Market needs are changing due to deceasing ARPUs and increasing cost of network building. Operators demand immense flexibility, open, interoperable solutions, integration of technical and business process management viz, billing, CRM, service activation, provisioning and fault management.

The saving grace for many of these providers is that aggregation in the OSS/BSS universe has driven the worldwide number down to the quoted 400 companies.

It seems that the following technologies might be on the radar screen for 2011 there;

1. 3G - reaching its peak
2. MNP -
3. BWA, WiMax and LTE
4. Increasing rural mobility
5. Cloud, data center virtualization, and shift to all-IP network
6. Infrastructure sharing, M&As and operator consolidation
7. Smart-grid and green technology
8. FMC, UC, managed services and M2M popularity
9. Proliferation of smartphones, smart devices and local MNCs
10. Value Added Services

While India is a completely different market from North America it is rather surprising to see the level of overlap with our own world. Read the entire article here.

What seems almost incredible in hindsight, it seems AT&T invented magnetic tape in the 1930’s, only to rationalize why letting it loose on an unsuspecting world would collapse the telecom industry. Funny how some very sober thinkers could create logical reasoning, flawed as it was, that would stop the invention from getting to the world for decades.

In analyzing the decisions that AT&T came to under these action Wu opines;

This is the essential weakness of a centralized approach to innovation: the notion that it can be a planned and systematic process, best directed by a kind of central intelligence; that it is simply of matter of assembling all the best minds and putting them to work in unison. Were it so, the future could be planned and executed in a scientific manner.

We tend to agree with his analysis and his book makes an interesting read. Here’s a short excerpt from that section.

Verizon’s position is best summed up by their release of yesterday;

A key reason why the FCC doesn’t consider the activities of those who control operating systems or applications is that the FCC looks at the world from the standpoint of its jurisdiction rather than from the perspective of the consumer,” Tauke said. “Given the outdated statute, that’s somewhat understandable. But from a reasonable person’s perspective, that approach makes no sense. That is why we need Congress to update the law.

His suggested four points for the update to the act make sense;

1. consumers should be free and empowered to use any legal device to access any legal content,
2. consumers must feel safe under uniform and consistent security laws,
3. consumer access and adoption should be a priority for the government,
4. the government’s role should be to protect consumers and ensure a smoothly functioning marketplace.

His broader point was that all players within the industry “ecosystem” must be subject to the same set of rules and expectations. Listen to his full speech here as it was presented to NDN earlier in the year.

I am not a great supporter of regulation for regulation’s sake but it is probably time that some thinking be done to standardize the rules across a far reaching industry.

A class project done at the Atlas think tank MBA program called “think tank MBA”. The fake website was created as part of the class project. It seems that many industry pundits took the website as they say in the Madawaska Valley “Hook, Line and Outboard” and ran with it decrying a major telecom industry conspiracy. Memo to the press - check the facts!

The tome

The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard dropped it’s 333 page brick on an unsuspecting world about a week ago. It’s taken us until now to plow through the interesting bits. While this study uses some data from prior OECD reports (often disputed and widely criticized data) it attempts to rationalize the effect of using that data. The upshot of the report vis-a-vis Canada is that we have fallen behind and need to catch up.

A number of other comments have arisen out of the study and many pose some interesting perspectives. DSLreports commented earlier today about the effect that adopting US like policy has had on Canada. Some other sources had similar opinions; Globe and Mail, Digital Journal, and GigaOM to name a few.

Systemic stupidity

Let’s get this right. This clinic was run by employees of the Durham Region Health Department. Their job is important and they are in the business of handling private and personal information for their clients. At this clinic they had many laptops which seemed to be networked together and they collected private information in order to identify the visiting patients. It seems they allowed an employee to copy this data on to a USB stick, walk out of the clinic and (a camera caught this) set the USB down on a rock in front of the clinic! From there nobody knows where it went to. Read more here.

The Privacy Commissioner has derided the Regional Health Department for not using strong encryption for mobile devices. What? Is my data that resides on their internal and non-mobile devices not encrypted? Every health record must be encrypted so as not to be compromised at all. This debacle has surely cost the Durham Region significantly more that actually using encryption capabilities—go figure.

Self Protection

Let this incident be a lesson to all of you folks who use portable devices for carrying around your corporate or private data. If you have a portable device (read laptop, smart phone, USB stick, portable drive etc.) you need to encrypt it. Encryption is easy and cheap. We use an very good open source encryption called TrueCrypt. If you are looking for something that will protect your sensitive data in mobile situations this is at least a start.

Another interesting fact is that Alexander Graham Bell was a founding member! If you are interested in becoming a member or just want to learn more about the Pioneers check out a local group in your area.

Nortel was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of the burial was signed by the bankers, the accountants, the auditor, and the retired employees. Old Nortel was as dead as a door-nail (with our apologies to Dickens).
However, it took James Bagnall, a journalist for the Ottawa Citizen to attempt the full autopsy while the vultures carried away the tasty bits.

Nortel: The chronicles of failure

We have written about Nortel before and late last year we had read some of the Bagnall articles that weave the complex tale of failure in Nortel back in November when it was released (though finding them is difficult—more on that later) and after a bit of down time during the holiday period we managed to aggregate all articles in their logical progression for your reading pleasure;

• Part 0 - Investigating the death of a global titan
• Part 1 - Last things first: Bankruptcy protection
• Part 2 - Retired executives sign up for one last battle
• Part 3 - The beginning of the end
• Part 4 - Looking for a turnaround
• Part 5 - On the road to ruin
• Part 6 - The silence in the boardroom
• Part 7 - The world turned upside down
• Part 8 – The Man Who Wasn’t There
• Part ∞ - After Nortel: Tech’s last chance

If you have trouble with the links above, here is a summary in PDF format.

A sad ending to one of Canada’s great success stories.

Ottawa Citizen you might look at how you organize articles such as this excellent work. And also why is your online search so inadequate?

Telstra Avatar Lady

In a move to impart a sense of understanding about employee guidelines for using social media Telstra’s posting of it’s policies in a public online manner has opened the door for other corporations to feel OK about going public. Their avatar lady seems a bit creepy to us but otherwise it’s an interesting approach. We’ll monitor to see how it unfolds in the future. Here’s a few of the videos;

and,

There may be more over at Telstra’s channel on Youtube. What seems odd is that Telstra has about 40K employees and the videos have been viewed about 6K times. They have been up for about two months so there certainly has been enough time for viewing.

Making a list

One of the things that I have been particularly lax about is developing is a quick call list in my mobile phone to be used in an emergency. A year ago I replaced my prior smartphone with a Blackberry and needed to re-establish the emergency process. Almost every phone will allow some number of speed dial entries so I have the routine numbers on speed dial including 911, spouse, family, trusted friends and others that I may need to reach quickly. For other numbers you might need in the event of an emergency, you might want another means of storing them so that they can be retrieved while you are under duress. So here is my technique for this process.

Entering numbers into your phone

In order to keep the numbers on the top of your phone list in your directory, and to find them quickly, I always precede the name with the characters “AA#” and for my Blackberry I store that information in the ‘Company’ field—for your particular phone you may have to experiment to determine what field to use so that it gets listed first in the directory. So, for example, the name of the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) is entered as AA1 OPP and so on for my ten emergency numbers. That way they are either the first ten entries in my phone’s directory or can be found quickly.

The list

Emergency Contact

While you may wish to have a different list, you can use this as a template to get yourself started.

Representin’ the GWN

In today’s announcement of the 2009 Internet Telephony BSS/OSS Excellence Awards it was refreshing to see that at least two of the companies were  home teams.
The winners were;

• Volubill, CHARGE-IT, Montbonnot Saint Martin, France
• SAP, SAP Telecommunications, Walldorf, Germany
• Intec Telecom Systems, Inter-mediatE v6, Woking, Surrey, United Kingdom
• Sigma Systems, Service Management Portfolio, Toronto, ON, Canada
• Redknee, One Call Resolution, Mississauga, ON, Canada
• Comverse, ONE Billing & Active Customer Management, Woodbury, New York

Sigma Systems has toiled in the OSS space for years and has reinvented itself a number of times. Sigma has defined itself originally within the cable industry and has expanded well beyond that. Redknee, founded in 1999 has developed a focused portfolio of solution for the billing and customer care field and made a mark for itself worldwide. Good on you both!

iPhone—the electronic harpoon

Given the popularity of the iPhone and it’s built-in input channels (microphone, touch screen, gps, and accelerometer) it’s not surprising that someone would eventually turn it into an instrument. Furthering this concept then a number of Universities have developed—you guessed it—the iPhone orchestra. Stanford and U of Michigan to name a few.

Here’s your Christmas concert

Go Michigan!

Go Stanford!

The explanation begins…

Martin has summarized the work of “Migrating to IPv6″ by Marc Blanchet. (Marc is a long time participant in the whole IPV6 parade and we think at one time he was a founder in Hexago now gogo6). So what follows in Martin’s article is the condensed version of IPV6.

In Part 1 Martin covers the basic differences between IPV4 and IPV6 with a light technical bent. Its a great primer for those wondering what the big deal is and how it will affect them.

In Part 2 Martin dives deeper into IPV6 covering router ‘advertisements’ , local & global addresses and DNS.

Now that we’ve covered the basics we’ve ordered a copy of Marc’s book for the real deal. You can get a limited preview of it over a Google books.

This is a Denial of Service attack on the entire national phone network, and nothing is being done about it. We pay for a phone line that can be used as a personal means of communication, not a marketing device to be exploited by companies.

In terms of the world wide risk, Privacy International has reported on numerous privacy concerns. In fact according to the Guardian they have experienced a 300% rise in privacy related complaints. While Canada has generally fared above average in world comparison reports we must not lose sight of the fact that we see our rights to privacy being incrementally eroded by the commercial action of many companies.

Scenario stage setting

In part 1 he got us hooked in the first line using Arthur C. Clarke’s famous quote about magic and technology. He uses the magic-technology connection to set the stage for the scenario planning he proposes that communications providers should be using. Part 2 moves us forward to being able to abstract our expectation of usage into a mode that allows the future gazing to be translated (by the smarter among us) into a communications reality. We like how he thinks.

If we might be so bold as to paraphrase some of his writing we think he’s suggesting that instead of looking around at a pile of technology and saying “what can we cobble together and sell big time?”, instead he is suggesting that we dream about the ultimate use in an unbridled fashion and then figure out how we might be able to achieve it. Hmmm…makes sense to me.

Arthur take us away

If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run - and often in the short one - the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.

Arthur C. Clarke, The Exploration of Space, 1951

Behemoth Box

Today Arbor released the latest version of it’s carrier grade security package, Peakflow 5.1. Now we’re accustomed to network throughput but this thing is like excrement through a goose on ex-lax. The measured throughput is 40GB per second. If you think this is not enough Arbor allows you to gang up to five boxes together under one management console.

