And the winner is.......Lord Howe Is.

I regularly watch the ABC1 7pm news broadcast and usually pay attention to the weather bulletin to, either confirm my belief of today's weather, or to prepare for weather conditions of the morrow.

Much to my surprise last Sunday when I viewed the national weather chart of capital cities, Sydney was missing. However Lord Howe Is. was present to represent the state of NSW.

Did the majority of 4.5m of Sydney residencies suddenly get the idea to go native and relocate? The few hundred inhabitants of Lord Howe Is, whose size is 10 x 2 km, would be feeling rather overwhelmed I expect. Indeed the island would probably sink!

So let's assume Sydney is still the most populous city in NSW. It certainly looked that way to me on my journeys to work over the last week.

The obvious assumption is somone has missed with the mouse and "Auntie" has stuffed up in attention to detail yet again. The really poor thing however is that LH Is. first appeared last Sunday night and tonight, Saturday - 6 days later, LH Is. is still the capital of NSW!

I emailed "media watch" on Thursday because I thought this couldn't pass unnoticed.

I await the Sunday news bulletin - will they have picked up the gaff? Probably not. It's a weekend after all and I expect it will take an executive of the ABC to watch "media watch" to discover the error.

What has this to do with service management you ask. Everything. The service to be provided was an accurate weather report and it failed. The SLA with the public failed to be met because of poor attention to detail. Service management 101 tells us this.

The quality of production values for the ABC1 news bulletins is in decline. There are often issues with video or audio links, or the failure of cue cards, plus there's the corny scriptwriter that needs to be shot.

Let us see if Lord Howe Is. continues to the capital of NSW into it's 2nd week and how long this error will be perpetrated.