James Wanless

Olympic indoctrination a matter of perspective

James — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 19:04:39 +0000

The dust-up about The Olympic Resistance Network (ORN) providing an Olympics protest workshop for a local of the British Columbia Teacher’s Federation (BCTF) began at the end of last week. I’m not big on political statements being made to children by teachers in classrooms, but I’m not sure that’s necessarily going on here. A look around the various web sites associated with this group certainly shows some political rhetoric, but also a lot of information focused on thinking critically about the effects of the Olympics, historically and in Vancouver 2010 specifically.

The ORN also suggests that they could come in and do workshops for students at the secondary level. I’d be hesitant to go there as I think there are some real risks about rhetorical opinion being presented as fact, and we’ve already had enough broken financial promises about the Olympics from government. I’d want to make sure that what the ORN was offering students directly was prepared with appropriate levels of research, and was presented in accordance with prescribed curriculum and in a way that allowed students to make informed decisions for themselves. What I’m focusing on here is the workshop for teachers.

Since it was reported that this workshop was to take place in Lord Strathcona Elementary on October 28th, the event has been moved to SFU Harbour Centre, due to media coverage and the reaction of Lord Strathcona PAC chair, Angelia Ellis. According to an article by reporter John Colebourn in the October 13 Vancouver Province, all parties are distancing themselves from each other and the event is now being held off school grounds. In my mind, the debate ends there, as teachers can attend anything they like on their own time and they’ve likely heard more political rhetoric at the average BCTF AGM, than they will at this workshop.

A little balance

… on this issue might be a good idea. News1130’s radio spot about it was far more circumspect:

A local with the B.C. Teachers Federation, the Vancouver Elementary School Teachers Association, is encouraging an event later this month called Teaching 2010 Resistance. It’s meant to help teachers raise critical questions about the Olympics by considering issues like homelessness and poverty.

However, Colebourn’s article veered dangerously close to editorial rather than journalism when he used words like “radical” twice, and “zealots” to describe the ORN. Zealots they may be, but wouldn’t a journalist (as opposed to an editorialist) leave labels like those to the reader to apply? Oddly enough, he gives many more column lines to PAC chair Ellis, Solicitor General Kash Heed and even Premier Gordon Campbell to support his bias, than he does to ORN member Marla Renn in providing the other side of the story. If supporting quotes were going to be solicited, then how about finding some from 2010 Olympic Games Watch or the Impact on Communities Coalition (IOCC) for a bit more balance?

The cheerleading that the major media are doing on the Olympics is nothing new, and an article like this might as well have been written by Vanoc, themselves. However, what I don’t understand is the article’s underlying idea that naysayers are necessarily zealots, or that since the Olympics are here in four months, no critical analysis or debate about the social and economic effects of the games should make its way into classrooms. Don’t we want children to grow up questioning the world around them and trying to understand at more than a surface level? Do we want them blindly accepting government promotion as fact, without something a little deeper? The ORN is probably guilty of no worse zealotry than anyone on the government or Vanoc side of the equation.

PAC chair Ellis was mostly concerned about the lack of communication and that the workshop was to happen in the school without official permission, and I can understand that concern. However, what about the traveling photo ops going to elementary schools all over the place in the guise of educational programs, with Olympic mascot costumed actors, ensuring that all school kids will have a glowing mental image of something that’s not so cut and dried? Apparently, according to Ellis government funded propaganda is just fine, but opposing viewpoints have no place in the minds of impressionable children:

With the 2010 Olympics so close, nothing anti-Olympic should be happening at the school …. Critical thinking is one thing, but not if it’s going to be a political platform.

The difference, of course, is that the photo ops are all part of Vanoc’s education programs; no fewer than 27 separate educational promotion opportunities, funded by your tax dollars and mine. There is no shortage of edutainment supplies and lesson plans, with none of it seeming to ask critical questions. I won’t even go into the notion that, while some of the material rightly promotes the healthy living effects of sport, this runs in stark contrast to the BC provincial government’s continual cutting of physical education programs, including mandating 80 hours of exercise as a graduation requirement but not funding it in school.

Where’s the real concern?

While Colebourn’s article also suggests that the local of the BCTF is now distancing themselves from the ORN, the quotes he used simply clarify that media reports that the two groups were associated were inaccurate. In other words there was never something for the BCTF local to be distanced from. The ORN’s Marla Renn also confirms that the two groups have never been associated.

BC Premier Gordon Campbell feels that children shouldn’t be pawns in the debate … that is, unless it’s at the hands of government classroom edutainment:

I don’t think it was right taking all the enthusiasm for the Games away from the children.