Arbor is one of those companies that has worked tirelessly at perfecting the tools of their trade. The results of their work is seen by the world as mixed. They are the masters of threat control for carriers and large enterprise  but also the fathers of that evil twin deep packet inspection. Love ‘em or hate ‘em you have to give credit to this company for the great products they have delivered.

You can read about this 900 pound gorilla over at Arbor’s press release.

Full Disclosure: We have completed consulting work for Arbor in the past but have not been involved with the company for a number of years now.

I attended the most recent session of the Rotman’s School of Business training program for Corporate Directors over the past year. During the course of the program I had time to both read and think about senior level leadership decisions.

How hard could it be?

From both this program, and my experience as a consultant, I find it incredibly hard to understand and then influence change within the process of effective decision making for the most senior level management of corporations. There is a reason for that and it goes like this; complex decisions made at the top level of a corporation are always difficult because those making the decisions are quirky, fallible, normal humans.

Decisions and Devices

In researching this topic for a written article I summarized a few points as an overview. You, my faithful reader, will get the data dump and hopefully some insight into the process of making good decisions.

There are many cognitive biases which work toward derailing decisions, in fact there are probably hundreds of things that affect decision makers, but here are a few that I think need special attention when it comes to decisions at the board or senior level of an organization;

1. Group Think—is a type of thought process experienced by group members who amicably work though conflict and reach consensus without being objective or critical of the underlying process by challenging, analyzing, and evaluating ideas.
2. Risk Asymmetry—wherein we seek risk aversion for positive prospects and risk taking for negative prospects.
3. Availability Bias—causes decisions to based upon information that is in our memory rather than relevant data more difficult to find.
4. Hindsight Bias—humans attach a lower probability to an event prior to it occurring than after it occurs.
5. Induction Flaws—the tendency to formulate a set of rules based upon little known data (e.g. one point on a graph does not itself make a trend).
6. Confirmation Bias—we seek and utilize data that supports our position rather than address data that conflicts with it.
7. Contamination Effects—irrelevant or unrelated proximate data is allowed to influence decisions.
8. Scope Insensitivity—wherein we do not proportionally adjust what we would be willing to trade for harms of different orders of magnitude.
9. Bystander Apathy—as part of a crowd we will more likely neglect to take a stand that requires individual responsibility.
10. Overconfidence effect—is a bias in which subjective confidence consistently exceeds the objective accuracy of predictions.

Act on analysis

As a leader is is up to you to determine the tone in the room and establish whether any of the above factors are unduly influencing decisions. No group of leaders will ever be free of their biases but they can address and deal with them constructively.

Who ya gonna call

Some weird folks will stoop to any level to make life for 911 call centers miserable. It seems that Joshua Basso ran out of mobile minutes with his carrier and decided that at that moment he wanted to start an steamy affair with a random 911 operator. The St. Petersburg Times picks it up from here.

Top turkeys

In the spirit of turkeys FierceTelecom had journalist Phil Goldstein list the top mobile turkeys of 2009. We love the list but think that he had stopped a bit too soon. What’s your recommendation for turkey of the year?

A modest proposal

So in the spirit of disruptive thinking here’s one idea that needs to see the light of day more. Should wireless spectrum be privately owned (a carrier buys the exclusive right to use a specific spectrum), be publicly owned (a carrier can exclusively use a particular part of a public resource) or shared (all carriers can ride on the same spectrum). While technologically there are hurdles in moving from one model to the next, but in it’s simplest we really do need to consider these tough issues.

We got to thinking about this prompted by a recent article by Mark Lowenstein in Fierce Wireless. Many countries have monetized what was once a broad public resource (spectrum) and not done a single thing to improve the underlying industry with the proceeds of sale. That’s analogous to charging outrageous taxes on gasoline, as we do here in the GWN, and not spending enough maintaining the road infrastructure.

Why can’t we all just get along

Another question is, given the perpetual need for more spectrum to fuel the inefficiencies of carriers, why is all spectrum not shared. We’re not network designers but there are smart enough people to figure this out.

Tough questions and ones for which we should be discussing the answers.

Some startling facts

BMO’s definition of small business is “firms employing 99 employees or fewer” (same as that used by Industry Canada). Using that definition then 98% of all enterprises in Canada are “small” and they provide nearly 50% of the private sector jobs. We were astounded by this statistic. It is generally not well known and certainly in our discussion with friends it was a complete surprise to most of those we talked to.

Regional views

The report delves further into the regional differences with small businesses across Canada and provides some interesting discussions about the patterns and trends of small business evolution.

Read the full report here.

2009-Q3 Update

In the report the CVCA released yesterday they highlighted that the state of Canadian VC funding is worst it has been in 14 years. This is a reality that will not surprise the majority of start-ups and VC players in the market. Their report hit up front and center;

…VC activity in Q3 2009 was the weakest recorded in 14 years. Furthermore, dollars invested at the end of the first nine months of the year, totaling $682 million, was 36% shy of the $1.1 billion invested at the same time in 2008. This suggests that final 2009 outcomes might well slip below the $1.0 billion-dollar mark for the first time since 1995.

CVCA Recommendations

The association had some specific recommendations for the Canadian government to consider;

• establish and grow fund of funds structures
• make improvements to the SR&ED tax credit program
• improve the incentives for corporations to invest in venture capital funds
• actively promote investment in Canadian venture capital funds as part of the offset agreements that are negotiated with major government contractors
• improve measures be taken to improve the attractiveness of venture capital to retail investors.

Some ideas worth considering.

Forget carrier rate plans

This puppy is cool with it’s black titanium carbide coated stainless steel and sporting a 60.5 carat sapphire crystal display and containing;

a great choice of rubber, calfskin leather and genuine alligator is proposed. Genuine alligator leather sourced exclusively from breeding farms is cut, sewed by highly qualified craftsmen.

The calfskin and rubber is probably also from some weird growing process. It also has a Bluetooth headset that comes with a nifty USB based 4GB memorystick and charger. Its actually cool.

Gotta get one

So, for all of you trend setters, this is the one and you can get it here for just $7,500 (some regional variations). Hmmmm now if I sign a 300 year contract with my mobile carrier could I get it for $29.99?

Chotzke included

After reading the details of the new offer (higher price and less features than my current provider) out of the envelope fell a lovely little notepad. They even mention in the text of the letter that they have included a little gift from “us to you”. How touching. Perhaps it’s a wonderful random gift, possibly a little token of their appreciation for my prior 29 years of unbroken commitment as a customer. That commitment ended in 2007 after 7 futile months of trying to get them to get my broadband service operating at even half of the rate they advertised and billed me for every month.

What it will take

Oh no Bell I cannot be bought out for a measly 20 page note pad, even if you print my name on it. I would however reconsider my service provider if you thought about dishing out some fast foreign cars or at the very least a new Moleskine Squared Notebook with my name on the cover—Not!

I am so glad you took the time to write

The sordid tale

The history of Nortel is long (founded in 1895) and fascinating. You can see the time line here and read a bit more of the history here. But the real meat of the situation that transpired on the final days prior to bankruptcy is covered in Bagnall’s article here. A great read for anyone trying to understand what the board had to deal with in the final days.

The touchtone symphony

Hi, I’ve been with you a long time

A recent survey by Ernst and Young, related to telecom, providers ranked the number one risk to telecom providers as Losing ownership of the client. Does this fact make any sense in your business and experience? We see this risk every day in both dealing with our clients and with our vendors dealing with us. We’ve had long term relationships with many providers. Their interest in us, as customers, has waxed and waned but it has never been consistent. This is just not a rationale and sustainable approach in a world of increasing competition.

The E&Y report can obtained here and it makes for some great reading as a back drop to your planning for 2010. We suggest that if you are involved with long term planning this is required reading. An additional article written by Tamara Monosoff has some very practical advice can be found over at Entrepreneur.com.

In our last post we talked about the activities that can assist in developing an operational budget plan. Today we look at the types of plans you may be involved with and the reasons why you need to understand this.

What’s the plan?

All planning cycles follow a similar path in terms of content. What varies are the actual forms that these plans take. Some very small companies will only develop an operational business plan. this might be OK but it may also not be enough for other uses and needs of the business. Plans that you, as a small business, might be asked for are; Investment Plans (investors), Strategic Plan (customers), Operational Plan (banker) among others.

Traditional planning requires businesses to look at the following;

In our work we often assist companies in thinking through the above topics. The actual business budget will monetize the last three items on the list. It attempts to address the question of;

what will be financially achieved if the the Key Results Indicators, Objectives, and Actions will be quantified and are incorporated within the budget plan?

Other sources

A recent podcast by Ian Portsmouth of Profit Magazine covered a number of these issues via interviews with various professionals in this field.

It’s annual budget time again for those of you who budget on the calendar. A typically painful effort for many people, though usually self inflicted. There are ways to make this difficult but necessary effort at least a bit more palatable. We’ve commented before about budget preparation and this contribution is going to focus on some ways to assist you in structuring your budget preparation.

Five pitfalls to effective budgeting

1. Attempting to budget at a detailed level without detail support data—In most cases budgeting at a higher level that your accounting systems record at is OK. IN many cases attempting to get a forecast of minuscule or detailed line items is complete waste of time. Set a threshold or exclude specific line item detail to assist in getting your budget done efficiently.
2. Becoming too formulaic—in a number of engagements we have worked with companies to assist them in getting financial plans and budgets prepared. In many instance there is a feeling that a budget can be driven entirely by formulas. This ’spreadsheet’ mentality causes many companies to eliminate the sober second look at the numbers and their relationship to reality.
3. Allowing for a ‘free fall’ budget—all too often we see that, in creating budgets, companies do not define the backdrop to the preparation. The strategy and it’s ultimate implications are often discussed at a high level but never effectively communicated at the working level of budget creation. All strategy implicitly defines certain expectations, constraints and objectives these must be visited in the creation of the budget.
4. Boiling the ocean—too frequently we see that well intentioned budgets are attempting to be all inclusive of everything that might possibly affect the company. While a noble effort it generally is a misguided strategy better that you develop an encompassing contingency than to try to detail all of the stuff you might run into.
5. Placing budget control in the hands of those who make decisions—all too often we see that folks who have developed budgets just don’t put the control of those budgets in the hands of the people whose decisions directly effect the results. The rule here is to budget at the level where at least 50% of the included costs or revenues are decided upon. Make decision makers accountable for the financial results if they significantly contribute to them.

