One of the
major frustrations that I have experienced in the past 30 years working on
international data is the level of ignorance of basic geography which permeates
companies holding international data and those people employed to manage that
data. Worse, there are too many companies claiming to be experts in validating
and managing this data who take the approach that they only need to know a little
more than their prospects to blague them into becoming customers. I’ve
experienced this in teaching, too – as long as you’re one page ahead of the
kids, it’s fine.
I see a lot
of this ignorance in plain sight on company websites. There are those claiming
to validate addresses for 300+ countries and territories, for example. (Even with
the most generous interpretation of “country or territory”, and even including
uninhabited rocks with their own ISO 3166 code, you’d be hard pressed to get far beyond the 250 mark). The unfortunate aspect is that their customers don’t have
the knowledge to realise that they should probably avoid working with or trusting these companies.
I was
looking at the website of Postgrid (https://www.postgrid.com/)
and noticed this address for their United Kingdom office on their “contact us” page.
Where do I
start? First of all, the time is long gone when you could use “England” to refer
to the whole of the United Kingdom. The union flag is used – England uses a
different flag. Worse, though, is that the address is in Edinburgh. That’s
Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland. Not in England. I mean, tone deaf or what?
You don’t
have to look far for other red flags. Their address validation list (https://www.postgrid.com/global-address-coverage/)
includes the usual unpopulated rocks, but also faux pas such as listing “Macedonia,
The Former Yugoslav Republic of” – it’s only been five years since it changed
its name to North Macedonia.
Postgrid
were contacted for comment. They have not responded or change the information
on their “Contact Us” page at the time of writing.
I’ve also always
wondered about the lists of “customers” many address validators proudly
display. From my own experience I know how hard it is in a large company to get
official permission to be publicised as a customer; and if Amazon, SAP and Microsoft
were running all the different address validation software that are claimed in their names – about 30
each – it would be chaos. Is this just a cheap marketing trick? It leaves a
nasty taste in the mouth.
Oh well.
There are some good companies out there dealing with international data. But do
your homework – if you don’t learn yourself about the data you’re holding, you
can’t expect to be able to assess the best partner to help you to make the best
of it.
I stopped
charging for access to the Global Sourcebook for International Data Management
(https://www.grcdi.nl/gsb/) in November 2014 – almost ten years ago. I wanted the information to
be made as widely available as possible, and administering the paid version
updates was laborious - I hoped instead to be able to cover my costs and
continuing workload through sponsorship and donations. After all, I watched how
Wikipedia raked in millions each year, and their international data information
was, and is, poor, contradictory between pages and languages, and, in some
cases, years out of date. My resource is by no means perfect, but by comparison
it is 4500 pages of pure gold, pared, pruned and improved for over 30 years.
Surely it would be no problem to get funding, especially as some customers were
concerned that I would stop updating the resource without subscriptions, so
they’d be the first to contribute.
Right?
Wrong.
I detest
advertising on so many levels, but if it must be, surely rather advertising
which reflected the information shown on the webpage rather than that which was
“personalised” through pernicious spying and stalking. So I approached
companies in the world of international data management and quality. People
viewing the pages of the Global Sourcebook would be a perfect match for their
services, and association with this respected resource would surely be a plus
for any company in our sector. Alas, there was little interest – they preferred
to trust their luck with Google and co. And as for donations … well, though the
link for donations had around 1.5 million page views in those years, the number
of donations was a disappointing. One, to be exact, providing a total income in
that decade of 2 Euro cents per month.
OK, I get
that business users are less likely to contribute – they have to go through
overcomplicated internal processes to get access to even minor amounts, and the
one contribution was from another sole trader – but the extent of the
disinterest is still rather sobering. Finally, I had to give in and activate
Google AdSense for the Global Sourcebook. I chose the least pernicious options I could – no
personalization, no tracking, no this, no that. And yet still I receive a few
cents per day from those ads, more than I received in any given year when
relying on voluntary donations. Why people would click on those ads is a
mystery to me, but much is a mystery to me when it comes to my fellow man.
The bills
continue to come in. The resource is used and admired, but nobody wants to
support it with cold, hard cash. What does a man have to do to cover his costs?
Answers on a postcard please ….
I must
finally admit defeat – social media has got the better of me.
It was
never going to be easy. Neurodiverse and social are never going to be
comfortable bedfellows, added to which is an inbuilt stroppiness that won’t
allow me to follow the crowd or to pander to algorithms.