Let’s not forget that the enthusiasm Campbell refers to is, in part, whipped up by the government in the first place in using the classroom for their own biased information.

What’s not clear is what actually had everyone up in arms. There’s a lot of stuff on the Teach2010 web site and some of it undoubtedly draws a very long bow, like connecting the racial issues associated with the 1936 Berlin Olympics with what the ORN perceive as present-day aboriginal racial issues. Most of it is suggestive of lessons and materials that teachers can target at secondary children. Of the couple dozens links from the main page, only one is focused on primary school aged children. Maybe, with the negative media coverage, some previously available material was taken down, but if not, then the comments of Solicitor General Heed seem to draw an equally long bow:

You know, encouraging teachers to recruit kids to break the law, to commit acts of vandalism, or to occupy private property, you know even to the extent of sabotaging children’s food, is absolutely and completely unacceptable.

Heed may have seen some material I haven’t, but vandalism and food sabotage doesn’t seem to be part of the Teach2010 agenda. Frankly, even if that kind of material is part of the workshop for teachers, let’s have a little trust in them to not only speak out against it, but to certainly not present it to school kids.

Engage kids on what really matters

As a fan of international athletic competition, I hope to see some great events on TV. As a taxpayer who accepts that the Olympics are coming in four months, I hope they succeed financially so that any debt associated with them does not get passed on to my kids. As a concerned citizen, I have many questions. Particularly when we continually watch the Campbell government do the following in the name of the games:

continue to downplay homelessness and drug problems in downtown Vancouver and other communities while throwing tons of cash at the games;
run a provincial deficit that could hit close to $3 billion and a ‘published’ games deficit of $60 million;
cut grants and programs in light of the provincial deficit;
let Vanoc run out of money while paying up to $30 million in staff bonuses;
leave Vancouver taxpayers at the whim of market forces to deal with athlete’s village cost overruns.

Financial questions alone should be cause for grave concern and the next generation of citizens shouldn’t be sheltered from as many perspectives as possible in considering their government and what something like the Olympics may actually cost us, financially and socially.

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Epic fail of the day, Microsoft style

James — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 21:57:47 +0000

I love opening files sent around work in our Windows-centric environment. In particular, when I think of the Microsoft promise to embrace standards and then see these kinds of dialogue boxes, I get shivers up and down my spine. Hey Microsoft, if you’re gonna port your crappy software over to other operating systems, the level of suck should be the same, not a little extra for good measure.

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250,000 gainers can’t be wrong

James — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 21:09:28 +0000

Ewan McGregor - cheeky devil?

Imagine my amazement. In Sunday’s Vancouver Province I saw a double-page spread that said I could get a free sample of the “Rolls Royce of male enlargement.” Say no more and sign me up.

What really caught my eye was the ad, pictured at left, showing a curious looking Ewan McGregor with the headline beside it, “What Celebrities Had To Say!” If this thing is endorsed by Ewan, how can I go wrong? It’s also “already tested with success by GQ Magazine” so it must be for real.

The JesExtender is apparently the latest in a slew of penis stretching devices. Upon reading the tiny details, Ewan was actually among three guests on the same UK show in which this device was also featured. What, you mean this isn’t a real endorsement? A major motion picture star at the height of his career isn’t coming out in support of a set of penis stretching weights? The celebs were apparently quoted as saying they’d try it if they needed it. So what if one of them was also Michelle Pfeiffer. Maybe it stretches other stuff too.

According to the ad, “the numbers are impressive” …

Backed by more than 1200 doctors, scientific studies, the FDA, Health Canada, and already tested with success by more than 250,000 people in 78 country … [sic]

Hell, even with only an implied or ‘flaccid’ endorsement from Ewan or Michelle, with other endorsements like these, I really can’t go wrong.

The jaws of life?

And then I saw it, at the very end of the article, and I decided I’d better forego this purchase for now. The box, pictured at right, has a number of different sized weights, two pieces of rubber tubing and a couple of pieces of plastic that look kind of like a pair of jaws. While the low introductory price of $79.95 is still damned enticing, and the offer of a free set of comfort pads and unlimited VIP access to a forum for the exchange of ‘tips’ with other men around the world suffering a similar affliction only sweetens the deal, I’m just not ready to strap weighted plastic jaws onto my tiny willie just yet.

Maybe if Michelle Pfeiffer also came with the package, I’d have to reconsider.

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Getting social media for CRM right

James — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 23:30:35 +0000

How do you use social media for CRM?

This issue has been percolating just under my skin for a while now. I often hear it said where I work that we still haven’t figured out how to use social media and I’d guess that’s probably true of many places. I think, though, that most folks who are charged with figuring out how to use social media to their advantage are simply looking at it the wrong way.