Typical Types

Budgets come in many types but the two that mostly are relied upon in the corporate world are;

• year-over-year (incremental) where prior years results are modified by some expectation of a combination of price (inflation), growth and productivity, and
• zero based budgeting (ZBB) where each budgeted line item is assumed to be based upon a zero start level and each revenue and expenditure has to be justified upon it’s own merit.

There is no one correct way but in many cases a combination of both is effective. Existing business may use incremental and new business uses ZBB. In any case if your busget is due soon you best use of effort is to get it done soon and manage it effectively.

Telcordia today announced that it had reached an agreement with Hydro One Telecom (HOT) to provide increased Operational Support Systems for the Canadian Broadband provider.

One to watch

In this fast paced world of telecom OSS it has been interesting to watch the progress of Telcordia. They have for some time been an on-again-off-again proposition. A number of years ago they assembled a remarkable suite of OSS product offerings and developed the “order to cash” model. We had anticipated that this would place them in the forefront of OSS providers and it’s done them well— they recently received recognition in the Software 500 awards;

• Top 10 in Overall Software & Services Growth, and
• Top 10 in Companies $100 Million - $1 Billion in Revenue categories.

It will be interesting to watch as this relationship unfolds. Read additional news about this.

We Sherlock for you

Speed dial another time and this time I record the call to get all of the digits. Telephone service is predictable so this mystery should be solved shortly. I record the call three times and here’s what it gets to;

1. Call number 1: 800-23-711-409-3944
2. Call number 2: 500-31-711-409-3944
3. Call number 3: 200-56-711-409-3944

Random pattern of digits to the first five characters but could that be an NPA then NXX and number? I check out the NPA lookup for 711 and direct hit! The NPA is an area code reserved for Telecommunications Relay Services;

Telecommunications Relay Service (TRS) is a telephone service that allows persons with hearing or speech disabilities to place and receive telephone calls.

Now the numbers being dialed always ring busy so I cannot tell if they are intended to go to that actual 711 number location or if it’s dialing something else. Hmmm need my trusty DTMF decoder. While it’s possible that my DTMF decoder is on the fritz (not used for many years, though it tested good on my phone) it recorded what were, at best, random dialed numbers. So mystery remains…I hate being foiled on a case!

Oh please!

While he had an opportunity to evaluate and critically review the proposed rules that the FCC proposed some time ago he chose instead to carry on about how it would negatively impact the ROI of carriers and stifle innovation. Arguments that the telecom industry have dragged out over everything that challenged them to action in the past decades. It would seem to us that he has not raised any serious argument against the four rules proposed by the FCC but really has zoned in on the additional rules added by chairman Julius Genachowski;

1. Prevent Internet access providers from discriminating against particular Internet content or applications, while allowing for reasonable network management,
2. Ensure that Internet access providers are transparent about the network management practices they implement.

We too have some serious concerns about Genachowski’s rule 1 but there is a way to deal with it. Discuss the issue in a rational manner by addressing the implications and shortcomings of the proposal. By continuing to dish out the regular telecom invective Seidenberg gives the impression he and Verizon have something to hide.

Additional media coverage

Find out what other news sites say about this.
The FCC live broadcast of the committee meeting discussing net neutrality follows:

You might recall in prior post we discussed the concept of the Decision Action Event Threshold (DATE). Check this out for a quick refresher course.

Delay relay

The essence of that post was to bring to the forefront that making wide reaching decisions is a good thing but that the delay time between the decision point and the full and complete effect of the decision was often long or unknown. Agile companies can get this down to perhaps months, ineffective ones perhaps greater than years!

Setting the scene

In our case study we monitored the progress of a crucial change to company policy of a rapidly growing high tech firm involved in the telecom sector. The company was about 125 total staff, they were spread over a number of commercial centers and traveled extensively. Significant numbers of travel expense spreadsheets were submitted for processing and the company was under pressure from it’s customers to constrain travel expenses, which were billed to clients.

Historically the company policy was one that allowed employees significant discretion with daily meal expenses. The company was considering a significant policy change on it’s reimbursement policy for travel expenses. They were moving from an actual cost based meal reimbursement to a fixed per diem. The president and senior team debated the alternatives and finally agreed to the revised policy. Immediately they had the policy change out in a mass emailing, with all the supporting rationale, and suggested that the change was important and should be implemented immediately.

It was at this point that we had the discussion with the president about how fast this change could be completed. He held firm that this would be done “100% in 4 to 6 weeks…” we held that the change would take at least five months given we had about a quarter to observe the pattern of behavior of the company.

The events unfold

Rather than pontificating about what happened you can see the results below;

At week 9 the president called us and mentioned that something was amiss. They had done all the right things that they had thought of and were still seeing a low success rate with the change. During week 10 we completed a full root cause analysis with the accounting staff. The results of this review led us to conclude that the main cause of erroneous reports were as follows;

Given the obvious results of the Root Cause Analysis we suggested some specific actions to be taken to address the most important to address the priorities in the errors;

1. Distribute the expense spreadsheets to all office document servers and pull old templates,
2. Rewrite the parts of the policy that were unclear and attach a quick guide to the spreadsheet,
3. Place the acceptable per diems into the spreadsheet as pull downs,
4. Allow exceptional cases to be documented in spreadsheet with approval process, and
5. Manually corrected spreadsheets which were submitted prior to policy distribution.

Given these recommendations, and the heightened sensitivity to the importance of this change, we then saw an escalation for the next five weeks. Not surprising since the adoption curve is pretty much a standard ‘S’ curve. What was a bit surprising was that it took the company a full 24 months to reach 100% correct. What was also remarkable was that they had achieved 80% success at the 15 week mark—much longer that anyone had expected. The president, in his original estimate, guessed at a DATE of 12%, we guessed at about 40% and in reality it was 46%.

What can be done?

Change at any time can be a tricky thing. Significant or far reaching changes must be handled effectively. Here are a few suggestions to make your changes happen quickly;

Communicate the proposed change quickly and clearly,
Eliminate any ambiguity in the communications,
Ensure that support tools (spreadsheets, documents, templates) are changed coincidentally,
Make the process of change easier than the status quo,
Communicate the progress of change.

What have you learned about change and what is the DATE in your company?

The Canuck 50

It’s refreshing to see that at least 50 of our companies actually managed to make it to the list. Most rankings such as these usually forget about anything north of the 49th. With five year growth rates exceeding 537 % (for the median) it is difficult for many companies to either get on the list and most importantly stay on the list for any period of time. We’ve commented before about the growth of our technology sector and still have reservations about the ability of the industry to recover in the long run.

The software industry was well represented with about 38% of the listings and the Telecom/Networking garnering about 16% of its brethren on the list. While past trends are not a predictor of the future you can rest assured that there will be pressure on most of these companies to continue their stellar growth. One more thing for the CEO to fret about…

2009 Fast 500 Top 5 Canadian Companies

Here is the full Canadian Listing or listen to their podcast.

Launch in 2010

It should only bode well for the planned launch in 2010 and may advance the start of service if DAVE can turn that cash into network and services. The company has been backed, up to this point, by John Bitove and Quadrangle Capital Partners who will most likely be happy to feel some financial relief and risk re-balancing as ING steps in to fund some of the roll out.

Wind me up?

Meanwhile over at Globalive, Wind Mobile is spending their money on defending their ownership structure in front of the CRTC and making youtube commercials;

and again,

and one more time,

So many domains—So little time

So among the usual suspects you would find the oldest domain being symbolics.com (a stunning 25 years in next March). Others represent a number IT and telco companies. One company that we’re surprised is not represented is CompuServe. Like many others we got our first taste of the rudimentary internet that existed in the early 1980 from providers like CompuServe. You can find the list of the oldest continuously registered domains here. A nostalgic  view indeed.

Make it so

The Finish government decreed that;

1. Broadband access has become a legal right,
2. All citizens will have access to at least 1Mbit/s internet service starting in July of next year, and
3. All citizens will have access to 100MBit/s by 2015.

Now put that in your pickled herring and chew on it.

Noteworthy or nuts?

We think this is noble set of objectives but one must look at the realistic nature of communications to determine if this is likely to be done. It seems to us that the laws of diminishing returns might plague those last two or three customers just kilometers outside of Utsjoki. It might cost an infinite amount of money to get that last customer. Is it really worth it for the country. Are there any people in Finland who are in the back woods just because they do not want to connect?

What about the 100MBit/s? Well it is possible, but again it is realistic? In a country about 3% the size of Canada, or just about 3/4 the size of Newfoundland and Labrador it might be possible to achieve goals like this but it will not be cheap or easy. The effort will have to make tradeoffs—reminding us of the the technology triangle of torture;

What’s our bogie?

Hey, if Finland wants to do it, great for them. We think North Americans would be better off if we upped the broadband penetration rate to include at least 90% of the citizens at at least 1Mbit/s by the end of 2010? What do you think? Read more about it here.

Just the facts

Not being network weenies we have to believe that Ericsson knows how to configure and operate an efficient network and that is covered in the overview of their method. In reading this report we gleaned the following;

1. Data could (should) cost less than C$2 per Gigabyte,
2. Mobile broadband is probably cheaper than DSL,
3. Economies of scale enable operators to move from 7.2Mbit/s to 21 Mbit/s i.e. 15% cost increase but 70% capacity increase,
4. The sweet spot seems to be about 2M subscribers,
5. Backhaul, Controller, Transport and Packet in aggregate costs are already cheaper than borscht.

You can also view a presentation which looks at the data (and introduces some more) in a summarized fashion.

Huh?

So can someone tell us why our broadband package cost us roughly $20 per GB? Seems someone is a bit overpriced?

I work with many senior leaders and am often amazed by their frustration at keeping track of all of their notes collected outside of their normal electronic environment. I usually coach them to follow a formula I’ve used successfully for years.

Good notes = low stress

While, more recently, I’ve migrated to keeping notes in a fully electronic format, many people that I coach take notes on paper. Often times a review of those notes, in response to a call for help about their information management will lead to an understanding of their frustration. They just need to follow a simple process to record and act on notes.

