Deliberate Misuse of Computers
- Council Education Department
Background
The Council collects data
from the schools under within their county by way of weekly
returns. This data is used for all forms of planning and
management information. Where it is appropriate, this data
is also used by other departments such as Social Services,
and other agencies such as NHS and Police.
Clearly the accuracy
and timeliness of this data is critical to the efficient
and effective delivery of the services provided to children
in education, as well as to the financial planning and
management of the council.
A major issue to the council's education department is
that currently the data provided by the schools is so
unreliable that it cannot be loaded easily into an aggregated
central database. This is due to many reasons, but the
principal cause is that the staff at the local schools
do not enter the data correctly.
A recent assessment showed that 75,000 records were unusable
by the council and the issue was so severe that loads were
attempted 3 times per year, rather than weekly as preferred.
Furthermore, it was forecast that this would take 18 months
at a cost of £75,000 using agency staff capable of
fixing 300 records per week. This of course, assumes there
to be no further errors in later submission and is entirely
unacceptable to the council.
Common errors include duplication (submission of two records
for the same child), inaccurate or missing postcodes, incomplete
data in terms date of birth and other key data fields.
Identification of Issue
In this instance the issues
only come to light when the council receives the data and
tries to load it onto their central database. It is only
at this stage that the council can assess the quality of
the data provided by the schools, and thus how much time,
effort and cost is involved in rectifying the issues found.
Cause
In the main this data is
corrupt because school staff, who are usually under significant
pressure, do not enter data in a complete and accurate way.
Implications to the City
Council
Cost - cost of remedying inaccurate records (a minimum
of £50,000 per year)
Cost - intangible cost in terms of planning and management
of resources.
Cost
- intangible cost in terms of impact on other departments
and agencies that would use the data. It should be noted that
such use is usually due to extreme circumstances, a point
at which complete and accurate data is critical.
Solution
Issue Identification
Issue
Resolution
Issue Prevention
A RAS Audit
solution would have identified the exact scale and nature
of the issues within a few days, allowing the Council
to determine the best strategy to rectify the current
issues and prevent the future issues. This may have included
improved data validation and staff training.
A RAS Rectifier
solution would have resolved all 75,000 records, or isolated
those requiring human intervention, within 3 months. This
would have included de-duplication of data from a single
school as well as across the aggregated data from all schools,
identifying pupils registered by more than one school. It
would also have included the Geocoding of all address data,
providing the correct address and postcode where the most
minimal of address data was provided.
With a RAS Enforcer
solution deployed to each school (and based on volume discounts,
this would not have been too expensive), the council would
be in a position to prevent such errors being made, meaning
that the council would only need to use a RAS Rectifier
solution to de-duplicate the aggregate data.
