Delivered as promised

Consultant pilot fish's company is working on an intranet for a large health care organization.

"One of the requirements for the project is to validate log-ins using the comprehensive employee database that was built by the internal team," says fish. "But every time I ask about access to the employee database, I'm told I don't need it.

"After the usual round of phone calls, e-mails and meetings, it turns out that the database was reported by the internal team as built a year earlier, but it hasn't even been designed yet."

On to Phase 2 of the project: weeks of discussion about how to build this database using more than 20 sources of employee data across the organization. All the usual database challenges are there -- scrubbing out duplicates, purging expired data, correcting inaccurate data and so on.

Finally, a database admin steps forward to take charge. "There will be no bad data in my database," he tells management.

Management is thrilled. Fish and his team have their doubts but keep quiet.

Months pass, with fish's team members waiting for the database to go live so they can test against it.

Finally, the database admin announces that the database is ready. The consultant team immediately start testing its application against the new database, using a subset of valid employee data.

Result: The application comes up with zero hits on every single query that's run.

Baffled fish calls the database admin. What could the problem be? fish asks. Is the test data we used out of date?

"No," replies database admin. "You aren't getting hits because there is no data in the database. Remember, we wanted to make sure there was no bad data -- so we're starting with an empty database."

Sighs fish, "There's no bad data because there's no data. A plan so simple, and yet so brilliant!

"The intranet went live a year later, long after our team moved on."

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