Rules for taking notes

1. Take all notes in one bound journal. Do not have an endless pile of individual sheets floating around your desk and briefcase. A bound journal is good, a spiral bound (or similar) will lay flat on a desk or table. Being a incurable draftsman I always used the classic Moleskine Squared Notebook—though lately the quality has been dropping. Take notes in a color which will photocopy and scan well. Black or dark blue is preferred.
2. Be legible when you write notes. It may be hours or days before you get back to the item so keep your intent clear.
3. Action oriented markups will keep you on track. Keep the rightmost 1cm (1/2 inch) of each page for action status. Indent lines which continue from a prior item of the same topic by 1cm (1/2 inch) on the left side. Use some of the sample status icons or create your own;
   • Action to be taken
   • Information to be provided to [name] (email, phone, fax, letter).
   • Information to be provided to you by [name] (email, phone, fax, letter).
   • Item to purchase
   • Blog idea
   • Skip line
4. Here’s my sample of notes I’ve taken:
   
5. Reading this stuff is straightforward. Anything with a vertical line through the rightmost column can be ignored as far as actions. Usually I cross out items with a vertical line also. So when you’re acting on items you can scan the vertical list and determine what can be done now. If items are delegated they should be marked as such—i.e. mark off the action you were to do and enter a new follow up for the delegate. Also I would place a date in the listing to reflect when new notes were entered. This was done to keep some chronological order even though it might skip a number of dates.
6. Full page done? Cross off the entire page in a diagonal corner to corner mark.
7. Backup? Just scan, photo, or photocopy the entire page (I do two pages showing) weekly of undone items. I routinely scanned pages and stored them by date of scan in a single folder by year.

Note taking styles

There are numerous styles of note taking. Some very famous and some very useful check out five styles here. Whatever your style the thing to remember is that you’re taking notes to get things done!

Rules, rules, rules

Within the first three months of taking this job, Genachowski commented that the four principles that the FCC developed for net neutrality;

Network operators cannot prevent users from

1. accessing lawful Internet content,
2. using applications, and
3. selecting and using services of their choice,
4. nor can they prohibit users from attaching non-harmful devices to the network.

needed some supporting principles so in a recent speech in September Genachowski proposed two additional principles;

1. Prevent Internet access providers from discriminating against particular Internet content or applications, while allowing for reasonable network management,
2. Ensure that Internet access providers are transparent about the network management practices they implement.

Seems logical to me and forms the basis of future policy discussion.

Fact Checking

He was quoted as making a few points that got our eyes rolling;

…federal fees firms pay to access the airwaves are unreasonable,…

a repeated message was Lord’s view that Ottawa charges too much - more than $4 billion for the entire industry the last year-and-a-half - for spectrum.

The fees that mobile carriers pay for their spectrum use was based upon the price that they bid for the license—if it’s unreasonable shame on them for bidding.

Canada is a world leader in wireless communication,

While I wish it were true, we are actually always a day late and a dollar more expensive. We stumbled and fumbled with GSM, lag behind the US in the introduction of new smartphones and just about never make it to the party in real advancements in mobile services.

industry pays steep fees for the public service companies are providing through new infrastructure and initiatives such as mobile amber alert technology and enhanced 9-1-1 service.

As it turns out customers pay all of these “steep” fees and do not see much in return.

We will need more spectrum,

Really? You might want to look at how efficiently you are using the spectrum right now. We suspect that much of the wireless spectrum out there is not being utilized to it’s fullest extent.

CWTA suggestions

Instead of having your president spend his time trying to spin us a good yarn about your great mobile services how about making some real changes to reflect what your customers want. Such as;

• Easy to understand service offerings,
• Long distance that reflects that most traffic is carried on wireline,
• SMS messages priced as data and
• data costs in line with the rest of the world.

Bonus question

Why does the Intelligent Communities Summit logo look like a shopping cart?

Make your pitch

It was rather inspiring to see the presentations of these three companies. Each of them presented in a unique manner and refreshed my enthusiasm for the resurgence of entreprenurialism that we truly need in OHANL.

Here’s the rundown from the presentations;

The company has raised $400K to date, seeking an additional $500K. This is an interesting company that is offering web based collaboration tools using SAAS. The service allows groups, organizations or companies to create ad hoc, secure intra and inter-networks and expand these networks on the fly. Secret sauce=allows secure controlled connections to other groups and the internet at large. Maybe you could spend a bit of time on your website to provide potential investor’s or users some information—if you’re going to be a web service don’t start with a dead end.

The company has raised $115K to date, now needs $500K-$1M. This company is taking medical technology (ultrasonics) into the factory floor. They have technology that can be bolted onto feed pipes in factories and can measure, at a molecular level, the makeup of the pipe contents. Not exciting enough you think? Just wait, it has huge opportunities for the cost saving, efficiencies and quality in making everything from butyl rubber, alternative fuels to (my favorite) beer! Secret Sauce=They have a worldwide patent in progress. You need more than a logo on your website!

(Sounds a lot like ColdFX hmmm?) Having raised $1.5M to date they are looking for $500K to $2M more. This company has gone into the area of testing for Macular Degeneration a disease that strikes us as we age and is genetically marked. They’ve done a really smart thing in locking down the IP for this specialization.

Its a simple process;

1. a specialist orders a test,
2. patient provide a saliva swab from a test kit,
3. kit is sent to one of two labs in North America,
4. labs do test,
5. results dispatched to patient’s doctor,
6. $500/test paid for by medicare, private plan or patient; Ka-Ching!

Sectret Sauce=IP Licensed exclusively.

Great companies with wonderful potential and a great day all around.

Customer Service leverages OSS & BSS

A site we follow has published an interesting read on the connection between systems and improving customer service. You can check it out at Telesperience. The article clearly covers the territory that relates underlying support systems to the customer experience.

Some more for the list

In addition to the areas mentioned in the article there are a few items that need some further consideration.

The three areas we believe that carriers fall short of leveraging their value to customers is;

1. Order Management—in many cases orders are not managed as a continuous flow. Updates are lacking, information is missing and the result is a missed commitment leading to a poor customer service experience. A small number of great OSS companies provide an overarching process flow for orders that telecoms should adopt.
2. Service Representative Flexibility—In many cases service reps have access to your customer information ONLY while you are on the call. For us this routinely happens on service calls. This is patently stupid and leads to much wasted time for a customer. Is it that hard to allow a representative to take down the call information, complete the research, fix the problem and then call the customer back?
3. Clear Display of Service Costs—In more than one instance, in the process of requesting service changes, we have discovered that the service rep, and our own information from the carrier’s web site, did not provide any clear delineation of service charges. In at least three times this year we requested a particular service, were provided with a service charge, and had the service activated. Later we found that the service charges were wrong, and in one instance the service conflicted with another on our plan. These were resolved after numerous hours on the phone (see item 2) above.

So what’s your opinion? Is customer service improved by good support systems?

We commit

Signing up for a .tel domain is rather a no-brainer. A number of providers will happily sell you a unique domain that can be used to display your information. Filling in the data is also straight forward, .tel is both a registry and a micro-domain. All data resides in a single site and your data entry is largely fill in the blank. You can see our .tel domain at Shulist Group .tel site. A cool feature is that the site will allow you to extract a vcard for your address book. You can also control who gets your data.

Domain squatters

While all possible steps we’re taken to allow legitimate domain owners to get access to their names (corporations had months to register before the floodgates were opened) it seems that a good number of domain names were scooped up on spec. The problem will be to get a short name so that it is easy to distribute.

Get it now

So if you want your own .tel domain you should sign up soon. It’s one more way to connect with the world.

Free as in free beer

Here’s the scenario;

• it’s 1980 and competitive interconnect is a reality for premises equipment,
• not a competitive wind is blowing over the long distance telecom landscape in Canada,
• mid-level managers congregate in an oddly located Four Season’s Hotel in Belleville, Ontario,
• amid hushed tones of well behaved telecom managers the team leader drops a bomb in the room
• The task at hand is to determine what to do between now and 1999 when worldwide long distance charges are eliminated?

This event alone was the single reason I decided that employment at the incumbent telecom company would not be the work of my life. The handwriting was on the wall for a fully competitive market and I wanted to be in the fray.

It nearly came to pass

In 2000 I was one of a fortunate few who manged to be part of the first trial of free VOIP calls internationally. A small service located in the UK provided access to local calls in many cities in both the UK and Europe. The service barely worked and its quality was as bad as open wire in the 1930’s.

Enter Skype in 2003 providing computer to computer VOIP services. Again it was flaky but the company had the persistence to make it work in the long term. Calls to Australia, Europe and anywhere in the US are mostly clear as a bell—and (mostly) free!

What’s strange is…

So what’s so weird about that? Nothing but the fact that now folks are paying their wireless carriers comparatively exorbitant sums of money for local calls, text messages and voicemail. Who would have thought that?

The facts—just the facts

The situation is being aggravated by the press who have had a run of reports speculating that the root cause of the situation was employees overloaded with Blackberry messages. Now all of us smartphone users probably pay too much attention to our devices but to blame the termination of many lives on them is just bad journalism. Where are the facts? On what did you base your article?

To read more about the situation check these news links.

Upstarts at the gate

It was a bit refreshing to hear that network monitoring start-up Vineyard Networks from Kelowna, BC is making quite a stir in the industry. Theirs is a disruptive approach to a rather under-served market—small and medium business. There solution is offered in two flavors;

1. NetCore on Demand, a cloud based solution requiring a monthly subscription fee for small business, and
2. NetCore on Site, a traditional in-house server solution.

In either case you get an network monitoring tool to assist in managing a growing network.

Information shortage

While their website provides you an opportunity for an overview of the services it seems they ran out of time to make it work fully. There is no information in the Resources area which makes impossible to understand what is involved with the process of getting your devices online. Also the link to “request more Information” alas goes to the endless bin bucket.

We’ll keep our readers posted when we hear more from this company.

Go directly to jail

In a recent press announcement the Business Software Alliance (BSA) announced it had reached a settlement with twelve small companies over infractions of software use. While the actual fines received were not huge, they represent a loss that some companies would have difficulties in dealing with. The major cost to many small companies is the legal representation and the resources required to complete a reactive audit and the related corrective measures.

What to do?

Companies need to have a controlled process to managed software distribution, installation and control. Here are a few points to consider;

At the desktop / laptop

1. Maintain Proof of Purchase records for all software,
2. Standardize all desktop/laptop software by user group,
3. Distribute all computing devices with appropriate software installed,
4. Establish and utilize an update server for recommended updates and upgrades,
5. Allow the installation of required (unique) software through a management approval process,
6. Use a server based scanning tool to audit compliance,
7. Take action immediately upon finding non-compliant applications.

For servers and developers

1. Apply all of the rules that are used by desktop / laptop,
2. Develop a process to integrate open source applications or code (if required),
3. Understand the rules which apply to open source software,
4. Establish processes to ensure compliance while using open source,

What the experts say

The process of Software Asset Management and is covered in a number of standards;

# ISO 27001:2005 Information Technology - Security Techniques - Information Security Management Systems - Requirements and ISO/IEC 17799:2005 Information Technology - Security Techniques - Code of Practice for Information Security Management.

At its basic level it involves the following:

1. Identification of all software applications and code.
2. Verifying the software including licenses, usage, and rights.
3. Identifying gaps that may exist between what exists on the installations, and the licenses or use authority, and the rights of usage.
4. Taking action to close any gaps.
5. Recording the results in a centralized location with Proof Of Purchase records.

