Geoff Coupe's Blog

Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

Category: Organizations

  • The Standards Office

    Related to the last post (about the description by Pat Helland of the two camps in IT: Controllers and Doers), Stephen Walli has his own thought-provoking post about setting up a Standards Office within Google. Such a place is usually seen by the Doer camp as being staffed only by Controllers (and mostly in a highly negative sense), but it need not be this way.
     
    Stephe brings his long experience in the Standards game to bear on laying out the case for why Google should have a Standards Office. I found it very compelling, but I couldn’t help wondering that if Google has not already got such an office and associated processes in place, then are they not too late to be thinking about it now? If, indeed, Google is driven primarily by the Doer camp, then I can’t help feeling that it’s more likely to end in tears sooner rather than later. Stability comes from the tension and interaction between the two camps. Both sides of the coin are necessary for the coin to continue to exist… 

  • Controllers and Doers

    Pat Helland has a few wise words about the two broad categories of people who work in IT: the Controllers and the Doers. I recognise the types very well. Indeed, I started off in the Doer category, but for most of the latter part of my career (if such a grand word could be used about my working life) I was quite clearly in the Controllers’ camp.

  • Mischief

    I don’t know about you, but if I were to set up a Public Relations firm, I think that last thing I would call it is Mischief PR. It sounds such a hostage to fortune to me. Anyway, someone’s gone and done it, and guess what, they’re refusing to come clean on the data behind a story they’ve apparently concocted for one of their clients. Why am I not surprised?

  • Another British Triumph…

    … in the long tradition of cock-ups. Heathrow’s Terminal 5. I confess to stirrings of schadenfreude over this:
     
       
     
    I do feel for the poor guy (one Ian Bailey). His faith in computer technology is touching. The scenes of baggage being stowed by automated stacker cranes brings back terrifying memories of the time I spent writing (and debugging) the software for the automated conveyor system that handled pallets of Austin Mini parts in the British Leyland factory in Birmingham in the late 1970s. Shudder.

  • The Turn of a Card

    Diamond Geezer writes of his experience with business cards. It’s very like my own experience in the days when the organisation I worked for kept on reinventing itself (for no good reason that I could discern).

  • Gobsmacked by Goskomstandard

    The PSD Blog has a bizarre little tale about fire extinguishers in Tajikistan. Kafka would be proud…

  • Plus Ça Change…

    I see that my old colleagues in Shell IT are faced with yet more major changes. I don’t envy them one little bit.

  • Performance-related Pay

    I see that the Vatican is to bring in performance-related pay for the 2,600 lay members of its staff. I also note that the priests, bishops, monks and nuns who form the Papal administration are exempt from this. I’m sitting on my hands, trying not to make a cheap shot about this…

  • Compare and Contrast

    Joel turns over the iPod and the Zune and reads the fine print. What he says is, on one level, perfectly true. Apple captures a feeling and Microsoft just sucks in the attempt.
     
    But, on the other hand, the statements make me feel as though both marketing departments should be first up against the wall, come the revolution. They strike me as written by a bunch of tossers… Apple because they deliberately fuck with your brain, and Microsoft because they are so completely clueless.

  • Things I Don’t Miss About Work

    This week’s Bug Bash takes me back… Been there, heard that, mentally shook my head in despair…

  • Badges of Honour

    I see that the Girl Guide organisation is thinking about introducing courses for some new badges. Apparently, it’s going to introduce sessions on how to practise safe sex, manage debt, and reduce the size of one’s carbon footprint. They’re probably more relevant to today’s world than the badges for learning how to iron and how to milk cows (1910), or the Homemaker and Commonwealth badges of 1957.
     
    The organisation has polled 1,000 of its members to come up with the subjects for the new courses. The need for knowing how to practise safe sex or manage debt I think is perfectly understandable, and laudable. I am much more perturbed by the fact that apparently large numbers of those polled felt the need for a badge for learning how to assemble flat-pack furniture. The engineer in me finds it difficult to appreciate that people do not have this capability as an innate skill. I shudder to think how I would cope without it.

  • Public Conveniences

    Public bodies, such as government agencies, are supposed to serve the public. But all too often, it seems, they actively take steps to thwart this intent.
     
    I came across two such examples today. First up is the UK’s Environment Agency. Amongst the data it collects on behalf of the British public is flood data. When OnOneMap (a site for prospective housebuyers) made the data accessible via Google Maps, housebuyers were delighted, but the Environment Agency was furious, and demanded that OnOneMap withdraw the facility. Read more here.
     
    Next up is the UK’s English Heritage, the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England, and funded by the taxpayer and by visitors to some of its properties. It has a ViewFinder image gallery website, but this actively restricts public engagement rather than make it easy. Dan Lockton, over at fulminate // Architectures of Control has the story. 
     
    So at the moment, the score stands at:
    Housebuyers (the Public, first team): 0, Environment Agency (Wankers United): 1
    Amateur Historians (the Public, second team): 0, English Heritage (Dickheads Town): 1
     

  • Management Speak

    A particular bugbear of mine is the growing encroachment of management-speak into every part of our daily lives. Whenever I hear it I cringe inwardly and sorrow that more humans have been taken over by the pod people.
     