Social media
based on photographs was never going to be an option. Nobody photographs me,
even my better half, who thinks that the cats are far more interesting, so why
would I assume anybody else would feel some compulsion to look at my girning
mug with any regularity? I don’t get it anyway – why do people want to see
repetitive images of cloned plastic people standing in ways that break various
rules of physics in order to stick one or other part of their anatomy closer to
the camera? And why would you allow these people to influence you in any way
whatsoever?
Beats me.
Twitter seemed
ideal. I needed a platform where I could provide updates and news about
international data management and quality – I’m by nature an information provider
- and my number of subscribers finally stuttered to a halt at around 543.
Hardly ground-breaking, considering the hundreds of thousands of people who
need to deal with international data every day. But par for the course because
99.99% of those people will never be persuaded that their data is anything
other than stagnant and just an extension of their own country’s data. Don’t
understand the naming convention? Don’t know where to place the postal code?
Don’t know why those numbers keep ending up truncated? Can’t work out what
those dots and dashes on a letter mean? Just wing it. Or, better, just look the
other way.
Which may
explain my current very concerning lack of gainful employment.
Hint hint.
But even
before the arrival of Clueless Musk things were not going well at Twitter. My
posts increasingly seemed to be disappearing into an empty void. If anybody was
there they weren’t really paying attention. Even the tumbleweed didn’t turn up
to answer any questions that I posed.
So it wasn’t
a hard decision to move across to Mastodon, a much more active, useful,
pleasant (though more techy) environment. I boosted, I posted, I hashtagged.
And my subscriber number ground to a halt at 13.
Hmm.
Maybe it’s
the subject area. In a parallel life I have a passion for analogue planning and
stationery, and a fellow sufferer suggested I create a YouTube channel. 47 videos
later and I have amassed 359 subscribers. My videos are hardly professional,
but they almost all get 100% approval ratings and are praised in comments for
being useful and honest. Which is gratifying, because, again, information
provision is what I do. Let’s just check some of the other reviewers. Yes, they
have better and softer lighting, and they utilise the ubiquitous and carefully
curated bookcase background along with the guitar leant up against a wall with studied
casualness. But many are being paid to spout only the marketing blurb of the
manufacturer with no honest comments at all. In many cases you can bet your
bottom dollar that they haven’t even used the product. My subscriber number: 359.
Theirs: hovering around 4.5 million.
Hmm.
Perhaps it’s
time to admit defeat! I’m never going to “get” social media, am I? Perhaps that’s
a good thing. I’ll have to think about that...
I’ve
specialised in international data and its management for 30 years now, and
everything I learn (which I still do daily) enforces the fact that the
foundation anybody needs for successful international data management is
knowledge. Knowledge, that is, of the world, its systems, conventions,
languages, cultures and ways. Knowing how to code brilliantly is unhelpful
unless you know what you need to achieve, and knowledge is essential when
choosing a partner to help you with your international data quality.
I recently
came across a provider of international address validation which claimed to
support “250+ countries”. Defining what a country is is not as straightforward
as you might suppose. It depends on who you are, where you are, and your
political background. There are unrecognized de facto countries and
non-existent de jure countries. Even so, however liberal your
definition, you would not get anywhere near 250. If you’re counting the more
accurate “countries and territories” then you’d get closer, but 250 remains
claim inflation. There was a time when every address validation company was
trying to outdo the others with country support number inflation. One supported
240 so the next claimed 250 and one even went for 300 plus, which is just
ludicrous. This had calmed down, so I rather hope that this new claim is not the
start of a new round of unsupportable claims. The company claiming 250+
includes uninhabited rocks (they may have an ISO code, but there are no
addresses to validate) and non-existent political entities such as Antarctica.
Check the claims in more detail, and they become more preposterous – they claim
validation to postal code level even for countries and territories which do not
have postal codes.
I would
feel better about seeing claims like this if I thought that most people dealing
with international data were well enough informed to be able to go to this
company and say “you claim to support more countries than there are, how can we
be expected to trust you with our data?” This wouldn’t have to happen often for
providers of these services to sober up and start telling the truth. The
company concerned claims 2800+ customers, including many large companies which
should understand addresses. I understand the pressures that companies put
themselves under to market and sell their products, but claims need to be based
on truth. I did contact the company to ask about this – I received no response.
If more people working with international data would educate themselves better
in … international data… then that data would be better managed, cleaner and
better governed. Let’s hope that things improve in the next 30 years.
