{"id":12090,"date":"2009-10-23T11:27:16","date_gmt":"2009-10-23T10:27:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/?p=1300"},"modified":"2009-10-23T11:27:16","modified_gmt":"2009-10-23T10:27:16","slug":"blind-and-incompetent-justice-thanks-to-spreadsheet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/2009\/10\/blind-and-incompetent-justice-thanks-to-spreadsheet.html","title":{"rendered":"Blind (and Incompetent) Justice Thanks to Spreadsheet?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"blind-justice-banner\"<\/p>\n

There was a great story in Slate<\/a> yesterday called \u201cErrors in Judgment — Were hundreds of criminals given the wrong sentences because lawyers messed up a basic work sheet?<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n

The background: the state of Maryland established a worksheet<\/a> that graded the severity of a convict’s crime and his risk to society, and was intended to make sentencing more consistent and the administration of justice a little less arbitrary.<\/p>\n

The problem? And all too-common problem with anything to do with information and analysis: human error. Despite the high-stakes (\u201cmonths and years of freedom gained or lost\u201d), researcher Emily Owens<\/a> found that the system was generating errors in 1 in 10 trials, even though there were multiple opportunities for the data to be reviewed and corrected.<\/p>\n

And what did people find so hard about the worksheet? Simply looking at the right number! From the article (click on the little plus sign by the third-to-last paragraph):<\/p>\n

\u201cThe work sheet generated separate \u201cscores\u201d for the felon and his crime. The recommended sentence was then read off a table with offender and offense scores corresponding to the rows and columns of a grid. More than 90 percent of errors resulted from the person completing the work sheet entering the figure from a cell next to the correct one. (Using, say, a ruler to get to the correct cell would have prevented this.) The remaining errors came mostly from incorrect choice of criminal statute in calculating the offense score and from a handful of math errors (in operations that were literally as simple as adding two plus two).\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Morals of the story for business intelligence deployments:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. You can never overestimat<\/span>e<\/span> underestimate the \u201cinformation competency\u201d of your users<\/li>\n
  2. Eliminate manual processes where possible (\u201cthe Commission had already been at work developing an automated worksheet with the explicit goal of eliminating errors.\u201d)<\/li>\n
  3. Build in checks and balances and collaboration \u2013 the answer to the \u201cpeople problem\u201d is more people to review the decision-making process. (\u201cmultiple levels of evaluation helped to undo some of the damage\u201d)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    It’s not only organizations that struggle with errors due to manual spreadsheets — here’s a nice example from Slate and the State of Maryland.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1299,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[160,198,204,213],"class_list":["post-12090","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-best-practice","tag-bi","tag-business-analytics","tag-business-intelligence","tag-businessobjects"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/blindjusticecover.jpg?fit=668%2C300&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3X9RF-390","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12090","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12090"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12090\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}