Oaksys Tech Update

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

The Greek Government has agreed big public budget cuts to reassure international investors.

It won’t be long before that happens in the UK. The Bank of England (UK Government) may have forced the interest rate down to an unnaturally low rate so that Mr Brown can afford to borrow so much money, but before long that interest rate will creep up to attract investors to UK Gov’t sovereign debt. The consequence will be that the interest payments on Gov’t Debt will spiral causing  even greater cuts to public spending. Savers and pensioners on fixed incomes will suffer as inflation follows.

Guru

I’m fascinated to see the french court case between La Martiniere (a french publisher) and Google over the Google Book project. La Martiniere has won damages and Google have been ordered to stop digitising book from France. Strangely enough the french government have just announced approval of a 1 Billion euro project to digitise french books.

I wonder how the french publishers would react if Google remove all reference to the french books and their publishers from the french publishing industry? The publishers would sink into digital oblivion if Google decide to retaliate.

Guru

Barclays Retail is terminating its desk top PC support contract with Getronics earlier than scheduled. Working through the reported figures each desk top PC is costing in excess of £2000 p.a. in support charges. I wonder if that contracted fee included extra that arise after the original contract was negotiated?

I always have one particular problem with the outsourcing of the support of PC’s to a third party organisation. It is whether the company is outsourcing the real problem?  Quite often the in-house support staff are TUPE’d to the outsource company so it is unlikely that the staff are causing the problem. Should the senior management team be looking more closely at outsourcing the management of the support team rather than the coalface workers?

Guru

We just had a sales call from a software security firm wanting to open business relations.Our reply “No, your Company screwed us about 7 years ago. We don’t do business with you.”In this world of “just in time”, CRM Systems and marketing led business models it is easy to forget that businesses and people have long memories.Sharp practice is never forgotten and is quite often retold to other people.Guru

The Credit Card Economics of the current government are leading the country towards a cycle of inflation caused by further devaluation of the Pound. With interest rates close to zero the government is spending close to £30 Billion on interest for the national debt. The Chancellor’s solution is to borrow more money. Before long international lenders will demand and get a higher interest rate on their loans. A higher interest rate will mean that the government has to borrow more money to service the loans, unless of course higher rates of taxation are imposed – a fat chance of that before the next election.

I can see that that the “solution” will be to allow inflation to rise so that there is more “money” to pay back debts. It is a bit like “Quantative Easing” really.

It is people on fixed incomes, such as private pensions, who will pay for this negligent fiscal attitude. There is no magic bullet, like North Sea Oil, to rescue our economy.

Guru

The bonus tax will be a blow to many of the middle ranking front office/back office staff working in Investment Banking in the UK and they have my sympathy. They will have worked hard and will be innocent of the excesses of the senior traders. The senior directors of those banks affected have brought this problem onto the employees by their insensitivity to the public mood. They have given the Chancellor the opportunity to impose a publicly “popular” tax on the bank employees. It is a measure of of the senior directors’ collective incompetence in handling their banks’ affairs.

The bottom line is that without the Government intervention many of these moaning directors would now be out on the street looking for a new job. Show some common sense guys! Weather some austerity for a couple of years and you can get your snouts back to the trough.