That’s the
start of so many sentences that I hear and read, and the prologue to having to
explain, over and over, that the mighty Google are as prone to errors and have
to follow the same data paradigms as other companies. Google is very good at
some of what it does. In other fields it is average or, if I dare blaspheme, it
is poor. Yet Google is constantly being
held up as the arbiter of everything that is correct. If Google says it, it
must be so. It is the law, even in aspects as esoteric as language translation.
In some cases this is just ignorance. In other cases organisations know that
Google is wrong, but follow anyway because they make a commercial decision that
they cannot go against the direction of the unstoppable machine that is Google.
This is a
worrying trend which goes against the dictates of data quality.
Every
database contains errors. Every database contains duplicates. Every
database. Including Google’s. Google also lack knowledge, or lack the ability
or desire to apply knowledge, in many areas. Problems may be the result of poor
data management practices, of which Google is the victim just as much as
anybody else; and of the perennial and ubiquitous problem of lack of knowledge
or lack of motivation to acquire the required knowledge.
Thinking
very specifically now of Google Maps, at the time of writing you may see a lot
of duplicate information where they have merged sources and been loose with
their de-duplication. That single
electric vehicle charge point at my local railway station? Google shows three.
Those multiple building numbers on Hawaiian buildings on their maps?
Duplication, because Google doesn’t have or apply the available knowledge about
their format so doesn’t realise that 91-123, 123 and 91123 are all the same
building. The failure of Google to find addresses in the borough of Queens in
New York? Again, a failure of knowledge about local variations in address
systems. And, more often than not these days, the format of addresses displayed
in Google Maps for many countries is demonstrably incorrect for that country.
That’s how
things are now, and Google does change things around a lot so these aspects may
no longer be an issue as you read this. Instead, other problems will pop up.
Because Google makes mistakes, just like anybody else. What really worries me,
though, is how people can’t see, or can’t accept, that Google is anything but
perfect. Will Google’s errors cause institutions to start formatting addresses
the wrong way, because “Google”? I hope not. In the meantime, I shall keep plugging
away and explaining, every time I hear “but Google …”, that Google has a long
way to go before they reach omnipotence in knowledge and its application. It’s
not even close. So, please spare me the “Yes, but Google …”
I received
an e-mail the other day from one of the millions of “unaddressed” people of the
world, living where there are no street names or building numbers. He lives in
Ghana, and does have a postal code, a
code which resolves to a GPS location so that Ghana Post can deliver to
him. But that’s his problem – it’s only
used currently by Ghana Post. He would like to order from companies outside Ghana,
but they all require a street address and none will accept the Ghana GPS code,
nor a latitude/longitude. What to do? I wish I’d had a short-term solution for
him.
There are
around 30 global code systems that are eager to fill the unaddressed gap, and a further 20 or so which work
at a national level. No organisation would be keen on implementing all 50
systems in their online retail portals – in fact, few organisations seem keen
to implement any at all, despite companies such as What3Words throwing
ridiculous amounts of money around to try to be the default choice for adoption.
Adoption by a one organisation wouldn’t be sufficient – the whole chain,
including all delivery companies, would need to adopt the same code system
too. Would Ghana Post be willing to deliver
mail using another company’s code system?
Regardless,
some of these code systems have been around for a number of years, and their adoption
rates, despite their best efforts, remains low.
There are good reasons for this. Postal address systems are very varied, both
within and between countries, but most consist of similar sets of information
and all, to a greater or lesser extent, can be interpreted by using something
we all have with us at all times – our brains. What3Words likes to market itself
as new and edgy, a start-up; but it was founded in 2013 – almost middle aged, in
my book. They’re haemorrhaging money at an alarming rate. In the good old days, questions
would be asked about a company that wasn’t even close to even covering its
costs after 8 years. But it appears that investors will continue to throw their
money into this pit despite increasing rates of negative publicity about its
many flaws. What3Words, in their overweening conceit, simply will not accept
that their system is anything other than perfect, despite obvious proof otherwise.
This will be to their cost – there’s only so much their marketing can do to
hide the facts. At what point should it become clear that What3Words and other,
similar, systems are not what people are looking for? The amount What3Words
spends on marketing and legal procedures each year could provide a lot of
Ghanaians with the infrastructure required to give them the addresses they
sorely need. I know where I
would prefer to see this money spent.
Some people
include a telephone number in their street address information in order to
improve the chances of a package being delivered. In fact, some countries
include a telephone number in their official address block format. But in a
world where parcels are increasingly chucked over fences or launched from
moving vehicles in order to achieve faster delivery times as margins become
ever smaller, what chances are there that a courier would take the
time to call a number to try to improve the chances of a package being delivered?
