Inflated figures and customers who were never there. Just another data migration then
- Reference: 1601276834
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/09/28/who_me/
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"Tom", for that is certainly not his name, was toiling away in the machinery of a large IT consultancy back at the start of the century, dealing with data migration and specialising in SAP systems.
"The company's Random Project Allocator™ assigned me to a project at an internet provider," he told us. For the purposes of this story, and for reasons that will become very clear, we're going to call them "NaughtyCo".
"The project," Tom went on, "was to design, build, test, and install a new non-SAP-based billing and customer service system."
A classic "large IT consultancy" project for sure, although this was the first time Tom and his team had laid hands on it. Another company had had an earlier crack at it, but the inevitable balls-up had resulted in a pulled go-live date.
"We had been called in to sort out the testing and data migration to get it over the line," he explained. The heroes of the hour.
Tom was tasked with leading the data migration, performing a trial cutover to make sure things would work, and then pressing the big red button for the production environment. The data would then be reconciled.
Those expecting the usual oopsie involving mixing up test and production can relax. This wasn't Tom's first rodeo. He did, however, find something decidedly whiffy in NaughtyCo's data.
We don't need maintenance this often, surely? Pull it. Oh dear, the system's down [2]READ MORE
Having worked out what the migration involved, Tom was dismayed to find that the previous effort was a mess of manual workarounds and what he charitably called "Excel-based wizardry" lurking behind the scenes. It was little wonder that things had been halted, and he and his team set about picking up the pieces.
It took a while, but eventually trials of the migration could be run. Tom produced a weekly report for management showing how many customers his system has successfully moved across, and how many had failed. The total came to several hundred thousand.
Unfortunately, Tom's total was light by tens of thousands, according to a worried project manager. His figures must be wrong.
The customer count was significant since it was reported to the stock exchange and affected the value of the company. Perplexed, Tom went back to look at his figures in search of the missing customers.
"I checked the numbers and came to some interesting conclusions," he said.
"Depending on your point of view we were both right. My figures represented the number of customers that paid money to NaughtyCo; the figure my boss was using represented the number of internet accounts. The difference was a surprisingly large number of staff accounts, test accounts, free accounts and inactive accounts."
Well, this was a bit awkward. Feeding false information to the stock exchange smells a bit like fraud. Fortunately for Tom, "I had exposed the situation and not caused it."
His boss was not happy and swore him to secrecy while she headed upstairs to discuss matters with the bigger bosses.
A plan was hatched. The company would spend the next few months gradually aligning the numbers reported to the stock exchange to match reality, but carefully so as to avoid frightening the horses. The tens of thousands of mystery accounts were shown the sharp end of the axe in the meantime.
As for Tom, "when we cutover to production the migration went smoothly and there were no more surprises regarding the number of customers.
"It just goes to prove the old adage that there are lies, damn lies, and statistics."
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/Tag/who-me
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/21/who_me/
[3] mailto:whome@theregister.com
[4] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: I bet inflated numbers happen everywhere
Nobody ever carries the can for that.
When was the last time the FCA #prosecuted# a director or auditor or CEO or CFO for fiddling the numbers? Nothing's happened to the beancounters who signed off on the accounts at RBS, HBOS, Northern Wreck, etc shortly before these basket cases went bust.
Why hasn't anyone been punished for the failure to reach their self-imposed targets for daily Covid-19 tests? Who's carried the can for the vapourware "world beating" track and trace app that was promised time and time again?
Re: I bet inflated numbers happen everywhere
My Parish has just been on the receiving end of a Housing Needs Survey.
Now we know most of the people in the Parish and know that the death rate roughly equals the rate that offspring earn enough to buy a house. All 5 that reached that threshold in the past year have bought in the village.
