Thanks to a Red Hat geek gift guide that I stumbled on whilst writing another post, I just found a very amusing (I’ll resist the urge to say cool) T-shirt for sale featuring this cartoon – there’s more like this at the XKCD store.
If you like it, check out the XKCD comic too. Very funny. If you are a geek. I believe that I am.
Many organisations have realised the value of blogging from a corporate marketing perspective but I’ve recently gained first hand experience of blogging as a social networking tool. In general, any relationships formed as a result of blogging activities are online (whilst other tools such as LinkedIn attempt to convert personal relationships into more complex social networks) but I keep bumping into people that actually read the stuff that I write here!
Earlier this month, over lunch at the UK highlights from the Microsoft Management Summit event, I realised that the chap sitting next to me had left a comment on this blog a few weeks back and we got talking (Hi Dan); then, tonight I was back at Microsoft for a TechNet event about Windows PowerShell, where another chap introduced himself and said that he reads my blog (Hi Mike). It’s happened before too – I work for a very large organisation and a couple of colleagues have commented that they knew me from my blog before they met me.
Now, just to keep my ego in check, I should remember that this blog’s readership is not enormous (although it has grown steadily since I started tracking the metrics) but bearing in mind that must of what I write is just my notes for later re-use, it’s really good when someone says “hello” and lets me know that they’ve found something I wrote to be useful.
Earlier this week, I added a contact form to the site and I still allow comments on posts (even if 95% of the comments are spam, I get some good feedback too). So, feel free to get in touch if you like what you see here. I can’t promise to write on a particular subject as that’s not the way this blog works (I write about my technology experiences and they, by their very nature, are unplanned) but it’s good to know that sitting here in my hotel room writing something late at night is not a complete waste of time.
Moving back to the social engineering point for a moment; it’s worth pointing out that the blogroll on this site is 
(XFN is a simple way to represent human relationships using hyperlinks).
I know that modern cars contain several computers (obviously there is engine management, then there is access control, in-car entertainment, possibly satellite navigation, etc.) but I’ve just returned from the local Saab dealership after having to have the electric windows reprogrammed! Next month the car is going back to have some bits of trim replaced, a new key fob and a software upgrade!
Whatever next, Microsoft Windows Vista Sportswagon Edition? Or perhaps a new version of Ubuntu codenamed Speeding Saab (which turns the Warty Warthog, Hoary Hedgehog, Breezy Badger, Dapper Drake, Edgy Eft and Fiesty Fawn into roadkill)?
(Sorry – I think last weekend’s sunshine has made me delirious.)
I can understand why outsourcing and, in today’s global economy, off-shoring is so attractive to companies. I just wish that companies would think things through a bit further than the initial impressions of reduced costs.
Because I work for a company whose core business is IT managed service (but never referred to as outsourcing!), I’ll steer clear of my feelings on that subject – suffice to say that clearly there is a conflict of interest there. This post is purely about my experiences as a consumer of outsourced and off-shored services.
Firstly, although I have no direct experience of this, I’m led to believe that the cost savings from moving services overseas are generally not as great as they may initially appear. The workers may be paid less, and the cost of office space in India (for example) may be lower than in Western Europe but in call centre situations there are telecommunications costs to consider, as well as the inevitable integration of the offshore systems and processes with the rest of the business. I frequently have cause to speak to an IT service desk in South Africa and am rarely happy with the outcome. Sure, the staff are friendly and English is well spoken but the telephone line quality is inevitably poor. I don’t know if it’s routed via IP or over low grade international lines but either way it is not good for conversation. Even for software development, there is an implicit need for integration with other products and teams based elsewhere in the world. Technologies such as VoIP and web conferencing services may help bridge the gaps but in my experience, occasional face-to-face meetings are required in order to cement a quality relationship (and good relations really help to get things done).
Whilst I can see that there are some benefits to be had from off-shoring, near-shoring is sometimes seen as a more practical alternative (certainly, one of my previous employers had a relationship with a company in Eastern Europe for offshore software development rather than further afield). From a business perspective, it’s often a lot easier to spend a day or two in another European city than to fly several timezones away with all the complications that entails (jet lag is really not conducive to efficiency – as I found on a business trip to New Jersey a few years back).
Getting back to call centres, I’m not always pleased with my bank (First Direct); however one of the main reasons I stick with them is that all of their call centres are UK-based. The staff may have a variety of regional dialects (who doesn’t?) but English is their first language – complete with an understanding of all the nuances and colloquialisms that are in daily use. Even so, a few months back, I wanted to know the telephone number for a branch office where the paying in machine had crashed half way through my transaction (my money had been taken but would it be credited to my account?). This branch actually belongs to First Direct’s parent company, HSBC, who only publish a central number for branch contact. And where do you think the call goes to speak to someone in the next major town? Yep. India. Who couldn’t put me through to anyone local that could give me an answer – all I could do was wait and see if the money appeared in my account (fortunately it did).
