularly at the hands of forms designed like this? Many programmers would not even be aware that the mask is not valid for most UK postal codes - they trust that the software provider has done their homework.

Back to the drawing board, please, Microsoft. This is not helping in the fight for better data quality.

Eurotunnelvision

A slight move off topic, if I may. It's that time of the year again when the Eurovision Song Contest takes place, accompanied, as always, by the sounds of weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth from the losers, who always try to find anything to blame apart from their own performances or the quality of their songs.

One of the most common complaints is the idea of block-voting, accompanied by a rather embarrassing lack of geographical knowledge. This year's Dutch song is doubtless very suitable for, and popular in, the local pubs of The Jordaan in Amsterdam, but is hardly material that will be popular elsewhere in Europe. Inevitably it failed to get through the semi-final. René Froger, one of the Dutch singers, immediately complained that this was due to block voting: "it's so strange that all the Balkan countries are through to the final", he wailed. And worst, no report I've seen pulled him up on it, seeding and strengthening the myth that everybody hates us/loves them.

Grabbing a pencil and a scrap of people, it took me no time at all to work out that six Balkan countries indeed made it to the final. And five did not. Not quite "all", and certainly no evidence of the great conspiracy so many profess to see. He'd have done better to point to the Nordic block, or the Caucasus block, or the Mediterranean block. If anybody should complain, it's the Central Europeans, none of whom got through.

Back to school, René!

For a map of those through, check Wikipedia here

Flying share

Another great example of how ignorance affects data quality from web forms (and can lose customers and money!) has come my way, this time courtesy of the site Flying Share. Flying Share are offering their users in the US, UK, Canada and Australia, via this form, a free USB drive.

All well and good until you get to the "ZIP" field (ZIP? Not outside the USA, good people of Flying Share - you probably mean "Postal code"). And there you find that the field will accept five characters and no more. So anybody in the UK or Canada wanting a free drive must either give up at this point, or provide a truncated code.

As drives are being sent out postally, there will clearly be a huge problem of undeliverable and returned drives. I know that this error has been pointed out to the company concerned, but no action has yet been taken, though correcting it would take seconds.

I do wonder at what point anybody at Flying Share will feel the need to act on this. Perhaps when the costs of returns reaches astronomical proportions? How many (potential) customers might they have lost before then?

I made a blog entry in March about Vietnam, where a postal code exists but without the populace knowing about it.

Two more examples caught my eye this week, in both cases where a country announced the introduction of a postal code system: Nigeria and Dominican Republic.

In both countries a postal code exists - in Nigeria's case since 2000 - and in both cases this information has been placed at one time or another on the national postal authority's website. It is very interesting that in all of the comments placed in reaction to these news items up to this point, only one persons suggested that they thought that a postal code system was already in place.

Regardless of the reasons why the existing postal code systems in either country had not been fully publicised before now, this is another indicator of how careful form designers need to be in their use of required fields. Nigeria may have a postal code system, but if nobody knows about it or uses it, requiring that field on a form will only lead to customer loss and data quality reduction.

For more information about web forms for an international audience, download the free e-book for here.