Volunteering for surveillance?

What do you suppose the reaction would be if your government (wherever you live) asked you to volunteer to carry a tagging device that would record where you are, every few minutes of the day? Even if they would need a warrant to access the information? But you can relax (for a moment) - I haven't heard of any government coming up with that one.

Happy now? But not for long... Because the chances are that you have already joined this 'programme'. Do you have a mobile phone? And do you keep it switched on?

There has been a lot written and said about the amount of personal data that various sites ask for, and that a lot of people hand over without any (or very few) qualms. There have been stories in the news about people losing jobs (or not getting them) because of their blogs, social networking sites, and web presence.

As a Data Management professional, should I care? Should it affect how I do my job?

Yes and no.

Yes, I should still resist the desires of the organisations I work for to store as much data as they can get about people 'because it might come in handy one day'. If we don't have a use for it now, then we should not keep it. But what if we can see a use in the short term? Say, in the next 12 months? Should we collect it now? While it is tempting, I believe that we should not. I have worked on too many 'programmes' where phase 2 never happened, and if we had added data for the use of phase 2, we would have ended up storing data that we didn't (officially) need. And people do have a tendency to want to use (analyse, run reports on) as much data as they can get that might be relevant to them. (If they really need it, then collect it when they have provided a business case and funding and cleared it with the Data Protection/Governance people.)

No, we should not collect data just because 'everyone does'. Nor should we supply it because someone asks for it - my Facebook profile shows my name, birthday, sixth form college and university attended (so people can find me), and gender. It does not show my relations who are also on Facebook, relationship status, sexual orientation, contact details, or anything else that is known to my friends but no-one else's business. Just because they ask, they don't automatically get! And if anyone demands things I would rather not provide (by making them mandatory fields), I have four options:

1. Lie
2. Decline to join (and, ideally, tell them why)
3. Give the information (but remember to ask them why they want it, where (geographically) they will hold it, and what they intend to do with it).
4. Provide it and assume that 'they' know what they are doing and will not abuse my trust.

Option 1 serves them right. Option 2 hits them where they care (losing business, members, subscribers, whatever), especially if enough people tell them they have lost. Option 3 is the slippery slope - unless someone really needs to know my dog's favourite food (or whatever) in order to provide a service to me, they have no business making my provision of that information a pre-requisite for the supply of the service. Option 4 is the worst option (but also, I think, the one most commonly adopted).

As a Data Management professional, I believe that I have a duty to fight for all non-essential fields being optional. (And making the mailing list a more attractive sales proposition does not count as essential.)

So, fellow data professionals (and anyone else who stumbled on this blog): thank you for reading this far, and will you join me on the virtual barricades that are fast crumbling under the onslaught of ill-thought-out data collection policies?

Next time someone tries to get you to tell them something they don't strictly need to know, go for option 1 or 2. And tell them why!

If you are involved in specifying data to be collected, make as much as possible optional (or leave it out altogether (you can also argue that storage may be cheap, but it will never be free!)

And never forget that data about you is yours.

Geek pride?

I am job hunting at the moment, and I just got asked what I do in between jobs. And so I explained - I maintain the DAMA-I website, I do DAMA UK committee things, I write presentations about data management for conferences... And then I paid attention to what I was saying, and started talking about photography and archaology (which are the things I like doing and reading about when I have to move away from a keyboard).

I didn't mention that I take photographs to use in presentations, nor that I have been toying with the idea of writing something about the history of data storage (which goes back about 5000 years to the clay tablets that the Babylonians used to record grain and beer going into and out of their warehouses.) One thing that data geeks learn early on is that many things are connected (or can be, with a little thought). Another is that most people don't really care all that much!

But next time you go into a bookshop, pick up a newspaper, or read a web page, spare a thought for the first person who worked out how to record that 3 bushels of grain were delivered, and 1 bushel taken out, and by whom. Because those pictures on clay tablets gradually developed into writing - and that might just make data management a much older discipline than we currently think it is?

Grace Hopper has a lot to answer for!

Not because she did so much to bring COBOL into the world (although that has paid a lot of my bills over the years).