I’ve just come off the phone from my credit card company (Marks and Spencer Money) and the only thing that keeps my custom there is the shopping vouchers that appear in the post every few weeks. All I wanted was a replacement card. After negotiating the inevitable IVR system I finally spoke to someone who was unable to help me because his systems were updating (and could I please call back later). After I said that they should call me (and he said he worked in a paperless office so he couldn’t make a note of my details to call back), I threatened to close my account (I meant it) and he transferred me to a colleague whose system could issue me a replacement card. Result. Except that it shouldn’t be this difficult and I shouldn’t need to be so stroppy.
To be fair, this could have happened in a UK call centre too. John Lewis Financial Services is based in Birmingham and I gave up getting a satisfactory response from them after problems with their Partnership card. Ditto for Halifax Bank of Scotland, who I hope never to do business with again (although that’s becoming increasingly difficult as they are so large in the marketplace). Even Volkswagen Assistance were unable to renew the breakdown cover on my wife’s car this morning because of a system being unavailable and asked me to call back later, although they were prepared to take a note of my number and call me (if only everything in life was as reliable as a Volkswagen). My point is, that if the call quality is good and the person on the other end of the phone wants to go the extra mile to deliver great customer service then I’ll be happy to continue my relationship and if they don’t, then I won’t.
In another example, my wife received a letter from her bank to say that as her credit card was coming up for expiry and, as she hadn’t used it for a while, they would close the account if they didn’t hear from her. That’s fair enough – customers who don’t use their accounts are bad business – but when she called to speak to them about keeping the account open (an opportunity to regain some lost business) she found herself on hold for so long that she decided that she didn’t want the account anyway! Similarly, I found myself on hold in Tesco‘s call centre phone system for so long a few weeks back that the cost of my phone call was greater than the cost of the product that I needed a refund for in my online shopping!
To make matters worse, many call centres only publish national rate (0870) numbers (and other non-geographic numbers that are excluded from bundled/low-cost call deals) – in effect, they can actually make money from you whilst keeping you on the line so, if you want to reduce your phone bill when calling non-geographic numbers for call centres, check out say no to 0870 for a database of alternative numbers).
In my view, it’s the cost of lost business that companies need to consider when selecting their partners rather than basing decisions on cost reduction alone.
Right, enough of being Mr. Angry – it’s a beautiful sunny day – I’m going to leave my computers and phone behind and get out into the countryside!
Yesterday, when my mobile phone rang it played the awful Nokia tune (I would never set that as my ringtone). Today, it decided that it wouldn’t make any sounds at all when incoming calls were received (although once answered, calls worked as intended). Then I realised, of course, it’s a computer. Time for a reboot. Problem solved. Bloody computers.
I’ve just got home from the first night of the new Faithless tour and am pleased to say that it was a great night out (even though we couldn’t get standing tickets and were high up in the seated area at the side of the venue).
Although I’d heard the first track (Bombs) on Radio 1, I didn’t have a copy of the new album (To All New Arrivals) and so hadn’t listened to it until we were on the way to the gig (Stuart brought a copy with him for the car). I was reasonably impressed after the first play (it’s very chilled) and it will definitely grow on me over time. Although the tour is clearly promoting the new album the set didn’t just include new tracks – old favourites like Insomnia, God is a DJ, We Come One and Salva Mea were in there too.
For anyone who has doubts about a live performance by an electronic act it works really well – in the late 90s, I saw The Chemical Brothers at the Glastonbury Festival and that was really just a DJ set in a marquee but then, a couple of years back, I saw Moby supporting Robbie Williams at Knebworth and that gig was huge (about 120,000 people each day). About 9000 people were watching Faithless tonight and the atmosphere was electric.
Oh yes, and in case you’re wondering what a 34-year-old father of two is doing at a Faithless gig – that’s the great thing about dance music – even crusties like me can have a good time (although I remember when people held lighters up in the air – these days it’s mobile camera phones)!
Links
I live in a small market town on the edge of the “Borough and New City of Milton Keynes“, a source of great ridicule to many but actually not a bad place to live (and there are over 200,000 of us living here).
Most (in)famous for the concrete cows (which are not actually made of concrete) and its highly efficient grid road system linked with roundabouts, the “New City” is celebrating its 40th birthday today.