Often, it’s about setting up Facebook groups or fan pages, or making sure their organization is tweeting announcements from corporate accounts. Some build networks to try and drive traffic to their web sites. I’m not saying any of these efforts is necessarily wrong. Ineffective for the most part? Yes. If, to you, social media is about getting followers, becoming a guru or simply driving traffic to another site, it’s likely not going to be effective for long-term benefit.

External social networks like Twitter and Facebook allow limited conversations but not ones which are contextually centered on your business or organization. In truth they are more about broadcast than social. Try having a real conversation with someone on Twitter sometime. It’s not impossible, but support and issue resolution will likely need to move to another forum to be completed. A good conversation happens because there’s a two-way dialogue and it’s at least somewhat intimate.

Where should you do it?

I’d argue that the best social media CRM implementations happen right on your own interactive properties. Where do your constituents interact with you? If I’ve got an issue with a product or service, I usually start by conducting a web search, then refining it down to a search in a knowledge base or FAQ at the site of the organization of interest to me. An external social network is not a comfortable or intimate enough environment for this. Plus, it may just be a personal preference, but I don’t follow corporate tweets and I don’t join corporate Facebook groups or pages. Frankly, I update Facebook through ping.fm or another service and rarely directly visit the site any more.

A colleague recently recounted an experience in which his son was purchasing something from a site halfway around the world. He had a question that couldn’t be answered without some help, and was very impressed when he could have a live chat with a customer service representative via an on-page box. He had to input his name and issue and wait in a short queue. The question was answered quickly and the purchase completed. By contrast, think about the same situation but one where the customer is forced to leave a voice message or send an email after hours and wait a few days or longer, or sometimes not receive a response at all. The opportunity is lost and the customer has likely gone to a competitor.

Think about the Amazon.com model. Not only can users review books and publish wish-lists for their purchases, but reviews can then be subject to ratings. The system continually provides more and more information of relevance to a potential customer within Amazon’s own context, not via external networks. While a post-secondary institution like the one where I work is hesitant to allow customer reviews of courses for myriad reasons, opening your organization up to external feedback and publishing relevant information to assist potential customers in their decision-making process will continue to become increasingly important in order to compete.

How should you do it?

ReadWriteWeb has some solid thoughts on how you need to think about a social media CRM strategy. While I still think the features need to be part of what you do on the web, IBM’s thinking is to extend an external network like Facebook to connect students and mentors in a more meaningful way:

“Facebook and MySpace are great places for social networking, but they don’t really have a goal. They don’t make the kind of connections you need to move forward,” Mr. Vogt said. “This platform is helping students say, Here are my ideas, and IBM is saying, Come work with us and we’ll help you.”

Even if you think I’m wrong and an external network is your solution, you’ve still got to choose the right one to reach your audience. A big chunk of BCIT’s student demographic is older and looking at applied skills to improve their job prospects or is upgrading, mid-career. Twitter might reach some of that target for push communications, but not so much for a traditional post-secondary trying to reach mostly students who are still in high school:

In June 2009, only 16 percent of Twitter.com website users were under the age of 25. Bear in mind persons under 25 make up nearly one quarter of the active US Internet universe, which means that Twitter.com effectively under-indexes on the youth market by 36 percent.

What about employee collaboration?

Intel published a white paper documenting their approach to developing a social computing intranet strategy. They did wide consultation across the enterprise and engaged with key stakeholders, developed usage policies upfront, performed user and proof-of-concept testing and outlined a solid architecture and phased approach to rollout. In short, they took a user-centred design philosophy and set measurable goals and objectives. This is something that any organization should do whether their implementation is internally or customer focused.

Based on my own experience at large organizations, the measurable objectives are often missing. The desire to use a cool tool often seems to trump a problem-solving approach, where the right tool is used to solve a business problem. Post-secondary institutions, in particular, are caught between the desire to leverage the web more effectively for employee productivity, while they grapple internally with labyrinthine policies and rules and red herring privacy concerns about how employees use web technologies.

Perhaps I’ll leave the last word on social media on intranets to Jakob Nielsen’s findings:

Underground efforts yield big results. Companies are turning a blind eye to underground social software efforts until they prove their worth, and then sanctioning them within the enterprise.

Frontline workers are driving the vision. Often, senior managers aren’t open to the possibilities for enterprise 2.0 innovation because they’re not actively using these tools outside of work. Indeed, many senior managers still consider such tools as something their kids do. One of the dirty secrets of enterprise 2.0 is that you don’t have to teach or convince younger workers to use these tools; they expect them and integrate them as easily into their work lives as they do in their personal lives.