Even the better courier companies have, thanks to Covid-19, abandoned getting signatures
acknowledging package receipt. The way things are going, I foresee package
delivery going down a tariff path similar to that followed by airlines and
health services – the standard price you pay just gets your parcel into the
system. If you want it treated well and delivered to the intended recipient,
you would have to pay the premium.
But even if
it were practical for the courier to use their time to call the intended recipient
to help them get to the delivery point, how useful would it be? We all know
that it’s not easy giving accurate directions to somebody even when they’re
standing next to you and you’re both facing in the same direction. What are
the chances of providing enough useful information when you don’t know where
the courier is, in which direction they’re pointing or which positional coding
app they happen to have on their phones?
If they cannot find you with the address information already provided, would
a telephone call provide enough information to help? Apart from the occasional “I’m
outside the front entrance, which floor are you on?” type of request, I wonder
about the usefulness.
What do you
think? Have you experienced telephone numbers in addresses providing a useful
addition? Are they actually being used? Any anecdotes? I’d love to know.
Regular readers know that I am not a fan of locational
coding systems as a replacement for postal (humanly readable) addresses. I do
not believe they can replace humanly readable addressing, and, despite a lot of
hot air coming from various companies, I have yet to see a system in full
working order.
Take What3Words, for example. OK, so I know I seem to bang on about them a
lot, but I have a strong aversion to hype, and a stronger aversion to any
organisation that sells themselves through clever marketing shored up by –
well, very little else that is apparent to me. Anyway, if you
live on the oxygen of publicity, and you keep sticking your head above the
parapet, you have to expect to be shot at.
So, What3Words. They
have announced in the past couple of years tie ups with various national postal
services – Mongolia, Sint Maarten, Côte d’Ivoire, Djibouti, Tonga, Nigeria,
Solomon Islands and Kiribati, in that order.
What3Words is an off the shelf solution – it should be fast and simple
for any organisation to implement. So,
where are the implementations? I look at a lot of addresses in my job – I data
gaze millions of addresses – and I still haven’t seen a single locational code
actually being used.
So, I set myself a task – check these countries’ websites
for progress on implementation.
Mongolia has a page of information about
What3Words. Sint Maarten has nothing (that I could find) but there is a video
on their Facebook page. Côte d’Ivoire,
Djibouti, Nigeria … nothing. Not a word. Tonga’s website had been hacked when
I was checking…. Only on the Solomon Islands’ website is What3Words given the
place it should have if it is a replacement for, or supplement to, the existing
humanly readable addressing system. “Introducing Solomon Islands [sic] New
Addressing System” it trumpets. A sound I would have expected from other
websites. But it is not to be. In fact,
not a single one of these websites, even that of the Solomon Islands, has the
contact address for the postal service concerned given in anything other than a
traditional postal address format. Not one contains its What3Words' address.
Leading by example? Apparently not.
So, what’s the progress on implementation in those six
countries outside Solomon Islands? Is it
to be kept secret from the users? Will
it be quietly dropped? Or am I over estimating the speed at which these
organisation work? (Though if Solomon Islands can do it, this should not be
a valid excuse for the others). If it’s the latter, I notice that both
Lebanon and Mongolia (again!) announced a partnership with NAC to use their
codes in 2013. Four years later and nothing (visible) has happened.
This is not to say that code systems aren’t being
introduced, and implemented. Look at
Ghana, for example, happy to publicise and implement its sparkling new home-grown system, and to publicise its own address in traditonal human-readable form, and as a locational code. I am curious to see how the uptake for that system is, and how well this implementation sticks.
So what’s going on here?
The emperor’s new clothes? Crying wolf? Let’s
see some implementation, and measurements of the success of new systems. All this announcing without follow-up is
unhelpful in the extreme.
The Irish Times took a look
at the uptake of the Eircode six months on
from its launch and concluded that uptake amongst the ordinary citizens of
Ireland was sparse – about 2% according to one post office worker. Highly
unscientific, but pretty interesting nonetheless.
Would it be inappropriate if, at this point, I got up on my
desk and jigged around, shouting “I
told you so!”?
Take up of postal code systems is always slow – I remember
how long it took all the members of my family to start using their UK postal
codes – but codes which are not designed with people in mind will, I think,
never fully succeed.
We are not computers and do not think like them. Our
geographical psyche works on an ability to associate with place and to be able
to connect with other places nearby. In other words, if my land line telephone
area code is 0495 I know that that’s the code my neighbour also uses. If my
postal code commences NR14 1 then I know that that’s the same for everybody in
my street. If my house number is 7 I know that my neighbour’s number must be 5,
6, 8 or 9. When my address is “High Street” then that’s the address for
everybody else in the same thoroughfare.