And not for distributing 'nanoseconds' to a load of people to illustrate why satelite transmissions can seem slow.

Most of what she did is creditable, but there is one thing that really annoys me. (And it is possible that she didn't actually say it, but if not then my ire is directed at whatever idiot did!) By the way - I did think of posting this on Ada Lovelace day, but it didn't fit in with the spirit and idea of the day.

She is credited with saying "It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission". Which gets quoted a lot, often accompanied by a smug, simpering little smile and an attitude of 'see, I was right and all those idiots who employ me and trust me were wrong'. If I had the power, employ and trust would be in the past tense. (You may have noticed that I am now in full rant mode.)

Lets think about this for a moment. I am going to be a little bit specific (not enough to identify the guilty party or company to anyone who hasn't seen the presentation, but quoting a real case).

I was at a conference (which doesn't narrow it down much - I have been to quite a few). I went to a presentation given by a member of the data management team from a large corporation. This person (who I will call Leslie, because that could be either male of female - see how careful I am being?) spoke for an hour about how they had initiated a 'stealth' Enterprise Data Model development at work. It was easily done - just add a little bit to each project they worked on, and gradually the thing was done. And it was so useful! People were so grateful, and used it a lot! But it had to be done this way because the large corporation had refused to authorise Leslie to develop it openly. Despite the obvious and wonderful benefits, thise idiots who controlled the money didn't want to spend it! How dreadful, and they obviously had to be circumvented! (I am paraphrasing just a little bit here...) And when it was done, Leslie told them what had been done and asked for forgiveness. The poor, over-awed bean-counters gave it (proably with suitable effulgences about Leslie's cleverness and their own unworthiness.)

OK - maybe I went a bit over the top there? You think?

So, I will summarise.

1. Leslie took money that had been allocated for a specific purpose and used it for another purpose, without the permission of the people whose money it was.
2. There may have been some pretty urgent priorites just below the projects that got 'stretched' which were hit, or couldn't be done, because the money went on the more important stuff.
3. The whole thing was concealed until it was a fait accompli, and since it was useful, it was kept on.

If Leslie had been a trader (or similar) in a financial insitution, the police and regulators would probably have been involved, and there may have been criminal proceedings. (I worked for a Swiss bank for a while - if their Ethics Statement is typical, there is no 'maybe' here - they have a very tough attitude to people who breach either the letter or the spirit of the rules. I liked it there.)

My point is that we may know best about our specific area (Data Management, in my case). We may believe we that better practices in our area will benefit the whole organisation. We will probably be right. But we don't know if there is something somewhere else that would cost about the same and have an even greater benefit. And our employers trust us, and generally give us the credit that we are doing what we say we are doing, and working to their benefit and within their rules, unless we indicate otherwise (or someone catches us out and reports it). So if we decide to go ahead and 'divert' a little effort into a pet project (with the good of the whole enterprise at heart), then we are stealing from our employers. Which isn't something to get smug about, is it?

If you want to find out more about Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, you could start with her Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_hopper.

One day, I want to visit the Smithsonian, and see the very first recognised computer bug - http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/comphist/objects/bug.htm.

On Ada Lovelace Day - Margaret Versteeg

Today is Ada Lovelace day, and over 1,500 people have signed up to blog about a women in IT who inspired them.

My inspiring woman is Margaret Versteeg, who was my mentor back when I started data modelling back in the early 1990s. Margaret taught me to think beyond the basic 'what data am I describing' level, and to think about how it would be used, and why, and also to give serious consideration to if it should be stored at all. She instilled a very firm belief that 'because we can' is NOT an acceptable reason for holding data, especially not about people. The report that came out yesterday about the appalling state of some of the UK Government databases illustrates why we must be careful (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7955205.stm). Margaret was a trained librarian (among many other skills), and taught me to order and store metadata with a view to someone getting it out again. (Very useful!)

Margaret also got me thinking about how data modelling and management is done, and why it works the way it does; this is the equivalent of a driver understanding what goes on 'under the bonnet', and has greatly enriched my work (and my enjoyment of that work).

So, on Ada Lovelace day, thank you, Margaret.