Communities are self-policing. When left to their own devices, communities police themselves, leaving very little need for tight organizational control. And such peer-to-peer policing is often more effective than a big brother approach. Companies that we studied said abuse was rare in their communities.

Business need is the big driver. Although our report discusses specific tools (blogs, wikis, and such), enterprise 2.0’s power is not about tools, it’s about the communication shift that those tools enable.

Organizations must cede power. Using Web 2.0 technologies to communicate with customers has taught many companies that they can no longer control the message. This also rings true when using Web 2.0 tools for internal communication. Companies that once held to a command-and-control paradigm for corporate messaging are finding it hard to maintain that stance.

Clearing cobwebs and groinal eggplants

James — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 00:06:29 +0000

So, when I finally sit down to write my first journal entry in more than a month, what do I write about? Why, my recent sports hernia operation, of course – and getting out of holiday mode and back to job work and thesis work. Truth is, I’ve got two or three partially written posts floating around, but they need more time. I just couldn’t bring myself to write over the past few weeks due to a number of issues, so I’ll just do some reflective personal catching up, starting with my gut.

Puffy abs

This past Monday, I finally had surgery which has been a long time coming. I felt the first lower abdominal pop close to a year and a half ago now on a tempo run, and have been through a complete 2008 cessation of my racing and ultimate seasons and a reduced and less effective version for 2009. After countless examinations, x-rays, physio sessions and running with lower abdominal and groin discomfort for a long time, I had sports hernia surgery Monday. The illustration at left shows a typical sports hernia location, though what I ended up with a day after the surgery was not dissimilar to a small eggplant jutting out of my lower abdomen with a two inch incision on top. The swelling and bruising is finally reducing and I’ve been able to stop taking the Tylenol 3s (thankfully, as pain is not the only thing they stop). I would post a photo, but there’s no way to not make it pornographic.

The surgeon actually found two weaknesses/ruptures and dealt with them both by placing the obligatory mesh patches (but not these ones) across them. I’ll spend the next week or so still only walking and will move to light cycling the week after, with very light short jogging the week after that. I should be mostly back to normal within about another 5-6 weeks. Only then will I really know if the surgery was effective. There are no guarantees but it works about 85% of the time. And, truth be told, the surgery itself was a breeze. 30 minutes on the table with a sedative and local anesthetic. I was drinking coffee 3 hours after they began cutting me open.

Since they don’t really know what causes sports hernias (and they aren’t actual hernias either), I’m lucky enough to be taking part in a study examining the role the hip may play in their cause. I feel there is some connection because for some time before I felt the full rupture in the abs, I was having some hip problems. I had an MRI the day before the surgery and should get some idea if anything is going on in my hip, along with whatever they publish as a result of the study. By the way … I think the experience of the MRI was worse than the surgery. Never had one before and not in a big rush to have one again.

Other distractions

While I just finished three weeks vacation, you’d not really know it. I spent a good chunk of the time repainting all room and closet doors in my home … in our garage, in the middle of the worst heat wave Vancouver has ever had.

Between painting days were car shopping days and plunked down in the middle of it all was a four day stay at the Galiano Inn for a very quiet getaway. A beautiful room and stellar view was a little marred on the last evening by a sub-par meal, but it was a really beautiful space to unwind and my wife had a wonderful spa treatment.

You can see more photos of our Galiano Island getaway here.

Back to the grind

After three and a half weeks away from work, it can be a bit of a challenge to get your clock back into early weekday rising and following someone else’s schedule. While I’ve been doing edits here and there on my thesis proposal, this ‘mostly ready’ document still needs a few tweaks and the nod from both my supervisor and the program head, before I get into ethical review processes at both RRU and BCIT in September.

I feel kind of guilty because, while I’ll be on my own through the next 9-10 months in completing my thesis, this summer the cohort in my program (the rest of whom chose more coursework and a smaller project) have been going straight through their second residency and moving into the remaining four courses before undertaking their 6 credit research project. Later on I’m sure the guilt will be assuaged, when I’m so busy I can hardly see.

If doing the thesis weren’t enough for the next while, I’ll be moving into a slightly different role – and desk – at work, and I can already see four or five significant projects beginning to pile up to hold me over well past Christmas.

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Is cloud computing still blue sky?

James — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 19:43:51 +0000

As I lurch through this summer trying to finalize the thesis proposal which will frame a large part of my life for the next year, collaborative tools for learning are never far from front of mind with me. A real interest of mine is the use of collaborative writing tools for learning in higher education. In particular, I am interested in learning more about why adoption is so weak – certainly where I work, anyway. Where I get to with my thesis research on that front is another post for another time.

