“Information is the best disinfectant”

I went to an excellent talk recently by well known English politician Tony Benn as part of the Lichfield Literature Festival. One quotation he provided was the inspiration and title for this blog post

“Information is the best disinfectant”.

The statement on its own may not make sense, but was used in the context of explaining how the publication of information on the abuse of the parliamentary expenses system by MPs both highlighted the problem and created the solution. Once MPs realised that any abuses would be made public, and that their viability as an elected politician may be compromised, many started to voluntarily repay expenses that may have been inappropriately claimed.

For those not familiar with the story, the image above is a “duck house” claimed on parliamentary expenses by Sir Peter Viggers. Not surprisingly, he did not stand in the 2010 election!

So what does all this have to do with data quality?

Normalisation of data deviance

The term ‘normalisation of deviance’ refers to situations where employees become accustomed to deviation from standards/designs in engineering and industrial situations without recognising that these can be precursor events to major incidents.

This was a contributory factor in the loss of the Challenger and Columbia space shuttles, the Buncefield explosion, the loss of an RAF Nimrod MR2 and many other major incidents.

Can normalisation of deviance occur with data?