The Eircode, and many other codes which for profit companies
are launching, such as What3Words, Geotudes and Posttudes, fail to take into account the
way real people think. Codes can be a boon for businesses with the
infrastructure and skills to manage and decipher them (and that, after all, is
where any profit for the code companies is going to come from), and the use of
codes to provide temporary addressing in areas of world without an address
infrastructure has merit; but without taking account of us, the people, I think
their time has yet to come.
I can’t remember the What3Words of my address, partially
because I don’t need to know or use it, but also because it has no connection
with that place and is not part of my mental map. My mental map, and those of
most people, is composed of significant (usually, but by no means always, named
or numbered) features – buildings, streets, hills, trees and so on. Information
about my residence which doesn’t fit into that structure is easily forgotten.
When I can’t remember my own codes, there no chance I’ll ever remember those of
my neighbours, which have no connection at all with my own. Though one gets the
impression these days that few people can get by without a smart phone glued to
their palms, I don’t believe that people really want to have to use technology
to decode their environment. If somebody asks me where the station is, or how
to get to the car park, or where the nearest supermarket is, the chance that I
will ever resort to a code is zero. And when I have to call the emergency
services because my neighbour’s house is on fire? They’ll have to get the
required information the old fashioned way.
Codes such as the Eircode will eventually become more used,
but I feel much of that progress will have to do with a certain level of
coercion rather than a natural increase of uptake. Similar location codes
launched in Middle Eastern countries only gained even a minimum of traction
when the population were required to use them for essential services, such as
their utilities. But will these codes ever become an integral part of people’s
daily lives?
A blog post, in collaboration with PCAPredict, about how location codes, specifically Google’s, can be made more relevant to human users. January 2016. Read it here.
A blog post, in collaboration with PCAPredict, about the variety of telephone number formats worldwide and why validating them is so important. November 2015. Read it here.
A blog post, in collaboration with PostcodeAnywhere, postulating that the explosion of various location coding services will not remove the need to have and maintain a postal address. March 2015. Read it here.
A blog post, in collaboration with PostcodeAnywhere, looking at spooky place- and street names, to coincide with Hallowe’en. November 2014. Read it here.
A blog post, in collaboration with PostcodeAnywhere, about data managers searching for hierarchies within their data which are not there. August 2014. Read more here.
When it comes to (postal/street) addresses there’s a figure
that’s bandied about: 4 billion of the Earth’s inhabitants do not have a proper
address. I don’t know where this figure comes from, but it’s everywhere. It’s one of those figures that has been
repeated often enough to be accepted as fact and published and republished
without further thought of checking.
Here,
for example. And here.
And here.
What I do know, though, is that it’s highly inaccurate. Let’s break this myth and find a better
figure.
4 billion. It’s one of those digestible numbers that gives
the impression that it’s been plucked from thin air, a number that’s high
enough to be newsworthy and difficult to check up on. Like newspaper reports that 4 billion people
watch the final of the world cup. We know this figure hasn’t been based on any
measurements, and when you think about it, you know it can’t be true. We know
that when a company claims they made $ 1 billion profit, that’s not the exact
number. Their computers have the exact number, down to the last cent, even if
they don’t tell their shareholders or (too often) the tax authorities. I much
prefer more accurate numbers – they’re not only likely to be more accurate,
they look more realistic too!
What’s a proper address? Whether you like it or not, “the
yellow house opposite the bus stop in the street of the ladies of the night,
Lagos” is a perfectly valid address. You don’t need street names or building
numbers to have a “proper” address – just ask anybody in countries like Japan
and South Korea, where streets are generally not named but where addresses
exist, based on areas and number sequences.
And if addresses need to be valid and fit for purpose … for whom? And for
use by whom? The address in Lagos above will
work fine to help people find the building concerned, but might be less
efficient if used for emergency services, utilities or the tax authorities. I’m not by any means trying to negate the
idea that everybody needs addresses – I’ve been working with addresses for over
20 years and am evangelical about them – but what wouldn’t work as an address
for one person might be perfectly understandable and usable for another. If
we’re going to quote numbers about people without usable addresses, one first
needs to define what an address is and how, and for whom, it becomes usable.
To do that, though, we need to find a basis figure. Let’s
try to find a better number to work with. if 4 billion’s not right, how many is
it? It’s actually a hard number to pin down.
