I've witnessed the marked decline in data quality over the years (Poor data quality eats into IT budgets). Unfortunately, the guys running IT are now typically IT illiterate – accountancy is more their bag – and don’t appear to know what data is. Mention normalisation and they look blankly at you.

If the management and the business don’t understand data then there will be no budget to put things right. Most of the overnight batch issues are down to corrupt data, such as missing parent/child relationships. Customer analytics is another area beset with data quality problems.

Charles

In his opinion piece, Dell’s Alan Mac Neela writes: “At a strategic level, public bodies need to develop the awareness and skills necessary to engage with, and procure services from, SMEs” (Opinion: SMEs need help to compete in the government arena).

In my experience, the problem lies with people high up in the public sector who are unwilling or unable to adapt – and that includes the MPs spouting all this guff about trying to help SMEs. The public sector has loads of skilled and capable people. Unfortunately they’re not over 60 and wearing dark suits so don’t get heard.

Geoff Vader

On the very same morning I read your article “Gartner: Customer ‘experience’ now a top-10 CIO priority” I received an email from Gartner asking me to attend their customer experience summit. Of course, there can be no connection between this interesting news from Gartner and the event that Gartner would like me to pay to attend.

A cynic

I have a supplier in common with the Ministry of Defence (MoD), and the precautions they take with data security are pretty major: following data in transit with armed guards, insisting on full fuel tanks before journeys start and personally witnessing the destruction of storage media (Bring your own device would not work in MoD, says defence chief).

I guess if there is one place in the UK where you can expect people to understand that data moves through people as well as machines, it’s the MoD.

John Stevens

How many companies can afford to put £100m into the pot (Cam­bridgeshire County Council issues £100m tender for next-gen broadband)?

So what this boils down to – and it’s the same for just about every other county – is that BT will do it, in order to stop others. Only one provider will be selected, and any innovation not allowed. BT will enable cabinets in densely populated areas with a token amount of fibre to one or two technology centres – for publicity purposes. The rural areas will end up on bonded copper that will give them a couple of miserable megabits.

In short, the county will stay on copper, but it will be marketed as “fibre based”, and the whole job will have to be done again in a few years.

Cyberdoyle