Some resources you can use to assist in audits can be found at the BSA website.

Is your company compliant?

Don’t wait for some outside party to knock on your door before you take that first step. If you are responsible for any part of software licensing or management in your company act now.

Just string ‘er up there Ivan

In metropolitan areas it was not unusual to see telecom cables and DROP WIRE (you heard it—drop wire) run from building to building. It caught our attention when we were in the proximity of the Soviet era apartment blocks. You know the ones—one design—thousands built—cheap as borscht.

The photo to the right is on a major street in St. Petersburg showing numerous street fixture and transit cabling and also telecom cables and drop wires running between building.

We Sherlock it out

We followed the drop attachments and found it what we knew as “Z drop wire”, some of it was “NEZ”, thats a multi-conductor with an enclosed support cable. Some of it came from Nortel???

We thought you already did that?

It seems that the Canadian telecom providers need to finally formalize what would otherwise be considered average customer service. The Code, not quite of biblical proportions, is supposed to make consumers of telecom services feel all warm and fuzzy that we are being looked after. Here’s the abbreviated version;

1. Provide their customers with complete details on the rates, terms and coverage offered in each of their plans.
2. Help ensure that their customers understand the terms of their contracts.
3. Communicate with their customers in a way they understand.
4. Ensure that their advertising is clear.
5. Protect their customers’ rights when they must change contract terms.
6. Provide ready access to customer service.
7. Safeguard their customers’ personal information.
8. Resolve complaints efficiently, fairly and courteously.

For those of you with not much else to do you can read the the full release here and a complete explanation of the Code here.

We’re feeling so much better now—aren’t you?

What to do, what to do?

Tekelec, a network gear provider, recently released a report that looks at the futue of SMS. They have assessed a number of different cases;

1. Optimizing the Existing SMS Infrastructure,
2. Managing Application-Originated Traffic,
3. Protecting the SMS Business,
4. Delivering Mobile Advertising,
5. Offering SMS Personalized Services,

While no deep analysis they do have something that provides at least some talking points. You need to provide them a minimum of your personal information but you can get the report without any great hassle.

Our issues with SMS

We often find the way carriers look at SMS as laughable (it would be if it didn’t cost). There are a few customer aggravations that exist in our world of SMS;

1. SMS is the most expensive data rate in the universe
2. SMS messages are a best effort service and as such there is no way to determine the level of service.
3. At least 5% of our SMS have service related issues (late delivery, non-delivery)
4. Carriers make it nearly impossible to do SMS-to-email and the reverse.

What issues do you face with the success of SMS?

Where oh where

With the convenience of 411 access using voice commands, the ubiquity of web access on mobiles and great tools such as Google over SMS who needs a book?

Drive by phone books

Further, it seems to us that the indiscriminate dumping of phone books inside apartment buildings (counted ~300 at a family friend’s apartment lobby—the books have been there more than three months), delivering two or more in urban areas, and using drive-by in rural areas is a completely stupid environmental action.

Bin there, dump that

What do you do with white/yellow books you do not need? Us, we toss them in the blue bin. Someone ought to tell the companies that produce them—or maybe the folks who advertise in them.

CVCA outlined the sad tale of the dwindling investments that companies are experiencing this year. We wish the news was better but it is not!

Street cred

Furthermore it is reflected in the discussion we’ve had with a number of small companies trying to get a foothold in a turbulent market. The CVCA had a number of good suggestions for both the Federal and Provincial Governments and hopefully someone there will actually be listening.

Required reading

For more detailed information there is an interesting document that was presented at the CVCA 2009-05-28 conference comparing venture funding worldwide, an interesting read.

It reminded us of the the re-branding of Allstream, some years ago, from its predecessor company AT&T Canada. We recall fondly of the hushed conversations, the coffee shop huddling and the secrecy that ensued. We also were lucky enough to retrieve a paper napkin (totally fake BTW) from a coffee joint that outlined the thought process in that instance. For nostalgia’s sake here it is again…

Read more about the name change here.

Half measures

In recent measures, Ofcom initiated a survey of the country’s ISP only to find that in selling service offered as “up to XX MB/s” the actual delivery fell far short of the mark. After some 60 million readings at a 1,600 homes (hmm, that’s 37,000 reading per home) the results were abysmal.

It seems that one could expect that ISPs should be able to offer a Service Level Agreement that ensures an offering range (i.e. 5MB/s to 8MB/s). Although in our experience all ISPs will attempt to use any statement to lock in a customer, then create enough weasel worded clauses in the service description that they could drive a fleet of trucks through.

You can review the entire Ofcom study here and review their suggested “Code of Conduct” for broadband providers. It’s rather weakly worded but at least in the right direction.

Closer to home

While our analysis of our own broadband connection does not parallel these findings you can see how your ISP compares with the rest of the world here.

I know what your bank code is

For many year I volunteered my time to a charitable effort which held a monster yard sale once per year. I was routinely buttonholed into getting the truckloads of donated computer equipment in running order. We generally would not have to do much to the equipment as we just usually booted the machines from a CD version of Linux and sold it as is. On some occasions we would have to actually do some Sherlocking on the machine’s data to get the machines to operate.

In these circumstance I was regularly astounded to learn that these machines contained some of the following;

1. Quickbooks files with no passord protection,
2. Bank access from Quickbooks,
3. Credit card records including PDF versions of credit applications,
4. Word documents of passwords usually called “password.doc”,
5. Personal information which could be used for social engineering, and
6. Personal photographs which probably should not have seen the light of day.

And this is only the short list. We generally reformatted hard drives and installed Linux on machines such as these. Though I am not sure why anyone would not spend some effort (or pay someone to do it for them) in getting the individual computers clean prior to giving it away.

I know who you talk to

The same holds true for mobile phones. On Friday, last week, I received a call on my mobile and pulled off to a vacant parking lot by the side of the road, since I knew the call was going to be long. During the call I noticed that there was a mobile phone on the pavement. After the call ended I picked it up and took it home thinking that I could get it to it’s rightful owner.

The battery was dead but improvising a makeshift power source by hooking two AA batteries in serial with some alligator clips to the battery terminal, on the phone, allowed the phone to be turned on.

No password protection was required, though I am not sure its available on this phone (I am not that familiar with the LG brand). The owner’s phone number was evident, but upon calling it, found it had been disconnected. There were numerous incoming and outgoing calls registered in memory and a list of phone numbers in the address book. One listing for a bank was obviously a transit, an account number and a PIN. Do people never learn?

LG call home

I returned the phone to the local store of the carrier (in this case Bell) who promised me they would get it to the rightful owner.

Cleaning your data trail

Lesson to learn: If you plan to give away (or throw away) equipment or are prone to lose small objects you ought to;

1. Make sure that you’ve done all you can to protect your personal information,
2. Learn how to set up device passwords, and
3. Learn how to clean an old device of data before you dispose of it.

1. Choose a phone that synchs with your PC based address book, or
2. select a phone which will back up your data to an SD card in a format that can be read by a PC, or
3. buy a USB based SIM card reader, or
4. back up your SIM card with a product such as Simkey Simcard Backup.

Paper is so last millennium.

The five are;

• André Chagnon (Business Visionary & Builder of Vidéotron);
• the Honourable Francis Fox (Canada’s Minister of Wireless Communications);
• Donald A. Chisholm (Father of the Digital World);
• Colin A. Franklin (Engineer of Canada’s Satellite Program) and
• Israel (Sruki) Switzer (Cable Technology Pioneer and Advocate).

A truly great lineup. You can visit the Canadian Telecom Hall of Fame here.

Programming 101

In a stroke of corporate genius, Etistalat installed their own client software (alarm bells ringing in my head) in more that 100,000 Blackberry devices to avoid “issues” in 2G to 3G hand offs. The whole thing came to a grinding halt when the Etisalat designed “patch” used only one registration server - and many mobile users did so at the same time causing their mobiles to constantly retry. This ultimately caused rapid battery rundown.

Who ya gonna call?

Seems that some folks in the know identified the update as spyware that could possibly monitor both email and SMS messages. Remnants in the source code may indicate that the spyware could have been designed by (or using tools from) a US company, SS8, whom we wrote about before. SS8 is not talking.

RIM also disclaimed any participation;

“RIM did not develop this software application and RIM was not involved in any way in the testing, promotion or distribution of this software application,” it said. “Independent sources have concluded that the Etisalat update is not designed to improve performance of your BlackBerry hand-held, but rather to send received messages back to a central server.”

All the news you can possibly shovel

You can read about the entire flyblown tale here.

It’s not that difficult

Its amazing that many senior level executives have absolutely no clue how to organize a meeting to start, progress, and end successfully. If you’re not good at something then find someone who is (see related post) and have them do it. That’s the MO for a successful executive.

Check your power at the door

Bob Sutton, a prof. at Stanford is routinely a no nonsense blogger and has written about the conduct of senior people who take advantage of other colleagues time and resources for no good reason and generally from bad management. Its a great read and maybe a link discretely given to an unorganized boss.

Another perspective that can be considered is an article written about a Google exec, Melissa Mayer, who in 2006 was profiled by Business Week. I’ve kept that article and referenced it regularly in my coaching work with other leaders. While I am not sure that my work style can match Melissa’s “7 minute meetings” I found a lot of good ideas in her many methods of getting meetings accomplished effectively.

Ten rules for meetings

Over the years I’ve tried to become more effective at running my own meetings and coaching others to do just the same. In general I’ve found the following to be effective;

1. Create an agenda showing topic, purpose, time scheduled and person prime,
2. Send the agenda out well in advance, e.g. for a 3 hour meeting 7 days is appropriate,
3. Organize the facilities and logistics prior to the meeting start,
4. Begin on time, set the tone that allows for required participation but is also time bounded,
5. Assign the responsibility of taking minutes to  a capable person,
6. Ensure that decisions and required follow-on actions get recorded,
7. Cover the agenda as planned, keep to the time line for each item,
8. Sidebar important related items needing further time in another venue,
9. Complete the meeting as scheduled and thank all for participating, ask for meeting quality feedback,
10. Issue minutes within 48 hours.

In the event that meetings are impromptu or called in a crisis then you should still attempt to provide an agenda on a verbal basis at the point of invite. Review the agenda again at the start of the meeting and stick to the planned time.

Meetings are an inevitable part of human interaction. Good leaders run effective meetings—or not at all!

Whatever happened to baking a phone into a birthday cake? Read the entire tale here at Associated Press.

I want my model T

When North Americans started to use the motor car a hue and cry to regulate the use, speed, and operating locations was instituted in every city who thought they smelled a car. Onerous regulation and operating constraints could not stop the torrent of automobiles.