Well, let’s make some assumptions. A hefty number of people live in shanty towns
and unplanned slum areas in and near large urban areas. Because these are unplanned they are largely
(though by no means completely) address-less because, even in countries with (postal/street)
address systems, the authorities haven’t (always) introduced infrastructure to
those areas. This is a sweeping
generalisation – many shanty areas are well enough established to have street
names and building numbers. But let’s go
with this. The best figure I can find for the number of people living in these
shanty towns is that it is one sixth of the world’s population, which at the
time of writing is estimated at 7 310 125 276. So, if we’re generous and assume
not one of those people has a usable postal street address, that’s 1 218 354
213 people without an address.
1.218 billion.
Next, let’s look at countries without street postal deliveries
– something I know plenty about. Unlike this reporter, you can’t assume
there are 4 billion people without a postman.
There are countries (about 22) without street-level postal deliveries.
Not having street-level postal deliveries does not mean that there are no
street addresses in a country. In fact, countries with highly developed address
systems, such as the United States and Canada have no street-level deliveries
in certain areas. Not having postal services may be indicative of problems
within a country, other than its address system. But If we add up the
populations of all the countries without any street-level deliveries, we get
509 650 000 (rounded slightly to save my calculator finger some work).
0.509 billion.
Not 4 billion.
Some of these people will already have been counted as
shanty town dwellers, but let’s be generous and include them all. Add these to the shanty town dwellers and we
get:
1 728 004 213.
Let’s say 1.8 billion. Let’s assume I’m missing a whole
bunch of people without addresses somewhere and you want a more digestible
number – let’s make it 2 billion. We’re
being generous.
It’s still not 4 billion.
Let’s work the other way. If I start with the world’s
population and start subtracting the populations of countries which I know how
full street address systems, it takes no time at all to get well below that 4
billion mark even excluding the one sixth in some countries we assume live in
shanties without addresses.
Yes, I approve heartily of the campaigns to provide
addressing for everyone. Read some of the marketing material of companies
creating universal geospatial coding systems, and you’d believe that we all
have an address already. But I am absolutely
not a fan of these coding systems – people require a human readable and
understandable street address, not a code. Let’s get everybody an address, but
let’s work on the basis of accurate numbers. Let’s get rid of this 4 billion
myth once and for all. 2 billion I can
live with, and it’s more than enough to warrant our efforts to work towards an
address for everybody.
I was surprised to receive a package today (late ...) from a company in the UK which included in my address the province as NIERDEROSTERREICH (sic), a province of Austria, instead of NIEDERSACHSEN, the province of Germany where I live.
There's no purpose to including a province in a German (or Austrian) address - I'm flummoxed as to why so many German websites ask for it - but the UK company concerned has my province name (correctly) stored in their records. To me this looked like a software error, where the sender had been allowed to choose a province outside the country to which the package was being sent when entering details for the courier service. Parcelforce, though, let me know via Twitter that their software allows free form entry of addresses outside the UK, so the error lies with the sender; and I suppose it's not completely out of the question that somebody in the UK with an unusually high knowledge of European province names had typed the name in incorrectly.
To give them their due, Parcelforce answered all my tweets.When I suggested that they introduce basic validation into their address capture software, they suggested that the expense for validating every address in the world would be prohibitive.
It wouldn't even be possible. But you don't have to go the whole hog, from no validation to full validation. Too many businesses think that way. There is a lot that you can do to test an address which is very easy and very cheap and very effective. You could, for example, test the basic validity of a postal code - length, allowed digits and characters, format. You could only allow the entry of a province which is in the country of the addressee. All this information is easy to obtain online, and easy to program. Partial validation is easy, cheap and effective - no organisation should be scared of trying it.
Parcelforce's parting shot was that responsibility for the collection of the correct address lies with the sender, not with them. Very likely. But Parcelforce is owned by Royal Mail, a national postal authority, who must understand the importance and value of address validation. Fobbing the blame off onto each small business using their service is a bit lame.
The package arrived (late, as I said, because GLS claimed not to have been able to find my address first attempt and didn't want to bother contacting me to help them - I suppose if you're in a van with eyes front and not wanting to slow down to check building numbers it's as good an excuse as any), but it did highlight again how simple actions to verify basic address elements can be in everybody's interest and not the great drag on resources too many people imagine it to be.
A recent
post by Daragh O Brien about the International Association for Information and Data Quality (IAIDQ) and its future got me
thinking. I’ve never been deeply
involved in the IAIDQ, unlike Daragh, but I was also a charter member, and I
have experienced a definite change recently. Or, perhaps, experienced that I
was no longer experiencing anything, if you get my drift.