A big clue as to why some post secondary institutions are so jittery about Open Educational Resources (OER) might be contained in the news this past week that Twitter suffered a substantial security breach perpetrated a second time by the same French hacker. An institution’s specific approach to open computing will also have a lot to do with how jittery they should be about it. For example, are we talking about true cloud computing or just using open tools, but hosting them? There’s a big difference from a data ownership and access control perspective in each approach. For the sake of argument, I’ll stick to using the cloud.

Over the past week or so, my feeds were all-a-twitter (and so was Twitter) with news that Microsoft Office’s cloud offering might be imminent. Given the success of Google’s office suite in the cloud, it stands to reason that Microsoft needs to make a me-too play and quickly. Not to be left behind, cloud computing provider Zoho announced a plug-in to migrate their DBs to web apps, either on Zoho or as Google Apps. The big players are pretty certain about the move from the desktop to the cloud. Google’s announcement that Apps could now translate uploaded documents paled in comparison to their bigger one.

Chrome OS is the next Google play in moving everything to the cloud. The idea that you can seamlessly move your desktop work to the browser would still seem to be a ways off, given the weaknesses in some of the Google Apps feature set:

But there are still a variety of applications that simply can’t be replicated within a browser, and consumers have had a mixed reaction to Google’s own apps, embracing Gmail but finding its presentation software to be severely limited compared to its desktop app counterparts.

As Chrome OS will ship with netbooks at first, full desktop replacement at this stage may not actually be on Google’s mind:

The Chrome OS will be appearing first on netbooks, which can’t handle some of the more heavyweight desktop applications in the first place. And the new offering has the potential to drive users to rely on Google’s online offerings, which certainly would further the company’s goals.

This probably spells the end of long-term Android development, as a single, more robust OS from Google to be run on all devices would make the most sense.

While the happenings in cloud computing show the big players are clearly making a push in that direction, moving everyone there will be no small task. For post-secondary institutions, there are many concerns including ownership of data, privacy and, as Twitter just showed us, the risk of a complete breach of authentication data. However, these issues are just the tip of the iceberg.

Technical, SLA and business solvency also pose extreme risks for organizations, let alone individuals, in trusting their data to Google or Microsoft and hosting it in the cloud.

What about power outages?

In the last week alone, there have been several high profile outages at data centers that host sites, such as video site DailyMotion, credit card authorization service Authorize.net, and Microsoft’s Bing Travel. Even the Google App Engine—a platform for third-parties to run their own cloud services—experienced performance issues that resulted in high latency and even data loss.

Or uptime guarantees?

Many large companies are used to having control over and responsibility for all of the servers that the business uses, so the idea of putting parts of their business on rented, “black box”-style cloud services makes them uneasy.

When it comes to education, we often think of OER in terms of access to scholarly journals, tools to help learners and instuctors, social software for social learning activities, repositories of objects, and the value that opening your work up to a wider audience brings. If enough instructors use OER journals, the story goes that more academic publishing will be placed in open, peer reviewed journals. Demand drives innovation and change, after all.

All of this is great in theory and I’m certainly a big proponent of social computing. However, I’d stop short of putting all my eggs in the cloud basket just yet, and maybe ever. I much prefer open source software, but hosting it, where I own the data and support the servers. There’s nothing wrong with using online office suites to help share collaborative work and tools like blogs, wikis, Skype, IM and chat are wonderful for bridging the distance gap. However, I always want to keep my core data, or at the very least backups of everything I’m doing there, locally stored. If I always have to do that anyway, then it starts to dilute the value of cloud computing as a way of providing cheap storage and persistent access.

Frankly, I’d never want to be the one to have to tell a class full of students or anyone else for that matter, that they couldn’t get at that assignment that was due because Google had a server farm meltdown. Or, that institutional data like student numbers, grades, addresses, credit card numbers and the like had just disappeared into a cloud because they were housed there in the first place.

Severing the Telus umbilical cord

James — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 23:57:45 +0000

: Image by Darren Hester via Flickr

The first move was finally made last night. It’s been long overdue and I’m happy to be on the path. I’ve taken the first step to getting Telus hands out of my pockets – and they’ve been pretty deeply in there for a long time. Complete disclosure forces me to say that I was a Telus manager for five years and my wife has now been an employee for 11. We met while working there, so not all my associations with the recursive T are bad. However, most of my customer service associations with them are horrific. This could be a very long post, so I’ll endeavour to keep it short.

