infoTECH Feature

August 27, 2015

How Adam Schefter's Accidental ESPN Firing Could Have Been Avoided

By Special Guest
Michelle Genser, Digital Marketing and Communications Principle, Infogix

At one of my previous places of employment, a senior executive once fired his new employee who had uprooted his family to move to a new city to pursue the opportunity he was currently in. Luckily, it was not real – it was just the worst April Fool’s joke in history.

But something similar happened this week for Adam Schefter, a prominent ESPN (News - Alert) reporter, who was “accidentally” fired by ESPN. Not a late April Fool’s joke, rather, a mistake by HR. And what’s more, this was not the first time that HR had accidentally fired this particular reporter.

The trouble with this accidental firing is that Schefter is ESPN’s lead NFL scoop man. And with the season just beginning, that means losing knowledge around the continued appeal of quarterback Tom Brady, the loss of key players to injury, trades and more. And with the competition of networks not dying down, ESPN’s bloodline to the NFL was deflated (pun intended). 

So how does this happen? Better yet, how can this happen…twice?

Data Checks and Balances

On the positive side, it’s clear that ESPN is doing something right. They have semi-automated controls in place to help manage data through various systems. We know this because when HR accidentally terminated Schefter, they disabled his iPhone (News - Alert) and computer. That means the system that HR uses to track employment also speaks to the system that was used to terminate access to his devices. However, it’s clear that these controls are semi-automated as the termination was accidental. That means that the payroll system didn’t check with the HR system, or vice versa, to terminate employment, rather, it happened manually.

So is the glass half full or half empty? On the negative side, it’s clear that ESPN lacks the right data controls because, well, they did accidentally terminate one of their key reporters during, arguably, one of the most important times of the season. It’s also clear that there was a process failure during the single point of control with no oversight. 

Does Adam Schefter Have a Hater?

Probably not. But ESPN does have a data governance issue that needs to be fixed.

Despite Adam Schefter having been accidentally terminated twice, there is a way to ensure this doesn’t happen again.  Considering this is his second time, it’s clear that ESPN did not heed the following tips the first time around. Hopefully they do this time, because in this instance, third time is certainly not the charm.

Automating end-to-end data controls across your enterprise helps ensure data quality and data integrity. However, implementing a data governance framework sets parameters for logically managing complex activities involving enterprise data that creates processes for resolving data issues and provides users the ability to make decisions based on high quality data. A useful example in this instance would have been the process of termination.  Had a process been in place to manage terms, one area of the business would have started the termination process and another would have validated it. Instead of manually doing the validation, automated business rules could be put in place to validate and immediately catch and flag exceptions that don’t match. Automated business rules are like having another set of eyes interrogating your data and prioritizing exceptions that require personnel to investigate. Each control point acts as a traffic stop light to stop, go, or pause data that isn’t following the established business rules. Nevertheless, data governance only works effectively when it’s monitoring a robust process in a meticulous manor. A resulting process within data governance is instituting checks and balances to help organizations guard against fraud and errors. A system with enterprise-wide checks and balances distributes the authority to make a decision, and verify its proper execution, across the multiple departments within the organization.  Such checks and balances ensure that no one department can complete an operation on its own; it’s a shared responsibility.

Understanding that data governance resulted in process-oriented data flow, a check point, or multiple, would have been established to confirm the accuracy of the termination. A control would have validated that the process up until that check point was followed, parameters were met and the termination needed to continue.

During this process, the various departmental systems through which data travels have to pass through the business rules that monitor various control points in an end-to-end process flow.. In this instance, if HR terminated Schefter, then IT would have instituted a control to ask, “How is the termination list validated for accuracy?”

Answering this question would have been key for this example. If ESPN had the right checks and balances in place they would have identified the source of the unreliable data and determined the appropriate steps toward correcting it. In fact, a data governance strategy would have ensured the right processes were in place to avoid this scenario in its entirety.

Redesigning a process in the spirit of data governance means checks and balances are in place with automated controls. This type of process would have placed automatic controls on the data, helping to identify the source of the unreliable data, as well as the appropriate steps toward correcting it. Implementing data governance also means that data scattered around an organization is controlled end-to-end, from one system to the next, to ensure no data disconnect.   

When data governance and processes aren’t followed, then a lack of checks and balances exist and errors are usually caught by the person most impacted – in this case, Adam Schefter. Rather than realizing the mistake with inactive devices, ESPN should have considered preventative measures like data governance, checks and balances and automated controls to help avoid such an erroneous error.




Edited by Maurice Nagle
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