Many of the
people I knew who were involved in the early years of the IAIDQ have retired or
moved on, and requests to me for information, articles and so on from the
current leadership have dropped to nothing. Which may not be surprising, as
they probably don’t know me from Adam. Indeed, as Daragh points out, a new
edition of the Journal has become as rare as a web form which can correctly
collect address data from more than one country (i.e. almost non-existent!).
Members used to have a vote on members of the committee – that seems to have
been quietly dropped too.
I know that
Daragh won’t agree, but I began to be concerned when the organisation started
to busy itself creating “Information Quality
Certified Professional” (IQCP) qualification. What’s it for? I am a firm
believer in educating people about data quality, but I don’t see how a qualification
is a useful part of that apart from filling up space on a CV. I have no idea
what the qualification entails – my services when it was being formulated weren’t
required – but my
impression is that it deals essentially with theory and not practice. And it’s clear to me that those at the doing
end of this data quality thing have no better understanding of data quality and
how to achieve it than they did ten years ago. In fact, as businesses perceive
that they need to obtain and manage ever larger amounts of data, even though
often they don’t, accuracy and quality are diminishing – gather enough data and
take a swipe at it, and you’ll hit a few targets on the way. Maybe the IQCP
qualification is useful for some, and shouldn’t be harmful for others, but it
does seem to me to have become the central focus of an organisation that should
be doing more than counting the number of paying students they can hustle through
an exam.
I don’t know
if the IAIDQ is dead. I’m not close enough to it and they seem not to want to
be too close to me. But one thing I do know. Much earlier this year I received
an e-mail requesting that I renew my membership. Instead of immediately doing
so, I cogitated on what I was getting out of the IAIDQ (nothing I could think
of) and so, in straitened times, I decided to put off the decision on whether to
renew until they sent a reminder.
I’m still
waiting.
If an
organisation dedicated to data quality can’t manage its own data, doesn’t that
say something?
A recent blog post from a data quality company, which shall
remain nameless, was in the form of a quiz. Could
the reader spot the errors in the address formats from various countries? The idea was good – trying to get the reader
to appreciate that these differ throughout the world, whereas most companies
think they are the same for everybody.
Unfortunately Sod’s Law intervened – the “corrected” addresses were
mostly not, and the post was full of inconsistencies. A quiet tweet in their direction and the post
was removed.
And that was the end of that.
Except that this is a very common topic for blogs from data
quality experts and providers alike. “Look”, they say, “this is wrong, and this
is right, and we help you get from the state of being incorrect to the state of
being correct.”
Again, all good stuff. But there are a couple of important
points which I rarely see addressed in those posts.
Firstly, correct
according to whom? According to the local postal services? According to the
local government? According to the emergency services? According to the bible of Graham Rhind? According to
local cultural norms? Although postal
services are often the managers of street address files, they may not originate
that data, and increasingly alternative resources, such as land registries, are
becoming available to use instead. Often “correct” is taken to mean the form
that an address takes in the local postal address file, if one exists. Those
files are often held for a single purpose – to facilitate the efficient
handling of mail – and, as postal authorities face the same problems of data
quality and management as the rest of us, they may differ substantially from
how the local populace actually write that addresses. The data may, for example, be stored only in
capital letters, without punctuation and without diacritical marks.
The fact that postal address files are used primarily for
mail delivery brings me to the second point I miss when companies talk about
what they are able to do – what is the
address to be used for? The blog
post I mentioned suggested, for example, that an arrondissement (district) of
Paris should be added to a French address and a county added to a British
one. We know that a county isn’t
required in a UK address used for mailing, provided the postal code is there,
and an arrondissement is not a requirement in a French address on a letter,
especially as that information is also included in the postal code. But if that address is being used in a travel
guide, or on a website to show a business’s location, or to provide a route description
for a person, then the additional data improves the usefulness of the address
information and won’t be wrong in the address unless the different pieces of
information don’t match (for example, if the wrong county information is
provided).
I look forward to blog posts and articles about address data
glitches. But is it time to move on from postal address files being regarded as
the (only) holders of the golden record?
I recently read an article in Database Marketing Magazine by Paul
Kennedy about the myths and reality of data (online version here).
In it Kennedy suggests, and I paraphrase, that consumers would rather see
offers and advertising online which is of relevance to them than generic
advertisements, a point often made. Is this assertion true?