However the District Council conducted a Housing Needs Survey and gathered responses from goodness knows where (they wouldn't tell us), but some people who lived 30-40 miles away said that they needed to move to (basically free) housing in our little Parish. Once you took out all those that had given an earnings in the lowest range (not enough even for shared ownership housing) it left one couple who were already in a shared ownership house in the village, but wanted a larger one and could not afford it. (The wife is stuck at home all day as we have no shops or public transport, and the husband drives a company van, they do not own a car.)
But it comes to the District Planning Meeting and the Housing Needs Survey says there is a need and so that trumps everything else! Damn lies!
I always take such figures with a pinch of salt. My favourite is when something claims to be the "fastest growing" such and such in the wherever. My new religion is the fastest growing in the world – I just invented it one millisecond ago, which means it's gaining a new member every millisecond...
which converts to
1000 new members per second, or 32 billion new members per year.
Further marketing wizardry will convert that to "we expect to have the entire global population signed up by the end of next quarter".
Re: "fastest growing"
By definition that means that you have the smallest market share, or you're in a new market that you just created. It's easy to grow fast when you have everything to conquer.
That's how I always take it.
I keep two ledgers!
One for the gubbermint to see, and one not! And should someone ask, Simon and Stephen have taught me well!
Re: I keep two ledgers!
I did this when I was engaged to be married. 'Er indoors couldn't see the point in saving for a rainy day, so every month I "accidentally" transferred £10 into a savings account that I hadn't told her about, so when it came to buying the ring, I could surprise her with a fund she didn't expect. Obviously, once we were married I came clean, and she entered into the spirit of the thing so we could save for the deposit on our first house.
Re: I keep two ledgers!
First time my daughter moved back home i asked her to pay "rent" and kept it all separate so she had a nice deposit saved up when she moved out.
Second time i charged her rent and used it to over pay the mortgage....
Excrement work!
I wouldn't like to be responsible for coming up with the original acronym for the Company's Random Allocator Project!
Data migrations
Posting anon for good reasons.
Did a couple of largish migrations back about 2010 - 2012 when I was working for a CRM/utility billing company. I like data and migrating lots of records from an old Mini-computer/ green screen system, info a modern RDMS, I was in my happy place. Both migration projects had over 250k active accounts and 3-4 times that of inactive accounts.
Some things.. like customers ringing up to pay via credit card, so the CSRs would 'helpfully' type in the full credit card number and other details into memo fields which were not entirely secure. Had to do some query's to find and kill that data.
One block of several thousands accounts failed a couple of times on our test migrations. Data was weird.. account numbers in completely different ranges, billing data that failed all RI checks. I kept digging until I found and old timer who was retiring but still working a couple of days a week. He was able to explain that the company had brought another small city utility company ~8 years earlier, so they had migrated data (without any referential integrity) via Lotus 123 spreadsheets doing some funky lost lost macros to force the data to fit the main billing system.
We fixed the data to allow the migration to proceed.. but it clearly showed that thousands of customers had been on the wrong billing plan for years and that they had overpaid. Legally the utility company was in difficult place and to be fair, executives asked me to try and come up with a settlement analysis. Given the long lost nature of the original data, we looked at systems like setting up a virtual billing engine to rerun all the historical billing from scratch.. but just not feasible. In the end the utility company offered the affected customers a one off 'bonus', and new account number. AFAIK, no customers ever queried it.
Sometimes they're biggies!
[cough] Barings Bank! [cough]
Re: Sometimes they're biggies!
I always wish that Nick Leeson had been played by Liam Neeson in the film Rogue Trader.
Re: Sometimes they're biggies!
With soundtrack by Rick Nelson and Nick Mason
I bet inflated numbers happen everywhere
I bet every publicly traded company has inflated numbers somewhere in their reporting.
Funny how the lie just gets perpetuated by those with a vested interest in not being the ones to carry the can.
We see government agencies doing the same too, they inflate numbers in their reporting to ensure ongoing funding or secure funding for their pet projects. When you define how information is collated you can get the numbers to say what you want.