Even though the development area has huge swathes of green space (as well as rural countryside to the north and east of the Borough), people who have never visited are led to believe that Milton Keynes is a concrete wasteland (as many new towns are). The truth is rather different – the original towns and villages within the Milton Keynes development area have been expanded with new developments and a commercial centre, linked by a grid of (largely uncongested) national speed limit roads passing through parkland and past giant lakes, lined with 40 million trees (meaning that Milton Keynes is probably the only UK town/city of its size which can be traversed between any two points in just 15 minutes). For those who are still unconvinced about Milton Keynes’ green spaces, just a stone’s throw from the city centre shopping centre and Theatre District is Campbell Park, where sheep can often be found grazing.
As for technology (which is, after all, the purpose of this blog), Milton Keynes has had a number of firsts: one of the first cable TV networks in the UK; the UK’s first multiplex cinema; the UK’s first indoor snow slope; Europe’s first purpose-built body-flying tunnel, and now the largest continuous area of high-speed wireless broadband service in the UK as well as the UK’s first WiMAX deployment. It’s also situated next to the UK’s first long-distance motorway (the M1, opened in 1959) and is half way between two significant technology research centres – Oxford and Cambridge (sadly, these two cities have appalling transport links, with the “express” X5 coach service taking 3 and a half hours to cover just 90 miles and no direct rail link since the 1960s, although proposals to reinstate the railway do exist). Continuing the research theme – the Open University is based in Milton Keynes and the Enigma code was cracked at Bletchley Park (now within Milton Keynes) during the second World War.
Let’s hope the next 40 years bring as much prosperity to the region as the last 40 did – in spite of Milton Keynes Partnership‘s best attempts to wreck it with ill-conceived government-backed expansion plans.
The PC that I use for most of my desktop work (actually it’s a Mac), is hooked up to an old amplifier and speakers in my den, cascaded from the living room when my wife made me replace my lovely 19″ hi-fi equipment (or “black loud crap” as she so tastefully referred to it) with something small and silver (or “girly” as I call it).
It sounds great (at least to me – an audiophile will probably tell me that 192k MP3s can never sound great) but has a drawback in that my den/office is opposite the childrens’ bedrooms and next to ours. This means that the lovely rich sounds which come through the amp run the risk of disturbing our sleep (and I have to remember to turn off the amp, lest an incoming e-mail – probably spam – wakes one of us in the night).
This was proving inconvenient (I kept forgetting), so yesterday I bought a cheap 3.5mm stereo 2-1 adapter from Maplin and split the audio output from the PC to run to both the amplifier (rich, loud, quality sound) and the monitor speakers (small, tinny sound) – I could have used wireless headphones instead, but I don’t have any. Now I can hear the general PC system noises on the small speakers and when we’re all up and about I can turn on the amp to hear everything properly (the monitor speakers are still there, but the richer sound from the main speakers largely cancels them out – they effectively become repeaters). Now all I have to do is remember to turn off the amp when I leave the room…
Apple keyboards may look nice, but they do tend to highlight the dirt (most keyboards are pretty horrendous when it comes to hygiene but white and transparent plastic doesn’t really cover it up as well as beige or black) and after a few months of use, mine is looking pretty bad. It just got a whole load worse though when the CD-R pen that I was using (we used to call then OHP markers when I was younger!) leaked over the U, I and 9 keys. After removing the keys and spending about 30 minutes at the kitchen sink with washing up liquid and a scouring pad I’ve pretty much restored them to white (albeit with a faint trace of blue-black smudge) but if anyone has any tips for removing permanent ink from plastic then I’d be grateful to hear them.
In the meantime, Vincent McBurney has a tongue-in-cheek look at 10 tips for better keyboard hygiene.
I once worked on a customer project where the outgoing IT Director (for whom this was to be his swansong) wanted the project to be named Cuba (a rival organisation’s project was Havana so this had to be bigger – what’s bigger than the city… the whole island!). This was later given an associated acronym of Common User Based Architecture – it was basically their Year 2000 desktop and server upgrade project – but we knew it the S**** H****** Information Technology Experience (where SH was the IT Director’s initials). Then a few weeks back, I was working with a guy who turned out to be working on the same customer account at the same time but for a competitor, who apparently referred to Project Cuba as Can’t Upgrade Bugger All!
Another colleague recalled some similarly dubious acronyms – he once had to support a system called Customer Requests And Problems and a common term used in one of his previous organisations was Failed Under Continuous Testing.
I’d love to hear from anybody else with poorly named projects/products – leave a comment on this post if you have some you’d like to share!