I don’t have any figures which support or refute this, but naturally
the answer to a question depends on the question being asked. I suspect that
given a choice most people would simply rather see less or no advertising than
relevant advertising, or would rather see advertising of any type which is
easier to distinguish from content than what is currently on offer. But most people
also understand that the current financial model for online content is to
provide it for “free”, paid for by advertising and often in exchange for
people’s personal data. Without advertising the larger online companies
wouldn’t be so rich and those of us with a smaller online presence wouldn’t
still be in business.
Regardless, I’m not one of those who wants to see relevant
advertising. And I’ll tell you for why.
When I receive mail, or an e-mail, from a company, then I
like the offer to be relevant to me, to be of interest, because I am offended
by the waste involved, in time and resources, when it isn’t. But when it isn’t
I can easily take action. I can dispose of the communication, which is a separate
unit which I can choose to pick up and read when I want to, or discard, and
then forget about. In many countries legislation exists which would allow me to
turn these communications off. When the advertising block starts on the TV, I
can turn it off, turn the sound down, or walk away for the duration. The
advertising is isolated from the content (though increasingly less so), and
that gives me, the consumer, the power of choice.
Upselling in mailings, such as with orders or statements,
has been around for a while, but at least it is generally in distinct units – I
can discard the guff and concentrate on the content. Up to now no company has
tried to upsell to me on the same piece of paper as the invoice etc. with which
it was enclosed, and let’s hope that that doesn’t happen.
Online advertising is different. It is pervasive and invasive. It doesn’t form
a separate unit which I can view or ignore, as appropriate. It is woven into any content that I have
actively sought out, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish
as advertising. It is intrusive and sometimes so invasive that its purpose is
defeated. A well-disguised audio advertisement on a page will have me backing
out of that page as fast as my mouse can reach the button, surely to the
detriment of the content provider. No legislation exists to allow me to view my
content without advertising. It’s the equivalent of being sent a bank statement
and then trying to find and view my account balance amongst the advertisements
for fast cars and Ukrainian mail-order brides.
Unthinkable offline, but run of the mill online.
Online advertising is often dishonest. It lies or disguises
itself as content to attract my click which, whilst profitable in the
short-term for the pay-per-click provider, won’t help a brand in any way in the
consumers’ eyes. I’ve seen pop-up advertisements in mobile apps with either no
close button or one which is so small that a human finger will often miss it.
Emphasis on what adverts are shown is placed on the person
viewing a page, which is why online advertisers are so keen to find out all
they can about you and I. Why there isn’t more emphasis on the content we are
looking for and looking at is a mystery to me.
If I’m looking at a page of reviews for hotels in London, then
advertisements for hotels in London would probably be a better bet to get my
click than ones trying to sell me a lawnmower. Once I leave those hotel pages and
move on, though, I don’t want to be continuously subjected to adverts for hotels
in London – that was then. I’ve moved on. Shouldn’t the advertising move on
with me?
When I go online to look for something, a new watch for
example, then I would like to see information about watches when I’m looking
for it. Just as I would choose to go to a jewellers to find a watch when
visiting my nearest shopping centre. Once I’ve left that shop/search, though,
do I still want to be constantly marketed to about watches? Do I want to read
about watches when I’m shopping for a fire extinguisher, or reading the news,
or chatting to friends? Why would I welcome that distraction? Fine to see
something while I’m looking for that product – it’s fair game that, if I’m
looking for a watch you want me to buy yours – but afterwards? There are
tracking cookies, more like stalking cookies actually, which keep presenting
the items you viewed in one site on other pages you might visit. Amazon does this. It’s like walking out of the jewellers and
having somebody follow you shouting a constant refrain of “BUY THE WATCH! BUY THE WATCH! YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO! BUY THE
WATCH” until you either give in or, like me, find and change the tracking
preferences for that retailer.
So, as advertising is there and isn’t going away, do I want
the advertising I see online to be relevant and “interesting” to me, in the
same way as with direct mail?
No.
I’m clearly not the target of most online advertising, which
is aimed at people who are as lax with their purse strings as they are with
their personal data, but I don’t want online advertising to be relevant to me
because, if I can’t choose whether and when to view it, then I’d like to be
able to block it out as easily as possible. Whilst the pages I view are full of
advertisements for cars, singles matching sites, holidays in the sun, football
tat and flat rentals, in language(s) I don’t speak and none of which have any
relevance to me at all, I can concentrate on the site’s content without
distraction. This also reassures me that either companies haven’t got much personal
data about me, or they don’t know how to use it. Either way, that’s fine by me!
A country may have a postal code, but is it used? Do people know there is a code system, and, if they do, what their code is? And when is it safe to make "postal code" a required field for forms for that country? Read more here.