I’ve been a cash cow for them. Particularly as my sons are now 19 and 16, we have four mobile accounts, our home landline and high speed internet. That’s too many eggs in one basket anyway, but since we’ve had four accounts they’ve been able to count on me for a minimum of $220 in revenue every month. Unlike our US friends who can usually add a new number and pool voice/data in a family cellular plan for a few bucks, now that Telus doesn’t offer family plans (and never did affordably), four accounts with reasonable data/voice runs well over $150 a month. Add another $60 for landline and high speed internet and that’s just shy of $2700 a year. When you look at it that way, the costs are nothing short of obscene. They don’t blend mobility and landline billing and good bundles for being a good customer are pretty much non-existent.

Earth to Telus: you’re not a monopoly

We’ve been having a battle with them for the past few weeks. My son had to change a handset and they transferred his faves (for free texting) for him, only from what we can tell they got one of the numbers wrong and he incurred probably $30-40 in charges that we feel were not right. My wife has been on the phone with them several times trying to get them to go back a few months and determine the error. Most calls end abruptly with the reps refusing to do enough to clarify the issue. So, they can’t look enough at the big picture that they’re willing to risk a good customer over a $40 bill reversal. Brilliant. Maybe someone forgot to tell them they’re not a monopoly any more because they’re as arrogant as one. Based on this, the expensive voice/data packages and getting locked into long contracts to get decent phones, we’d already decided that as our contracts rolled we’d be looking elsewhere for wireless.

Since the feds auctioned off some wireless spectrum last year, my understanding is that Canada may finally have competition more like the US in the next 6-12 months. There are already options to go without contracts and system access fees but the voice/data is still pricey and the three carriers who offer these are simply subsidiaries of Telus, Rogers or Bell. You can’t get away from the monoliths as it stands right now. I think things will be looking very different in a year.

I don’t need no stinkin’ landline

I’d always operated under the assumption that cable was still slower than ADSL, but Shaw has been making steady improvements with their cable service while Telus hasn’t been keeping pace. Their high speed internet is generally rated as faster now, while their customer service consistently blows Telus out of the water. A little research yesterday told me I was probably with the wrong ISP. What really sealed the deal for me was when I thought about our home phone use. I can count the calls we get in a week on one hand as most of us use our cells for our voice. While Telus very much needs that wireline connection to try and sell me high speed or, gawd forbid, Telus TV, I don’t need it at all, thank you very much. Decision made.

I had committed to two years with Telus high speed just before Christmas for the privilege of getting a lower price, so I knew I’d have to swallow a cancellation fee to move to Shaw. I’d already accepted that I’d be paying more with Shaw, but for faster high speed and way better customer service, it seemed like a fair trade off. What I didn’t realize is that Shaw’s current promotional offer would more than make up for it. Two months for free, six more for $20 and then $43 a month after that when bundled with my HD digital TV service. I’ll save $200 in the first eight months with Shaw and cover my $120 cancellation fee with Telus. My home phone will be gone and so will my copper connection with Telus.

The best part

Aside from severing the umbilical cord with the Local Incumbent Carrier (telecom lingo for former monopoly), the best part of this is that my Shaw bundle for TV and ISP will run me about $122 + tax after the eight month promotional period is done. Right now, when I add up TV, landline and ISP with Telus and Shaw blended I’m paying about $140 + tax. By the end of this month I’ll be taking about $720 a year before tax out of Telus hands. Sure I’m putting it somewhere else, but I’m going to make sure I get satisfaction with my dollars. As our wireless accounts roll over the next 18 months or so, we’ll be pulling another $500 a year at a time more out of Telus hands.

The worst thing that could happen to Bell now

Anticipating intentions and meeting expectations

James — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 19:58:53 +0000

This week was a frustrating and interesting experience at work. At the end of the week prior, I finally launched the new design of our program catalogue. It’s a little hard to explain or show what this means. It’s a new interface for a specific kind of site that will blend two sources of program data together once program staff update their content, which used to be displayed in different places on our site. One particular design feature has caused significant amounts of both elation and consternation. Would you have thought it would be the addition of a contact form? Me neither, but I’m oversimplifying and that’s not really what this post is about.

What I’m really getting at here is a fundamental design truism. Whether it’s learning, marketing or consumer products, a successful design is predicated on the quality of a user’s experience with it. In my mind, the two absolute most important elements of that are the user’s intentions and expectations and how well you anticipate the first and meet the second.

A little background

A main requirement for this project was to ensure we drew attention to the key calls to action. The image at right shows the actual size of the main calls to action on the new program UI. They are the single largest text elements on the page and speak to the issue of anticipating user intentions.

