#eavoices

From Dodgy Data to Dodgy Policy – Mrs May’s Immigration Targets

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The TotalData™ value chain is about the flow from raw data to business decisions (including evidence-based policy decisions).

In this post, I want to talk about an interesting example of a flawed data-driven policy. The UK Prime Minister, Theresa May, is determined to reduce the number of international students visiting the UK. This conflicts with the advice she is getting from nearly everyone, including her own ministers.

As @Skapinker explains in the Financial Times, there are a number of mis-steps in this case.

  • Distorted data collection. Mrs May’s policy is supported by raw data indicating the number of students that return to their country of origin. These are estimated measurements, based on daytime and evening surveys taken at UK airports. Therefore students travelling on late-night flights to such countries as China, Nigeria, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia and Singapore are systematically excluded from the data.
  • Disputed data definition. Most British people do not regard international students as immigrants. But as May stubbornly repeated to a parliamentary committee in December 2016, she insists on using an international definition of migration, which includes any students that stay for more than 12 months.
  • Conflating measurement with target. Mrs May told the committee that “the target figures are calculated from the overall migration figures, and students are in the overall migration figures because it is an international definition of migration”. But as Yvette Cooper pointed out “The figures are different from the target. … You choose what to target.”
  • Refusal to correct baseline. Sometimes the easiest way to achieve a goal is to move the goalposts. Some people are quick to use this tactic, while others instinctively resist change. Mrs May is in the latter camp, and appears to regard any adjustment of the baseline as backsliding and morally suspect.

If you work with enterprise data, you may recognize these anti-patterns.

David Runciman, Do your homework (London Review of Books Vol. 39 No. 6, 16 March 2017)

Michael Skapinker, Theresa May’s clampdown on international students is a mystery (Financial Times, 15 March 2017)

International students and the net migration target: Should students be taken out? (Migration Observatory, 25 Jun 2015)

Oral evidence: The Prime Minister (House of Commons HC 833, 20 December 2016) 


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[GUEST BLOG] How to design a Target Operating Model that delivers tangible outcomes

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The term Target Operating Model (or TOM) has been used a lot in many of the organisations that I have worked for all around the world over the years. Many 100s of millions of dollars in business […]

The post [GUEST BLOG] How to design a Target Operating Model that delivers tangible outcomes appeared first on Enterprise Architects.

A Tale of Two Tweets

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Serendipity is a wonderful (and sometimes entertaining) thing. Monday afternoon, two tweets wound up one after the other in my timeline, one interesting and one “interesting” (I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine which is which): and My favorite definition for the word “innovation” comes from Scott Berkun: If you must […]

Information Obesity – keynote now on YouTube

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I recently discovered a DVD with a 30-minute video of a keynote that I gave back in 2004 at the Online Information conference in Olympia, London – which is now added to my YouTube channel on Enterprise Architecture. I think the original argument still holds true: we are producing information faster than our capacity to use it:

3 myths about information and IT

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In this post I’d like to debunking three popular myths about information and information technology. Myth 1: The best way to improve the use of information is to invest in information technology. This is an expensive and time-consuming way to make improvements, but it is the route favoured by the technology vendors, big consultancies, and…

Parenthesis

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Today I like to talk about the parenthesis in term of rhetoric not the moth called ‘Lecithocera parenthesis’. Parenthesis is an explanatory or qualifying word in a passage or statement, as I have just attempted in the first sentence. I most modern writing qualification of a statement often only happens in the second or third … Continue reading Parenthesis →

Uber and the Cost of a Culture of Corruption

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Even before I hit the “Publish” button on Monday’s post, “Regulating Software Development”, I had already started composing this post in my head. In that post I had used the words “corrupt culture” in passing. I needed to expand on that, because I believe that’s what lies at the heart of Uber’s cascading collection of […]