I want my fax machine

In the recent past, I recall the mass adoption of the fax machine (it replaced the TWX or Telex) which the carriers believed was “eating their lunch” since massive amounts of “data” was being transmitted on the voice network. In both cases obstructions, regulations and endless gnashing of teeth was not going to stop it. P2P is here to stay and will get bigger and more ubiquitous.

I want my work content

It seems to us that P2P is a significant opportunity for innovation within the world of collaboration. In our own work we have used a number of P2P applications for work with our clients such as;

1. Skype (communications)
2. Groove (file sharing and collaboration)
3. ICQ (communications)
4. WebDAV (File sharing)

The extent to which applications are being throttled by certain ISPs is ridiculous today. Our ISP provides a D/U of about 9MB/0.5MB on a regular non-P2P basis but in using almost any P2P collaboration tool we can barely get 5KB/S. They are not shaping traffic, what they are doing is throttling my P2P to not exceed a certain level of throughput. If they were truly shaping traffic then at some time during the course of twenty four hours I should approach my maximum D/U capability.

Network throttling newspeak

Some rather uninformed statements were being made today about the the use if P2P such as;

P2P applications are not time sensitive…

Users don’t notice traffic throttling…

It’s statements like this that demonstrate that most carriers and ISPs do not understand how far the use of P2P applications are integrated into business use. In the vast majority of cases our use of P2P is time sensitive. As a collaborative partner within a network of people working on multiple interconnected projects we need the most current data now, not in 17 hours.

You can listen to the CRTC hearings here . Hmmm, the CRTC might benefit from using some P2P collaboration tools to collect comments from listeners. An interesting source of P2P news and advancements is P2PNet.

Seaton, at the Canadian Telecom Summit as part of a panel discussing commented that;

The medium is no longer the message.

The crowd was noticably unsettled with that opinion. Though one can clearly see why that attitude is becoming more a reasonable assessment of the communications world. It is no longer important what medium a message gets to a customer, what is gaining importance is that the customer has an i

Filter spam & convert books

Our most recent attempt cleaning up comment spam is to install a version of re-Captcha which is an interesting Web 2.0 tool that uses the power of blog comments to convert published works to a digitized format. You can read about that unique process here.

Hopefully those of you who are posting normal comments will not see the gatekeeper as it should be transparent for legitimate comments.

Improved download

The new rate tested out quite nicely at Speedtest.net with a respectable comparative profile;

Notable was the significant improved rate over the average service from the other ISPs domestically and internationally.

I’ll trade 1 MB/s of that for…

Annoyingly on the other side of the equation is the goofy adherence to a limited upload speed ot 0.5MB/s;

Notable is the way we Rogers customers lag behind other ISPs in Canada and the rest of the world.

In our space all of our client work is provided via direct secure FTP, Torrents or collaboration servers and as a result of this piddly upload speed documents seem to take forever to get to where they need to be. We would gladly give up 1 - 2 MB/s of download speed for the commensurate change to our upload capability.

Rogers—are you listening—is anybody there?

My upload rate has fallen down and it can’t get up…

Brand name managers

The Tandem Expansion Fund will be lead by Charles Sirois and Brent Belzberg, both well experienced in the world of technolgy startups. It will start with seed funds from the Federal Government of C$75M.

Sirois said that they will ultimately have a much larger pool of funds available once institutional investors get on board;

…the target size is four or five hundred million and with that amount of money we believe we can do a very good job in the Canadian marketplace…

Not new money

It should be noted that while this is good news for tech firms in Canada it is not an expansion of government funding but rather an allocation of funds already earmarked in the 2008 budget. Nonetheless every dollar does help the industry.

Gimme a B…

While not specifically communicated, there appears an interest, by this fund, to look at investments in the range of C$ 10-40M which will put them in the “B” round of most companies. This will benefit larger start ups that need some extra help in getting over the market growth hurdles both domestically and internationally.

Name dropping

Now generally we’re not name droppers but in our past we’ve had the privilege of meeting about 1/3 of the names on the list and do have to agree that they are indeed significant players in their own right. An interesting read from all walks of Canadian business.

Howard Davis, in the telephone business, created the now famous art car which looks like a red touch-tone desk phone. If our memory serves us correctly it is a replica of a 1960’s 2500?

The Phonecar is street legal in Massachusetts and is now driven primarily in parades and shown in art car shows. You can get the whole story here.

If you have read any of our VC rants in the past you know we feel that venture funding in the telecom and communications sectors have dwindled down to nothing short of a drip feed.

Surprisingly upbeat

Recently a friend of ours (a Canadian expat) residing in Michigan attended a conference sponsored by the Michigan Growth Capital Symposium. She tipped us off to the proceedings of the conference. From her perspective, the tone of the sessions that she attended was uplifting. Even though the state of Michigan has seen some of it’s worst downturns, on the whole, local participants remained very upbeat. Further, she relayed the story of Marc Faucher, who as a panelist provided an interesting and compelling reason to look to US-Canadian investing - especially in early stage technology.

Good Conditions

Faucher is a partner of the Toronto-based BlackBerry Partners Fund and was speaking with enthusiasm when he said;

From a cross-border standpoint, we’re finding very good conditions for early-stage investments in telecom firms in Canada that we’ll bring down to the U.S. for deals as the companies mature.

It’s about time someone recognized the talent pool we have in this country and fostered it’s growth. While the government level incentives are not perfect they are generous and can be utilized with a degree of determination.

Read related

Tom Henderson of Crain’s Detroit Business has written an article covering this event also. You can also read more related articles here. On a more sobering note you might also want to to read the CVCA’s recent press release.

Failure to launch

Failure to fuel the expansion of network gear and support capabilities will undoubtedly assure the North American communications industry a seat in the nose-bleed section of the global arena.

Borden was a speaker at the Telemanagement Forum in Nice, France (mon Dieu! How we wished to return there this year) and we’ve read from afar the various proceedings. He was also interviewed by Light Reading Europe.

The event

The Entrepreneurial program has teams of four to six MBA students who investigate, select, and develop a business plan for a potential business. On 2009-05-08 all team coaches were down in London, ON to participate in the presentation of  the business plans from five of these teams.

Teamwork wins out

The event was humbling in that these teams had grabbed the ball and run with it. In fact the teams were so pumped on the opportunities that three of the five plan to run an actual business under the proposed model.

What was rather striking also was that the team’s requirements, as startups, were minuscule and in some cases had already been funded out of beg, borrow, friend and family. This was refreshing to see.

A call to action?

Think what country we could become if all universities and colleges considered the entrepreneurial spirit as an important value to foster?

More references

Some additional reading can be found here;
Ivey Entrepreneurial Blog, Subscribe to the Ivey Entrepreneurial Newsletter, BDC Entrepreneur Program, and the Canadian ACE Program.

Seems that Nepal Telecom is planning to install a mobile tower around base camp. This is a real boon to those of us who climb up and want to spend some time talking to our friends who just could not be there. Having climbed a few mountains of our own it seems that this is one more distraction to a very tough climb which will have marginal benefits. Here’s how we see most calls will go down;

Flatlander: Hello, Flatlander here. How can I help you?

Climber: Hey Flat…I…ugh…jus’…hold on.. ’til…I…get…my…breath.

Flatlander: What’s this are you some perv? What’s all this heavy breathing? Have’nt heard that since the mis-dialed 967 number. What gives?

Climber: Wait…I…ugh…adjust…tank.

Flatlander: Whoa! Who is this?

Climber: Yeah…I…jes’…made…it…top.

Flatlander: Kiss off wheezy and call some other rube!

And so it goes. You can also read about this triumph for rural telecom service here.

Bookishness

The first was a tiny book titled “Seven Days To Online Networking” written by Ellen Sautter and Diane Crompton. (caution: it’s one of a series of Help in a Hurry books - not as bad to be reading in the subway as those Idiot’s Guide to…). At any rate it covers some interesting ground about getting your ideas and name out in public places. A quick informative read if you’ve never jumped into the online networking game. For those more experienced it may be an OK refresher.

Blogishness

Then hours later I stumbled across an interesting post over at Telesperience. The focus on telecom professional using Twitter is an compelling strategy. I’ve dabbled with Twitter and feel that it is an interesting opportunity for furthering your reach. This blog is a step by step to guide you to using Twitter. Now getting to greatness on Twitter that’s the hard part.

Creativity falling behind?

The Globe and Mail recently ran an article by Sara Diamond (of the Ontario College of Art and Design) that questions whether OHANL is falling behind in our ability to both deploy the technology and perhaps create leadership within the industry.

Anyone care?

I’ve been concerned for years over the erosion of innovation in Canada. A small few organizations are worried about this also. The MaRS group, an innovation centre in Ontario has been attempting to lift the entrepreneurial spirit up. The Ivey School of Business last year created the position of Entrepreneur in Residence and has developed their MBA and HBA program to include an entrepreneurial component.

As a country are we really doing what it takes to develop creative leadership in the telecom industry—I think not.

Hold the presses…

I just notice that over at Telecom Trends , Mark Golberg, a long time friend, has commented on this G&M article also.

I have had the privilege of working with a number of excellent Executive Assistants (EA) who tried very diligently to keep me on the straight and narrow. From these folks I learned a great deal of how to make that relationship work. Most of the foundation of an Assistant’s success in managing with an executive comes from effective commitment management.

The area most likely to be the focus of this is calendar management and related areas. What I have learned is that by setting up rules that allow both the executive and the assistant to work collaboratively, but not trip over one another, maximizes a EA/boss relationship. What follows is:

Shulist’s Ten Rules for Executive Assistants
to convince the world that their Boss is really in charge
( when we know that EA’s run the Universe)

1. Who gets to see your boss is important

The executive will provide the following lists:

• A list of folks who can always get in their calendar (This is the Always List = Customers, Boss, Spouse etc.).
• A list of folks who can get in their calendar on a recurring basis (This is the Regular List = Subordinates, peers).
• The rest must have a reason that is crucial to the executive’s success (a comet will strike the earth in ten minutes etc.).

Make sure these lists are regularly updated

2. Recognize the practical constraints.

Some of the obvious items to look out for are:

• Enter all holidays in to the calendar; know about holidays in other places your boss travels to (and take that into account).
• Be knowledgeable about the various time zones your boss travels and works through. Make sure this is accounted for.
• No double booking of any appointment is allowed. Resolve any conflict immediately.
• The next seven days should have no ‘To be Determined’ (TBD), or ‘To be Announced’ (TBA) information. Resolve these.
• If you book meetings “back-to-back” ensure there is enough time between to get from place to place, collect info, food, etc.
• Ensure you know the working window of your boss for any given day (Is your boss available from 08:00 to 17:00? Does your boss have different hours?)

While the world does not need to know about your boss’ personal life, you should know critical personal commitments that affect availability.

