Oaksys Tech Update

The UK Inland Revenue misses 43% of the 103 million calls that it receives each year. With 10500 personnel employed to answer calls there are approximately 4 incoming calls per employee per day. Yet the Inland Revenue misses about half of those calls. To be honest the figures for incoming calls in the BBC report seem low to me. Personally I get rather more than 4 business calls a day and I rarely miss any using my standard plain old telephone. No doubt the the HMRC has call centre systems to queue calls and offer advice to waiting members of the public, but somehow the call queue management is not as good as it could be.
Here’s a piece of advice to help them fix it. The senior managers at the Revenue should spend two hours a week sitting in a call centre taking routine calls from the public. If that happened I think we’d  suddenly see procedural changes that fixed the problems. When the statistics on call centre performance are boring figures on a spreadsheet they are easily ignored by senior management and do not lead to Root Cause analysis.

Guru

The government/local authorities did not order or stockpile enough road salt for treating ice on the roads and pavements. What is the cost of this governmental negligence? The lost production and the additional injuries of people slipping on icy pavements represents a cost to the country.

Somewhere government officials, individual people, took the decision to restrict salt stockpiles and to rely on a just in time delivery system from a single major supplier. The officials did not analyse the impact of severe weather. They got it wrong and should be held to account for the consequences. It is not good enough to bleat that this is an exceptional winter. The extremely high salaries for the Local Authority CEO’s was supposed to provide the best people. It hasn’t. They should be removed from post.

This disaster was easy to foresee, in fact the AA predicted it, but  David Sparkes of the Local Government Association described the predictions as “ridiculous scaremongering.” If there wasn’t a 250.000 shortfall in national/local road salt stockpile the problems wouldn’t be so bad.

According to Independent on Sunday newspaper councils are paying £120 / tonne for salt that is purchased now. In the “offpeak” sales the charge is about £30 / tonne. Does it really cost £90 to store a tonne of road salt for a few months?

Guru

An article in The London Evening  Standard 5th Jan 2010 projects that the cost of servicing (Labour’s) public debt will shoot to £60 Billion a year. That is £1,000 per person (every man, women and child) per year. I don’t think that it will stop there. The Government will be forced to cut spending and as a consequence unemployment will rise placing an even greater burden on the public purse. A lack of confidence in the Pound Sterling will force a devaluation and as a consequence the price of imported energy will rise. There is no North Sea Oil bonansa to save the economy and Banking is just as bad.

We are in for some very tough times in the UK.  I often think that Gordon Brown is the revenge of the Scots on England, he has single handedly decimated our armed forces.

Guru

We are seeing persistent attempts by persons unknown to enter comments on this blog advertising “thecommissionpayload .com” These are clear attempts at SPAM or SPLOG. As such that is the kind of organisation that we would blacklist and never recommend to any third party.

Some of the Sad Cases creating this Spam appear to be using the Russian software Xrumer tool, but I’m afraid guys that, while it often handles the Captcha interface, it does not overcome the Mark I eyeball of the administrator.

Much trumpeting is made about the UK Government £2000 car scrappage. Like most of the pronouncements from this government it should not be taken at face value.

The amount is split in two amounts of £1000 between the manufacturer and the Government, but each amount includes VAT at 15% so £300 of the amount goes straight back to the Government. The initial net cost to the Government is £700, not the much trumpeted £2000.

Now let’s remember that a car selling for £10,000  will include a VAT amount of £1,500. So the scheme by the government to get people who wouldn’t have bought a new car anyway will give the government a net £800 gain in taxation per car included in the scheme. Not a lot of generosity there!

Alaric

The poor performance of the Royal Mail is so bad it is almost fraudulent. They have halved local deliveries, they have halved local collections. The number of Post Offices in the area has almost halved, causing longer queues for customers. Yet they have increased their prices well above inflation in the past few years. Their “First Class Large envelope” scheme is another money raking scheme. They treat their staff so poorly there are frequent strikes.

All this decreased service level just transfers the cost to the customers. A classic MBA type solution where a monopoly is involved.

This morning they couldn’t deliver a small packet, because I was out (there is no way of predicting when the mail will be delivered). So they just posted a “come and collect card” through the door. Both my adjacent neighbours were in at the time, but the Royal Mail chose the solution most convenient for themselves and most inconvenient to me. Now I have a 30 minute round trip to the sorting office. To rub salt into the wounds they included my neighbours mail in with the letters that were pushed through my door. So I had to deliver the mail for the Royal Mail!!

The current Royal Mail bosses should be fired! Their cost to the business infrastructure is unbearable.

Alaric

I’ve just seen a Job Advert for the boss of ICT Procurement in the UK Ministry of Justice. It talks about “Supply Chain and Value Chain re-engineering”. This makes me wonder if the people specifying the job adverts actually understand the management speak jargon that they are placing in the narrative for the adverts.

Value Chain refers to the process of “adding value” to some kind of supply?  How can the MOJ add value to Computing and Telecomms? It is not a vendor. It is a consuming organisation of such facilities. Tellingly the advert specifies qualifications in Procurement and also requires an MBA. It does not require any formal qualification in IT or Communications. Could this lead to a situation where the supply of ICT is “cheap”, but doesn’t do the job effectively?

I’ve found a couple of Internet sites that are useful for decoding such gobbledydook. Predictably one is www.google.com, but enter the term “define:” at the start of your search input e.g., “define:Value Chain”

The other comprehensive list is  : Deardoff’s Glossary of International Economics

And a list of common gobbledydook words.

Hope that brightens your day!

Guru

The Blog by Alistair Kelman describes some of the new rules that will apply to electronic evidence in court cases. In essence the organisation will have to be able to produce a snapshot of their system including transient messages such as IM’s, email and twitter.

Nightmare stuff!

Guru