If we know or can surmise what it is our users want to do (particularly to meet our business goals), we should make those tasks easy for them. If they’re considering applying to a post-secondary program, it should be simple to request more information, get in touch with us or to simply submit an application. Making these obvious and placing them on good page real estate has increased contact requests roughly ten-fold and requests for more information by roughly six times

Anticipating intentions

Does this mean we made the best decision we could have? It’s hard to know. We can’t accurately track program applications through the web (don’t ask), so I don’t know if we’ve had a significant spike, but clearly there was a previously unmet need for our site visitors to communicate with us about programs.

However, we’re somewhat a victim of our own success. At launch we had to send all contact inquiries to our program advising group, who’d never seen a tenth the volume they suddenly got. Where possible since launch, I’ve been pointing those forms directly to program staff in the schools (who’d been the prime point of contact on half our 420 programs anyway) and am currently about halfway through, so the flood is beginning to disperse. Of the feedback I’ve received from the schools, some are ecstatic with the increased interest and some are naturally worried about response standards.

The ‘request more info’ link requires them to provide a certain amount of demographic data and we tell them up front that this will generate a follow-up contact and some snail mail. With the ‘contact us’ link, the requests which previously went through program advising, were met with a form which asked for a fair bit of information upfront. Difficulty finding it and then having to answer a few questions probably disuaded a good number of users from filling it out. The new form by contrast automatically picks up the program from which it came, and asks for a name, email address and comment. Couple that with how prominent it is and I think we did a good job of anticipating needs with the redesign.

Meeting expectations

This is where we now need to move quickly on number of fronts. If you decide you want to apply to a program, you’ll end up here. This is legacy content, which will then drive users into one of four longer pages, most of which ask them to go search for the program they want to apply to. We need to provide them that information if they came from a program and clicked ‘apply now’ and make it fast for them to get to our Banner application process. As we can’t do much to improve that piece (and we are upgrading Banner fairly soon), the most important thing we can do is meet expectations for a useful thing to happen if our users decide to apply.

Similarly, with the contact form. We may have to temporarily send users through the form with the multiple questions while we build a slightly better process for our contact forms, and I’m worried about doing so. The end user isn’t worried about where their query went – they just want a timely answer that helps them make a decision. Since, like all post-secondaries, we ultimately want course registrations and program applications, we want to do everything we can to answer their question. The problem we need to solve is, with a severe increase in queries, due to simple design improvements, how do we ensure our internal process meets the expectations that result from anticipating intentions.

No related posts.

Grokking the literature review

James — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 05:40:08 +0000

I have to admit that I’m liking the literature review process, the more I understand the right approach. Having said that, I’ve not really done what could be classified as a real literature review yet. I did a very surface one (which could only really be called a minor literature summary) when I did my preliminary thesis proposal a couple months ago to get my topic approved. I am presently starting with that version to flesh out a better one for my official thesis proposal in the last of my cohort classes. When I launch into my full thesis phase in July, I’ll build on the version I’m doing now yet again.

I realize now that I had been thinking wrongly when I approached the literature review as a general reading of related literature, tying it together so as to quote things I thought were relevant, but without what I would really consider any kind of critical analysis. As I’ve been reading journal articles and relevant chapters of a couple research texts, it’s becoming much clearer to me how to read more effectively and how to understand why the process is so important to situating and contextualizing the research I will be performing myself. In fact, I’m now understanding how I’ll be able to finalize my topic and questions ONLY if I do a decent literature review.

Boote and Beile (2005, p.4) state that the literature review should:

set the broad context of the study, clearly demarcate what is and is not within the scope of the investigation, and justify those decisions.

They go on to say that it should also:

report the claims made in the existing literature and examine critically the research methods used to better understand whether the claims are warranted.

Similarly, Knopf (2006, p.127) suggests that, when determining whether a particular approach to some problem has been successful, one can:

focus on the ‘lessons learned’ from a previous effort to deal with a certain problem (and those lessons learned might have been proposed by outside scholars or by practitioners themselves).

Developing a topic and questions

Getting to the point of a really good research topic and questions which truly operationalize it is no small task. In particular, I’ve come to the realization that you won’t land on the final versions until you’ve concluded the literature review for your proposal. It’s also clear that the topic and questions may easily get revised again when further literature review is done for my thesis. This is because, provided you look at the literature critically, you’ll start to really see where the gaps exist and what methods were used to produce the various findings – exactly what you need to determine what you want to look at. If something has been studied to death, you have a lower chance of adding much value to existing knowledge, whereas figuring out that some aspect of a topic has been poorly analyzed may actually give you a better way to approach your research.

In getting to the point of being able to move forward with a researchable topic, Rugg and Petre (2007, p.55), have a good bullet list of the things you should be able to do when you’ve conducted your initial search of the literature. You should be able to answer the following questions:

What is the problem you are tackling?

What is it academically significant?

What are the main things that have been tried before?

Who tried them?