3. Regularly scheduled

Routine items must be mapped out at least a month in advance:

• Signing documents.
• Reviewing information.
• If you screen mail or reading material, then block the time to do so.
• Routines that are communicated and predictable are effective. Schedule your activities and ensure they are known:Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, Annually

4. Appointments

For appointments requested in the next 24 hours confirm with each other verbally (or by some other positive electronic means).

5. Trip Return

Allow your boss two hours of free time immediately after extended travel (to allow for trip notes, expenses, catch up).

6. Open / Closed Door

If your boss has the door closed, allow for no interruptions (shoot to kill), the exception may be the Always List — just wound them.

7. Meetings

Meetings that your boss is chairing must be started on time. It is your job to ensure this happens. Leadership is about setting examples and you can assist in that with your boss. For meetings he is attending you must ensure that he gets there on time. If your boss is responsible to issue minutes suggest that you attend to take notes (much better that than be given a few pages of scrawled notes to make sense out of two days later).

8. Commitments

In all cases, if you make a commitment for your boss:

• Recognize that you wield a lot of power by affiliation with your boss. So, when you make a commitment, you are doing so as an extension of your boss.
• You must know EXACTLY what the purpose is, request formal confirmation if possible and establish what your boss is expected to bring (reference material, minutes, presentation etc.).
• Have supporting material organized for the meeting in advance.

9. Calendar Shorthand

When you enter appointments into a calendar (electronic or otherwise) use a standard, consistent method:

Rules for Calendar Management

10. Your Boss Time

Schedule your time with your boss regularly - you are a critical part of his team. Your career development and the issues that affect your success need airtime also. Set the agenda and ensure that you can cover the issues that are important.

Cigar anyone?

Now in my experience suing a law firm is like smoking a cigar in a dynamite store. It might be OK for the first few puffs but eventually you’re going to get your ass blown up and your wallet will disappear. At any rate it seems the presiding judge thought similarly;

Mr Justice Andrew Smith ruled that, despite finding Linklaters’ early advice to the claimant was expressed negligently, it did not bear any loss to the client and therefore awarded nominal damages of just £5.

You can read more of the whole sordid tale at LegalWeek.

The founders of this conference, Mark Goldberg and Michael Sone have been friends of ours for a number of years. The conference draws people from all areas of the telecom world and is one of the best places to rub shoulders with senior telecom representatives.

Mining for Data Gold

They’ve asked us to moderate a session exploring the recent trends in data mining on June 15th at 14:15. The following companies have agreed to discuss this topic;

• Amdocs,
• HP,
• Colloquy,
• ConceptWave,
• TTI Telecom, and
• Redknee

We’d be interested in any questions you might want to pose to the participants, and you can do so by attending the conference in person or by sending us a comment to this post. The full conference agenda is here.

What’s under the hood (bonnet)?

It’s got it all:

• 2.8″ multi-touch screen
• Fingerprint reader for owner identification and phone lock
• Numeric keys with high quality tactile response
• E-mail and Internet application
• 5 megapixel camera
• Wi-Fi for network connection
• Sapphire Glass
• 18k rose gold
• Kinetic rotor system (auxillary power generator)

I’m liking it since it has such a SteamPunk look about it. I think it would have looked good in the hands of Captain Nemo or George of The Time Machine fame.

Buy it now

Available only through Ulysse Nardin authorized retailers and their website. Gotta go get me one…

See more weird telecom posts.

In a recent article in the Guardian journalist Richard Wray wrote a story about the Amazon’s departure from the list of companies who originally were part of Phorm’s service database. Doing so eliminates the opportunity for Phorm’s application to match a consumer with an action involving Amazon.

Trust=value proposition

In our perspective companies, with whom you do business, have an (legal, moral?) obligation to maintain a standard of privacy (yes, we know it varies by country, and unfortunately by legal interpretation) that not only covers your private details, but also what business you have enacted with the company. This should include your browsing habits, your interests and other collected data.

Vote with your feet (or credit card)

Companies that respect this will have our continued business and those who don’t do so at the peril of losing a vast number of consumers who are increasingly more wary of being the brunt of  dipping into identity trails for commercial purposes. The mobile world is even more prone to actions such as this since who would take the the time to read a EULA or a Privacy policy on a mobile we browser?

Over the past years we have stopped doing business with a number of companies who, in our opinion, mis-used information we have given them under the privacy policy identified on their websites.

We had commented on this story before and it was really no surprise when BT continued to expand the mandate of Phorm after it’s clandestine trials. The press has jumped on this with both feet. You can read the article penned by Richard Wray of the Guardian titled Phorm: UK faces court for failing to enforce EU privacy laws. The EU has rigid privacy rules when it comes to telecom. The rules require;

…member states to ensure confidentiality of the communications and related traffic data by prohibiting unlawful interception and surveillance unless the users concerned have consented, while the EU data protection directive specifies that user consent must be “freely given, specific and informed.

While the final behavioral ads are not active (as far as anyone knows) it seems that the EU has had enough of the polite letter exchange with the UK authorities and has received enough data to raise the flag of concern.

We laughed in 2002 when in Minority Report the fictional retail world portrayed was able to target individual users at the point of sale. Seven years later we are laughing less and growing more concerned now that we are being seen as mules for more and more advertising spam. Telecom is an industry that sees more personal data than most and it seems bent on harvesting all it can from the carriage of that data.

What do you think about the increasing targetted ads based upon your private data?

Promoted beyond competence

The Inc. article titled The Peter Principle Lives On brought back all too many memories of that troubled time. TMWOBC was a senior level bureaucrat that had little or no field experience outside of some corporate auditing jobs. He was thrust in the the support role for the largest field services organizations within the business. This might have been all peachy if he actually realized he did not have a clue. Unfortunately he considered himself a bit of an expert on everything that came across his desk.

Work in spite of the jerk

Working in spite of him was a regular challenge. He could not remember from day to day the policy recommendations he had made, the financial decisions he had implemented and the scope of our organization’s mandate.

Fortunately for me and my peers we were generally strong managers and were able to get the job done without too much of his interference. So how did my peers and I find ways to move forward?

1. We formed a loose pact of like-minded people wishing to get things done and supported each other in dealing with the chaos of the the boss,
2. We discovered that all decisions needed to be written down and would do so religiously as soon as THMWOBC made them,
3. In presenting information to him we had to;
   
   1. Remind him what we had last discussed (create a historical reference point),
   2. Update him the new information, strategy, action (what’s changed),
   3. Tell him what new action, communication or effort was required (What’s to be done).
4. When TMWOBC had to attend critical meetings alone we prepared him with “talking notes” in a fully indexed binder and highlighted areas that we needed his support and position to be clear on, and
5. We made a point of debriefing with him after every meeting or conference to ensure we had a full understanding of what commitments he had made. These were then formalized and delivered back to him in writing.

I cannot guarantee that these methods will work for you but they did for us, and each and every one of us managed to move out from under his organization, without so much as a scratch on our careers.

Recently we were archiving some notes from a prior consulting engagement and having thumbed through the mounds of data and reports, that made up the effort, we stumbled across some statistical results that caused us to pause. Have you ever considered how to measure the effectiveness of a business in making and implementing decisions?

The time it takes to implement decisions in any business varies according to many factors. This might include the nature of the decision, the importance of it, the number of people affected and so on. There is no magical lever to pull that will apply a decision immediately. The results of extended decision implementation in this day and age can, of course, be significant.

Measuring thresholds

In order to adequately measure the effectiveness of decision application one must first define it. In that respect we’ll one more time wade into the path of carelessness and suggest our own definition of the Decision Action Threshold Event (DATE);

The measure of time, expressed as a percentage of a full year, between when a decision is made, at the senior corporate levels of a business, and when it gets enacted by the last affected person in the chain of the organization.

The plot

In our work, with this particular client, we were assisting them in their pursuit of a comprehensive business strategy and improving their ability to communicate this strategy to their employees. It seemed their history was checkered with false starts and business plans that collected dust upon shelves. They were looking at ways to change this, get messages out and shorten the communications cycle to all employees. In order to assist them we looked into how decisions had been made in the past and took a couple of seemingly innocent corporate level decisions and followed them to a natural conclusion.

The Facts

What we found was the the DATE was nearly at a 50% level. It took them nearly six months to get decision implemented under normal business processes.

What’s your DATE?

If you look at your company, how effective is it in getting decisions implemented? Can it boast a short DATE or is it a protracted effort? In our next installment in this topic we’ll cover more of what we discovered and how it can be fixed.

I’m a dedicated Outlook user and a follower of Getting Things Done (GTD). I routinely add tasks to my to-do list that have been collected while in meetings or on the road. It’s easy to do—you can use your PDA or mobile phone (that synchronizes with Outlook) but during those times when it’s either not convenient or there are a long list of tasks to add what do you do?

CSV SVP

I use a Comma Separated Value (CSV) file that exactly matches what Outlook expects as input. You can get a sample here though it’s pretty easy to create your own from Outlook.

Create your task input file

Using Outlook 2007 as an example:

1. Open Outlook
2. Open the task pane
3. Select File | Import and Export…
4. Select Export to a file
5. Click Next
6. Select Comma Separated Values (Windows)
7. Click Next
8. Select the Task folder you want to export
9. Select where you want to create the file and it’s name
10. Click Next
11. Click Finish
12. Select the date range {to limit the number of tasks} and then Click OK

Other versions of Outlook may be different but should follow a similar process.

Importing your tasks

Using Outlook 2007 as an example:

1. Open Outlook
2. Open the task pane
3. Select File | Import and Export…
4. Select Import from another program or file
5. Click Next
6. Select Comma Separated Values (Windows)
7. Click Next
8. Select the Task folder you want to import
9. Select Do not import duplicate items (ensures you do not overwrite existing)
10. Select what task folder you wish to import to (generally I have only one task folder)
11. Click Next
12. Click Finish
13. Click OK

Other versions of Outlook may be different but will follow a similar process.

On the road

As I travel I keep a copy of the CSV file on my laptop and I also keep a copy in Google Docs. When I update the CSV file with new tasks I usually just email it to myself for later processing. This process eliminates most of the drudgery of trying to read your scribbled notes to extract any follow up items. Another benefit is that using this process disciplines you to fill in the details of a task as they are being considered. Furthermore, if these task will ultimately be delegated or shared then getting them in Outlook makes these steps easy to do.

While many parts of the telecom world are not as dependent upon a wired infrastructure, we in almost all of OHANL are completely dependent upon it for normal communications. Communications spending on maintenance and the adherence to good work standards went out the window more than ten years ago amid the blind ambition to reduce operating costs. The death knell rang for good service back when carriers outsourced their field work to contractors with no effort placed into field inspections or measured standards. You do not have to go very far out into the field to see the results of this crumbling infrastructure. It is only a matter of time that the infrastructure of the both the last mile and local distribution will fail us. Our only real hope is that it will happen after an alternative is available.

