The Globe and Mail has a story about the Canadian government robo-calling its own numbers to determine which phone lines are no longer used. The reason they are taking this strange tactic is that they are missing accurate records on which offices have been shut down or moved:
“The project over the last year was to locate government lines that no one ever picks up, whether because of long-ago workforce downsizing, an office move or other reasons.
But Shared Services Canada, the agency in charge, has no master list of orphan telephone numbers for its 43 client departments, who are often sloppy about keeping track.”
This demonstrates how poor data quality, or missing data, can have very real financial impacts on organizations — or, in this case, for taxpayers.
(Photo by Flickr user aussiegall, Creative Commons license)