Why didn’t those approaches work?

What are you going to do that’s different?

Where did you get that idea from?

What evidence is there to suggest that this might work better?

If it doesn’t work, will the finding be useful or just make you look like an idiot?

In particular, I like the last question. I’d have to say the biggest risk I’m feeling as I read a ton of articles this week (other than that of not getting my proposal literature review done by Sunday), is that of doing something that hasn’t got the academic merit I’m hoping for.

I’d really rather that the next year of my life isn’t spent on something that makes me look foolish. I can do that easily in many other areas of my life.

References

Boote, D.N., & Beile, P. (2005). Scholars before researchers: On the centrality of the dissertation literature review in research preparation. Educational Researcher, (34)6.
Knopf, J.W. (2006). Doing a literature review. Political Science & Politics, 39(1).
Rugg, G., & Petre, M. (2007). A gentle guide to research methods. Birkshire: McGraw-Hill/Open University Press.

The worst customer service I’ve ever had

James — Sun, 24 May 2009 01:29:48 +0000

Who’d have thought getting new glasses could be this complicated? I’ve had a customer experience that I am still finding hard to grasp. I’ll make this short, but writing about it is a bit therapeutic too, I guess. I got an eye exam a few weeks ago with my normal optometrist, who also runs a small optical store in the same office. It’s close to home and convenient. However, I also find it difficult to find frames I like, so I did a bit of shopping around before settling on a pair at my optometrist’s office about a week and a half ago.

I paid $308 in full upfront for glasses that were to arrive this past Tuesday (after the $85 it cost me for my exam). When I went in to pick up the glasses and tried them on, I could see nothing clearly past about 12 feet, though they were great for anything within six feet. They originally gave me two prescriptions; an extended wear one and a close-up one, with an option for progressive lenses. My eyes are still pretty good so we opted to ‘tweak’ the extended wear prescription to make it a little stronger to aid in reading and computer use.

The owner does all the fitting and purchasing recommendations and, when I told the receptionist that the glasses were not acceptable and left them there, the owner called me back within about a day and we arranged that I’d come in yesterday to look at options. He indicated that his notes suggested I had decided not to use them for extended wear and only for close-up, while my recollection was that they were for extended wear but would be adjusted to make them a bit stronger. If not, why would we make adjustments and not just use the close-up prescription?

Yesterday was a day off work that I arranged specifically so that I’d be in between 12:30 and 1:30, when he committed he’d also be there. Arriving at almost exactly 12:30, he’d apparently forgotten the appointment altogether because he’d just left to do some errands. I was pretty unhappy and indicated to the receptionist that it would probably be a couple of weeks before I could get into the store again and that I simply wanted a refund (I’m not good when a business stands me up, and has my money to boot). I was informed that he’d have to cut the cheque, so I said I wanted to be called.

I heard nothing the rest of the day yesterday and left a voicemail for them this morning, recounting my issue, providing two phone numbers and asking for a call again. When I hadn’t heard anything by 2pm, I called them. The receptionist said that he was with a customer and would call me back. When I asked why no one had called me, she said that the dial tone hadn’t indicated there was a message so she hadn’t checked their voicemail.

Fast-forward to 4pm:

Me: Hello, is Derek there?

Receptionist: Is this Mr. Wanless?

Me: Yes …

Receptionist: I’m sorry, but he had to go out to his other clinic. He said a cheque will be available for pick-up some time next week.

Me: But I asked to have him call back.

Receptionist: Yeah, he’s sorry but he had to leave.

Me: You mean he’s had three opportunities to return a requested call and he couldn’t even be bothered? Hmmm, is he aware that he’ll be losing four customers by this treatment?

Receptionist: Why?

Me: Because my whole family are patients/customers and none of us will be spending another dime there. Please tell him that.

She also confirmed that she had, indeed, got the earlier voicemail. After a long pause of stunned silence, we had a bit of back and forth and I assured her that while I was annoyed, it was not with her. She understood my frustration, however, I was also getting a lot of vagaries with regard to when a cheque would be available and it took a bit of work to make her understand that I wanted to be called Monday and told exactly when my refund would be there. Given that I was previously told that he writes the cheques, I’m not sure why he couldn’t have simply done it today.

I fully expect he’ll make me wait and also try and deduct some kind of fee. All the while I get to keep hunting for frames and go through the whole process again. I guess it’s the lack of foresight that gets me here. Even as late as yesterday afternoon, a simple apology and assurance that he would fix the issue probably would have saved my business. That he couldn’t bother calling, apologizing for missing the appointment, or simply had the guts to deal with an unsatisfied customer is inexcusable.

The worst thing that could happen to Bell now