The BlackBerry 850

How does a company fall from grace so quickly?

Jonathan S. Geller of Boy Genius Report (www.bgr.com) has an idea. In a recent article titled “Inside RIM: An exclusive look at the rise and fall of the company that made smartphones smart,” Geller takes a look at RIM’s history, including its personas and politics.

It’s an interesting inside look at how the iconic company evolved — and didn’t evolve when it missed product features and device trends like adding MP3 players and cameras to its phones.

Read the full article here.

An IT department that points and laughs is hardly encouraging learning and business alignment.

The piece highlights the fact that the help desk, despite the growing importance of IT/business alignment in the enterprise, remains in the “condescending gatekeeper role.”

As evidence, Wailgum includes a video that features Andy Bitterer, co-chair of Gartner Group’s BI Summit, doing Jay Leno-style “man-on-the-street” interviews in London. Among Bitterer’s questions to the masses: “Do you use a database?” “Do you know what Business Intelligence tools are?” “Do you know what OLAP is?”

Honestly, does this Gartner bloke really expect everyday people to know what these things are? As Wailgum asserts, Gartner conference attendees may find it amusing (ha, look at the stupid users!), but it really demonstrates how out of touch IT is with its customers.

This paragraph, in which Wailgum describes IT’s image problem, is particularly illustrative: “A technological arrogance that lurks behind and manifests itself in arcane techno mumbo-jumbo and smug conceit, that, for lack of a better word, really pisses off end-users and has turned them against IT departments.”

Nicely put, Wailgum.

What’s really troubling about the five-minute video, however, is the fact that a number of the interviewees seem to be lying when the say they do know what OLAP and BI are. Perhaps they feel compelled to pretend they know, even though they clearly have no idea.

Feigning knowledge to avoid appearing ignorant happens in the workplace all the time. And an IT department that points and laughs is hardly encouraging learning and business alignment. Such a help desk delivers only lost productivity, and a whole lot of errors.

I don’t find that funny at all, and neither should a CIO.

FOR THE RECORD: OLAP stands for Online Analytical Processing (Wikipedia page here); and Business Intelligence, or BI, uses technologies, processes and applications to analyze mostly internal, structured data and business processes (Wikipedia page here).

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While many companies do have admirable archiving systems in place, just as many firms leave the details up to chance, the honor system, and other faulty methods.

Although I have never tried to get out of an assignment by saying a dog ate my homework, I have fouled up plenty, and confessing was quite difficult in some cases. But, what I have learned over the years is that if you ask for help, you will commit fewer blunders and have less mess to clean up.*

Back to the government e-mail issue. According to an article by Computerworld’s Patrick Thibodeau, the whole mess stemmed from a Domino/Notes-to-Microsoft Exchange migration. The old archiving system was phased out, but the new one was never implemented. From that point on, Thibodeau explains, the government manually archived messages. The result was millions of “missing” e-mails.

Jump back to March 2008. Computerworld blogger Douglas Schweitzer, while reporting about the missing e-mails, asserted that by not automating its archiving, the government went against what is “considered ‘fundamental principles that well-run private companies adhere to routinely.’”

Routinely?

While many companies do have admirable archiving systems in place, just as many firms leave the details up to chance, the honor system, and other faulty methods. This apathy’s driving force is money, or lack thereof. (In a financial crisis, the IT budget’s the first to be cut.) The result is corporate workers who have no choice but to “wing it” and find their own workarounds. The government’s gaffe demonstrates just how much money “winging it” will save you.

Read Thibodeau’s piece here; Schweitzer’s here; and NPR’s here.

*By offering employees software training and support, companies can make it OK to ask for help, despite this culture’s innate “by-the-bootstraps” attitude.

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Aerial photo of nuclear power plant in Limerick PA. (Photo: Arturo Ramos, Creative Commons)

Remember dial-up? The squealing, pinging sounds that indicated a connection was imminent?

Imagine having to do your job using such obsolete technology today, when wireless is standard and photocopies can be made with a handheld computer. If you worked in one of the United States’ 66 nuclear power plants, that is precisely what you’d be working with.

According to a recent article on Wired.com, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has asked the operators of the U.S.’s 66 nuclear power plants to voluntarily upgrade the Emergency Response Data System, or ERDS, which plants use to report conditions to the government. Currently, the plants use dial-up; the NRC is hoping they switch to VPN.

But this story isn’t just about kitschy reactors and their quaint modems. The ERDS transmits critical data, like reactor conditions and radioactivity release rates. With dial-up, data transmission could be delayed by a busy signal (remember them?).

It seems unthinkable that an industry with such apocalyptic power would not be using the most efficient technology. But that’s just naïve. Think about the business world, which has its own apocalyptic power. Think about the antiquated processes and software used every day – and the resulting stymied productivity, clunky work processes, costly mistakes, and atrocious security.

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Yesterday, Best Buy shocked customers with a whopper of a deal: a 52-inch Samsung HDTV for $9.99. Orders came in and credit cards were charged. Some customers attempted to buy up to 10 televisions each.

Best Buy issued a statement saying it would not honor the pricing error, so it may have saved itself heaps of money. Some companies haven’t been so lucky.

It was a mistake, of course, and the company corrected it promptly. The sale price should have been listed as $1,699.99. Still, customers were miffed, and Best Buy had to get to the business of refunding credit cards that had been charged, and doing a little reputation management via its web site, on Twitter, and elsewhere.

Best Buy issued a statement saying it would not honor the pricing error, so it may have saved itself heaps of money. Some companies haven’t been so lucky. Foul-ups involving a few decimal places may seem innocuous, but even the smallest mistake can cause millions of dollars in damage.

Consider the results of a landmark Dartmouth College study, which I wrote about in April. It offers a clear picture of what’s at stake.

For the study, researchers looked at the quantitative impacts of errors in operational Excel spreadsheets from five different companies. Among the more notable findings:

• Within a single organization, spreadsheet practice can range from excellent to poor.
• Some organizations use spreadsheets that are riddled with errors and some of these errors are of substantial magnitude.
• There is little correlation between the importance of the application or the risk involved and the quality of the spreadsheet.

The researchers also identified the major symptoms of poor spreadsheet practice, including chaotic design and complex formulas.

“In the hands of experts,” the researchers state, “complex formulas can be used to great effect.” When novices get their mitts on them, however, errors abound.

And some of those errors can cost companies millions of dollars – in the study, researchers found at least one mistake that could have cost a company more than $110 million.

Although the study is two years old, its findings are as applicable today as they were when the researchers embarked on the project. They may be even more so in the current economic climate, in which companies have fewer employees and just as much work to be done. (Jen Darr)

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