Castlebridge Associates

Flicking through one of the local newspapers this morning (the Wexford People) I spotted a story about a laptop that had been stolen from a primary care Medical Centre in Wexford town last week.

What struck me about the story was how they made a point of stressing the value of the laptop (€1500) but at no time did they mention whether or not the laptop held any personal data relating to patients at the Medical Centre in question.

A colleague of mine in Switzerland today sent me some details of the German Government showing the value of information as an asset, albeit in a manner which is, to my mind, questionable.

The German Government is considering purchasing personal and financial data relating to German nationals which, it is alleged, was stolen from an unnamed Swiss financial institution. The asking price for these records is €2.5 million, which if you apply the figure of 1300 records that Business Week is quoting, puts the price tag on personal data at just under €2000 per record.

One comment I have heard in the past about Data Protection Compliance is that it is a burden on the business, an overhead, something to be tackled when you've done with the important stuff of setting up and running your business.

However, this could not be further from the truth. I've written on my personal blog about using an Asset Life Cycle model to help manage your information more effectively. In that post I used the data protection failings in Temple St. hospital as a case study for how thinking about information as an asset might have prevented the problems. At the end of next month I'm also delivering a FREE tutorial that might help prompt some clear thinking for people in this area at an ICS/IAIDQ conference.

In a recent article on QualityDigest.com, author David Schwinn writes about the downfall of General Motors and the key failings in the organisation which have lead to its ultimate demise. As a former GM-er himself, he has an interesting perspective on the root causes.

Ultimately, it seems to boil down to a failure to keep learning and to use the information at the disposal of management to better understand what was actually happening in the business. Schwinn shares the anecdote of his time in Ford when Japanese manufacturers were making inroads in the US auto industry because of their higher quality. Schwinn was in Ford's Corporate Quality Office, and it was clear that Ford had access to the data they needed to figure out the quality issue. But it wasn't being looked at because their biggest competitor (GM) wasn't looking at it. When they eventually began to look at it they found they had to play catchup.

Thanks for stopping by. This site is still being developed behind the scenes (a bit like the business). So it will be content light for a while. There will be some small changes in site layout and presentation, and there'll inevitably be a load of legal stuff put on the site as well as is required by law. But we're not quite at that stage yet.

The purpose of this opening post is to manage some expectations. Some of you may know me from my personal blog, or from my work with the IAIDQ or the Irish Computer Society. So, some of you will be expecting some bad puns and lame jokes to appear here from time to time, along with the occasional rant.

This site will be different in tone. Not because I'm being a sham or attempting to hide anything or be duplicitous, rather because this is a business site where as my personal blog is, well, personal. That calls for a different perspective.