A promising alternative might be WiMax and in fact we have a WiMax-like (offering carriers refer to it as pre-WiMax) service through Inukshuk. It has been a rather less than stellar service and service issues continue to plague the user community.

So how does one change that? Telecom wannabe, Google has teamed up with Clearwire Corp., Cisco Systems Inc., and Intel Corp. to provide a sandbox WiMax implimentation at the campuses (about 52 square kilomteres) of Google, Cisco and Intel. You can read the whole story here.While WiMax has been ballyhooed for the past number of years its actually interesting to see someone “eat their own dog food” to make sure it actually works properly rather than foisting it on an unsuspecting audience.

Isn’t it about time that we seriously thought about an alternative to our rapidly decaying infrastructure?

Managing the space between sales and a delivery organization has it’s unique challenges. Over the many years I’ve walked in that somewhat rough ground I’ve learned a thing or two about how to manage the process and in doing so, myself.

1) Process

Generally the process between sales and the delivery team is troubled by resource conflicts. This is usually because there is not an effective early warning system to indicate what is “coming down the pipe”. Also, from my experience, there is usually not a clear process being followed by all sales staff (or potentially the services delivery staff) which would support a resource planning process. I have faced this same problem in many locations and have found that the following approach may have a positive effect.

Have a clear process that defines the interaction and hand-off between your sales and professional services. If you do not currently have a documented sales process and are looking for one I suggest you read a book called ” The New Strategic Selling” by Heiman and Sanchez. The book has a section that lays out the process that sales should go through. I’d give you the exact reference but I’ve misplaced my copy in recent move. At any rate for each step of the sales process there is an aligned step that needs to be done by services delivery.

This is the point you have to roll up your sleeves and actually do something. You will need to translate the textbook form of the sales process into something that will work for both your sales staff and also the service delivery counterparts. This is a crucial step and one not to be taken too lightly. It also needs the buy-in of both parties (sales & service delivery). Once the process is documented make sure involved people are trained on using it.

2) Pipeline

Develop a sales pipeline with an outlook that spans at least the next 6 months (this depends on the type of product and the typical sales cycle, longer sales cycle means longer outlook).

3) Purchase probability

Be clear about how a prospect moves from one probability level to the next. Good sales staff generally have “happy ears” and as such are always way more optimistic (they should be since a pessimistic sales guy is just about useless.) than the reality of the situation generally substantiates. The move from one probability to the next has to be based upon the existence of a tangible ‘marker’. Here is my suggested list, but modify for your own situation:

• 50% — Prospecting has indicated a likelihood of a product match and the client is in a state of potentially buying. Probabilities of less than this are coin flips.
• 60% — Analysis and contact have created the opportunity to develop further interest. RFI, RFP or RFQ processes have been started.
• 75% — We have been determined to be on the long list of suppliers. The customer ‘buyers’ have been identified and formal presentations and discussions are underway
• 90% — All buyers have been met formally and have moved our proposal to the short list. The user communities have been given a demo and are supportive.
• 95% — The contract process is underway and both parties are finalizing details of the terms. The signing is scheduled and imminent.

4) Review progress

Schedule a routine and regular review of the pipeline with the services delivery staff who are responsible for the completion of sales support and resource planning. Not a cast of thousands, mind you, but just those who are prime. Review all items on the pipeline and ensure that the progress reflects reality. Discuss in detail any item that is in jeopardy for the following reasons:

• Might lose an important sale due to something you can change (don’t cry wolf here)
• Project is not in the mainstream of your business and has unique complexities,
• Opportunity requires a significant commitment from your resources early in the sales cycle.

6) Resource plans

The services delivery staff should be developing a resource plan for each project as a prospect moves through the pipeline. To begin with, it will be ’shadow team’ with just position holders for staff, but as it moves higher up on the probability list is should become more and more real. Until the 90% level where the team may be fully identified and may be scheduled off current commitments.

5) Stand down

Just as important to this process is to ensure that there is a method to ‘call off the troops’ should a sales target move into left field. Situations like that are more likely in our current economic climate. As a services delivery guy nothing is more frustrating than to be working on a deliverable needed for a sales prospect than be told that it fell off the rails last week.

While there is no formula for all aspects of this process the items highlighted above have served me well in the past. Hopefully they might provide you some impetus to move on your own situation?

I’ve been working on the…

In 2002 the Linux Foundation set up a working group for Carrier Grade Linux (CGL). They have been working diligently for nearly seven years and we’ve managed to follow their progress. In 2007-03 the version 4.0 specifications were released (they are grinding out Version 5.0 specs now) and have been adopted by a number of manufacturers. For a short review you can read our previous post about Carrier Grade systems. It’s been six long years of CGL slogging and only recently is the market opening up with deliveries of CGL operational capability.

What’s the news?

It has to be rather disappointing to the proponents of CGL as a recent scan of the popularity of the term “Carrier Grade Linux” on the web has been slowly declining. We’re not sure why this is the case, but it could be for one or two reasons.

1. Suppliers are using the specification in their product but not referring to it (marketing strategy?) or
2. that in fact it is not an important point in the world of the web.

We’re not sure and cannot draw any conclusions at this point, but we love graphing things.

Turning point

The opportunity to utilize carrier grade Linux is increasingly getting airtime at senior levels of various carriers. It is an opportunity for considering significant change models, but comes with some significant challenges. If your company is considering CGL then you need to pay attention. Some reading material can be seen here and also here.

The nut

Friedman’s principle points in the book were based upon his observations that sometime in the 1990’s three things were converging rapidly and globally;

1. The world has become a flat market place,
2. The means of communication and production became globally available and economical to use, and
3. about three billion more people were made available to the global market.

These factors caused many businesses to reconsider their vertical structure and consider if not restructure to a more horizontal alignment.

Who’s doing it?

Interestingly enough, the world has become flat for some players in the telecoms industry, but for the most part it has not. Telecom it seems is a rather bumpy domain with significant obstacles to spreading yourself globally. Some companies such as telecom suppliers have certainly moved into the global marketplace to take advantage of the flatness that they can get to. Providers, on the other hand, have generally just stuck with the knitting, though some recent providers such as Skype have broken the mould from the perspective of business model but have lagged behind in tiny details of making money.

It would appear that there are boundary conditions to telecom that make this transition difficult such as;

• Regulatory constraints,
• Difficult and complex trade rules,
• Product standards,
• Language difficulties,and
• In-country partnering hurdles,

To name a few.

What to do?

In a recent article at Telephony Online Augusto Morais, a Principal at A.T. Kearney, has summarized his views of why telecom has not succeeded yet in this flatland. His analysis is thoughtful, informed and well summarized and well worth a read from anyone involved with the global expansion of a business or service offering.

The slope

Not only does it seem that many telecom suppliers have no memory of the telecom meltdown of 2000-2003, some are even making their sales along with a credit pitch. In a recent posting over at SeekingAlpha, Andrew Schmitt commented;

It is no secret that Huawei is aggressively taking global market share, particularly in second and third world nations. Many people mistakenly believe this is because it offera cheap prices. This is not always the case. What Huawei does consistently offer is attractive credit terms, and is often the only equipment vendor doing so. While Alcatel (ALA) and Ericsson (ERIC) still feel the vendor financing wounds of 2001-2, Huawei has no such memory.

Balancing view

All of this sounds great when describing the sales book, but in the long term it bodes poorly for an industry that has, in recent memory, suffered the painful financial consequences of the same behavior. It seems to us that avenue will be only open to suppliers with a pristine balance sheet and bags o’ money in the bank.

In a balancing viewpoint, Carl-Henric Svanberg, the CEO of Ericsson, at a press conference earlier last month stated;

There is an increased demand for financing, said Svanberg, adding, “we don’t do it on Ericsson’s balance sheet.

What to do

We think the prudent move would be to be enabling customers to seek credit in more traditional modes. Vendor financing never works unless that’s the prime business you are in. If you want to refresh your memory of the heady days leading up to the telecom crash at the turn of the century you might read Om Malik’s Broadbandits: Inside the $750 Billion Telecom Heist.

Budget process

No matter how big or how small you are, if you do not have an ingrained process that does the following;

1. Create a budget at least two months prior to the start of your fiscal year,
2. Develop budgets down to the most relevant decision making unit,
3. Manage your day-to-day operations based upon your budget
4. Report on your monthly performance within 20 calendar days of month end,
5. Review variances to that budget (estimate to actual) monthly, and
6. Act on your reviews quickly…

You will not survive long.

Reward on Results

With this regained fiscal prudence it may come back into vogue to reward managers who actually manage to live within a defined budget. While the whole notion of budgeting and fiscal accountability seemed to have taken a back seat to unrestrained and freewheeling practices in some companies, we think the most successful will bring back some of the important aspects of fiscal planning and measurement as key factors of success.

How does your company shape up?

Seems that an enterprising website is possibly ( we chose not to sign up to find out) selling the ultimate pet road warrior gear for old Rover.

Choices, choices…

Now does Rover get to call anyone he wants to? Does he need a data plan? Can he use the built-in GPS for rabbit hunting? So many possibilities, so many butts to smell, so little time.

Imagine…

Imagine, if you will, a web based Asterisk—a fully programmable PBX in the cloud; this is Trilio’s modus operandi. Twilio’s business model is interesting, and one which we think is a good long term strategy. For cloud based phone calls within the US it charges 3 cents per minute, 5 if it’s an 800 call. We like the idea of a company in the Support System space riding its revenues on the rails of the per minute transaction model.

Competition

There are competitors around Twilio, but in IMHO it seems that they have made the business of dealing with them dead simple. They have an open ended capability and have demonstrated that capability to a number of fortune 500 companies already.

Caveat Emptor

However like any Web 2.0 service one must consider whether you want your business to ride on a beta application, which might or might not make a go of it. As long as you approach Twilio with a knowledge of it vulnerabilities (business sustainability, scalability, reliability —all unknowns) and do not put mission critical processes on it you should have an interesting ride.

Bell traditionally allowed for no autonomy in any of it’s retail locations. This has lead to the inability for it’s store staff to deal with anything out of the ordinary. On the other hand The Source stores seemed to be operated more independently and allow the staff to make decisions on the fly. We cannot see how the management of these stores will be improved by Bell’s traditional approach.

The acquisition does have the added benefit that Bell will most likely drop the sale of it’s competitors products. Goodbye Rogers mobiles, cable service, so long Telus mobiles and it does not bode well for the new wireless entrants who now have 750 fewer outlets at their disposal.