Oaksys Tech Update

A few year’s ago I bought a Polycom Communicator C100S as a portable speakerphone for my Laptop and my travels. It was great under the Microsoft XP environment, but when I upgraded to Vista I soon found that the device did not work properly. Polycom support promised new driver software by mid-2007 but it never materialised. It was not a cheap microphone, it cost over $100, so you’d expect a reasonable service level from Polycom. However, no  joy, Polycom ignored the complaints from the people who purchased the device. I understand that there is now a new device CX100 that works with Windows 7, but I’m not going to give Polycom the opportunity to screw me again! Their name easily mutates to Polycon.

Guru

Femtocell technology used to extend Cell/Mobile phone reception to dead spots is being put forward as the next great solution for communications. Vodafone already have a system called Vodafone Sure Signal and O2 are trialling their solution. This is however little different from voice over IP, such as the SIP protocol, using local WiFi base stations. Both solutions need a broadband Internet connection, but the solutions by the mobile phone companies is likely to be proprietory to their own networks. Unless standards are introduced it will just promote vendor lock in. All that this provides is the opportunity for the owner of the Femtocell device to pay for rectifying the shortfall of the Mobile Phone Company coverage.

If you need information on deployment of Femocells there is a guide here. Here is an example of the equipment from Airvana.

Guru

“Five fire engines in South Yorkshire and the Humber region have been sitting unused since they were bought in 2007″ in a BBC report. At 26 tonnes they are too heavy to be used on the UK roads. Excluding the purchase expenses such as specification and manufacturer visits these vehicles each cost over £500,000.  The fire service bosses blame the manufacturer, calling it a supplier error.

I know that if I had ever  specified/ordered computer equipment that was too heavy for the containing building, I would be fired and/or sued for negligence. With the mind set of the Fire Chiefs I’m not surprised that no-one has been fired for this negligent purchase. I’d love to buy a Chieftain Tank to park outside of my home, but I know that road regulations would make life very difficult for me and I’d have the councils chasing me for the cost of road repair. The people raising the Fire Engine order were presumed competent to buy such equipment, but they got it wrong. I bet they will still get their full pensions when they retire.

Further waste of Tax Payer’s money and no penalty.

Guru

It is fascinating to see that BP is of the opinion that in concentrating its supply chain for IT to one supplier – Computacentre, that it will reduce costs.  I have no axe to grind on Computacentre. I have used them before and they are a thoroughly professional outfit, but they were not always the lowest cost supplier. As an IT Manager I usually found that I could reduce costs by multi-sourcing, but it did take some management time to monitor the arrangements and performance.  An upside of the management involvement was that I was fully aware of the service level provided by the various vendors. It gave the opportunity to reward/punish service levels accordingly.

When I moved to a larger organisation (from 1500 employees to 75,000), that had streamlined vendors, I found that the support charges to users were five time higher than my previous employers. The service level monitoring by the client company of the single service organisation was significantly poorer and the goods supplied were more expensive.

In effected the client company had tried to outsource a management responsibility to one of its suppliers. Eventually this poor service level was mitigated, but not resolved, by employing additional Relationship Managers within the employing organisation.

BP need to be very sure of what problem they are trying to solve by removing 540 suppliers and replacing them with one. They may not get the result that they expect. Their financial processing may be simplified a little, but they may find that account management is much more difficult.

Guru

Many business managers assume that the physical security of their Data Centre and other IT facilities will be the responsibility (and budget) of the Facilities or Building Services Manager. This is not the case. The CTO must take responsibility for this issue even if that simply means that he/she ensures that the Building Services Manager does a proper job.

There are now substantial financial penalties, not just loss of IT assets or loss of business services, if you get this wrong. In the UK the Information Commissioners Office can fine your company up to £500,000 for failure to provide adequate security for your ICT systems if that action then breaches the Data Protection Act.

Your ICT installation should have a good Physical Security Policy and Plan in place. Managers should be made responsible and accountable for the physical security and the proper implementation of the security policy. The effective implementation of physical security should mesh with network and server/PC security. It should be tested and reviewed on a regular basis.

Simple business insurance is not good enough.

Oaksys

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