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Monthly Archives: January 2020

Can Data win Elections?

Posted on 22/01/2020 - 9:50 pm by

In 2018 Cambridge Analytica became a talking point around the world, for all the wrong reasons. A former employee confirmed what had been suspected. Cambridge Analytica misappropriated data and used this information to influence voting in political campaigns.
Data mining, data brokerage, data analysis and strategic communication are all strategies that are used in every campaign worldwide. The problem in this instance was that they did not have permission to gather this data.
An app was developed where Facebook users would answer a series of questions and the results were to be used for academic purposes only. It was revealed that a gap in Facebook’s data protection then allowed the app to collect personal information on the people taking the survey. It didn’t stop there. It also allowed access to the personal information of all the people in those users Facebook social network. As a result Cambridge Analytica had accumulated data from millions of people.
So what does this mean? Basically it means that Cambridge Analytica gathered so much data on individuals that they could build a profile allowing them to create targeted advertisements to Facebook users depending on the user’s personality traits. Their aim was to influence people on who to vote for, by showing different advertisements on the same topics to different people. In conclusion, the digital data correlated could potentially win an election.
Our own general election is around the corner and don’t be too surprised to see political advertisements pop up in your newsfeed. In fact the targeted ads based on the data you knowingly provide to Facebook is a vital tool in any campaign strategy. So much so, that from March 2019 to 19th January, Fine Gael has spent over €24,000 on Facebook advertisements.
There are arguments for and against how effective these methods are, but there is no denying that carefully gathered data is a powerful tool. This highlights more than ever that a move to digitisation is essential. Could you imagine the workload of gathering information like that with a traditional paper trail? By the time the required conclusions were gathered the information would be out of date and irrelevant. No business wants to be irrelevant. Moving forward digitisation is the only way to ensure that doesn’t happen.

New Decade, New Decision- Making a VERI small difference to the carbon footprint in training.

Posted on 09/01/2020 - 6:59 pm by

Yesterday at the Pendulum Summit, a hero of mine management guru Stephen Covey expressed the need for agility for change in business in the new data driven world. His analogy was that it would no longer be the big fish eating the little fish, but the fast fish eating the slow one. 

Over twenty years working in training I have seen the mandatory compliance data and how people are locked into a paper process. this process  makes no sense with duplication, no transparency and lack of access to vital data. And of course, no time stamps or verification. 
There was also an issue for me around the tens of thousands  of sheets of paper used fulfilling training compliance. A one year QQI accredited ETB  training programme for 20 people could take up to 50,000 sheets of paper. If you take a contracted trainer with 19 programmes,  because of the required paper trail, they could generate up to 850,000 sheets of A4 paper annually.

Over 10 years that translates to huge administration costs, paper storage but also alarmingly; 

  • 2,500 trees
  • 56,000 gallons of oil
  • 450 cubic yards of landfill space
  • 595,000 KW (kilowatts) of energy

(Data Source: www.epa.gov)

So as Greta Thunburg says,

“no one is too small to make a difference”. 

For the new decade we decided to partner with a fantastic Environmental Training Agency Envirico and have now got  involved in supplying tools to help the Environment Right Now! Envirico as environmental partners consults nationwide and is viewed as a leader of community and field based learning. Evirico are also a Lantra Certified Training Body.
The first of our joint projects using the Veri dashboard is South Tipperary Development Association’s Water Biodiversity Programme. Experts from their 11 strong team of environmentalists will be Training in Citizen Science: Water Quality Monitoring and Community Action in Invasive Species Control. 
Our role will be verifying the training. We will be digitally bench marking skills. We will simultaneously communicating with the 40 strong communities’ participants and giving them online access to their learning and progression. Really importantly, our data capture can be visualised to then  embed the citizen science research and monitoring data into beautiful graphics dashboards, to tell the story that we all know needs to be heard. We are about to announce a second larger project and we are excited.  Like Covey said to be ready for the Tsunami ! 
Verifying quality training and reducing paper while communicating digitally and collecting data in the cloud, our new partnership brings an eco- innovative approach that we can share with our clients for the New Decade. If your Corporate Social Responsibility defines reducing your Carbon Footprint or like us, as an SME your conscious just makes you want to do one small thing, give us a call today! 
https://vericonnect.ie/contact/