    Here’s a particularly fine example identified by Dr. Crippen over at his NHS Blog Doctor. Watch the video and see if you can remain unmoved. I think it was when Dr. Jonathan Tritter talked about "sharing the vision" that I lost it completely and screamed aloud. Mind you, the signs are there from the very opening sentence which is: "The aim of the new NHS Involvement Centre is to place patients at the heart of new and creative health services". Oh gawd, what the f*ck does that even mean? Forget about "new" and "creative", why not just have health services that work? And that guff about "putting patients at the heart" is right up there alongside "giving the consumer choice" as a trope that sounds good but signifies sod-all.

  • The Gentlemen of the Press…

    … and I use the term "gentlemen" with the utmost irony. While, clearly, some journalists and newspaper staff have high moral principles, some, equally clearly, do not. 

  • A Bunch of Bankers

    Here’s a salutary tale from an overseas student at Cambridge. He received a letter from his bank (the HSBC Group) telling him that they no longer wished to provide him with banking services, and that he had 30 days to move to another bank before his HSBC account would be closed by them.
     
    After unsuccessfully trying a number of times to ring the contact number on the letter (his local HSBC branch could do nothing), let him take up the story:
    After two written complaints and a phone call to customer services, a member of the “Team” finally contacted me. She enquired about a single international deposit into my account, which I then explained to be my study grant for the coming year. Upon this explanation I was told that the bank would not close my account, and I was given a vague explanation of them not expecting students to get large deposits. I found this strange, since it had not been a problem in previous years, and even stranger since my deposit had cleared into my account two days after the letter was sent.  
    I love that: the bank "doesn’t expect students to get large deposits". Dear lord, when I was at university forty years ago, I got my student grant paid to me in a single large deposit each year, hasn’t the penny dropped yet at the HSBC that this is what happens?
     
    I note that this student isn’t the only one to receive a similar letter from the HSBC. Clearly, some newly-introduced fraud or anti-terrorist checking system has been throwing up false positives. It all leaves a nasty taste, particularly after reading the similar experiences of others who have commented on the student’s Blog entry. Cockney rhyming slang doesn’t even begin to describe this bunch of bankers.
     
    (hat tip to Bruce Schneier for the link)

  • Management Madness

    In large organisations, it often seems that more time is spent in trying to manage things than in actually doing productive work. Moishe Lettvin provides a good example when he describes his time working on Microsoft’s Vista operating system. He worked on a team that was responsible, amongst other things, for the design and implementation of Vista’s shutdown menu. As he says, the implementation took a couple of hundred lines of code. But he found himself interacting with 42 other people in the attempt to design and implement the feature. Madness. It’s a miracle that Vista ever made it out of the doors of Microsoft at all.

  • The World’s Greatest Bureaucracy

    Based on personal experience, I often think that The Netherlands must rank high as a leading contender to be the world’s greatest bureaucracy (we’re guaranteed to grind you down…). However, on reflection I think that the honour should probably be passed to India. After all, they’ve been taught by a master in the form of the British Raj. The evidence is here.

  • Not Sensible

    So there I was, making a backup of some data, when my eye happened to fall on the box containing the CD blanks. Pleomax, it proudly proclaimed, along with the tagline underneath: "a sensible bit of SAMSUNG".
     
    And that got me thinking. What on earth does that actually mean? Does it mean:
    Congratulations, you’ve bought these CD blanks from a sensible bit of our corporation, when you could, just as easily, have bought something from us that was not sensible. It could have been downright stupid, for example, or actively evil. For example, you could have bought this from this SAMSUNG division and you would have been exposing yourself to invisible sperm-destroying rays. So count yourself bloody lucky that you have purchased merely a sensible CD blank from a sensible SAMSUNG division. Phew, what a relief, eh?
    What is it about marketing people? They get paid to sit around to dream up this stuff? Ridiculous blue cartoon figures? I thought Belgium had the monopoly on that shite. Life is too short.

  • Fingerpointing Again

    Here we go again, the fun of trying to deal with organisations that just blame each other instead of resolving issues.
     
    I ordered a DVD recently from Bol.com ("the biggest mediashop in the Netherlands"). My purchases from them are charged to my American Express card.
     
    I noticed when the charge came through on the last statement that it had been charged, not in Euros, but in Singapore dollars. Odd, thought I. Particularly since the original invoice from Bol.com was in Euros. And it meant that I ended up paying more than the amount shown on the original invoice.  
     
    So I rang American Express… "Oh yes, sir, Bol submitted the charge in Singapore dollars – we suggest that you contact them to find out why they did that".
     
    So I rang Bol.com… "But sir, our Finance department records show that we have only received the original Euro amount from your credit card company. We don’t know why you have been charged extra, perhaps it is commission costs from your credit card company. We suggest that you contact them to find out why they did that".
     
    Aaaarrrggghhh!!!
     
    Still, this particular cloud does seem to have a silver lining. I sent an email back to Bol.com expressing my frustration at the situation(!) and they have just sent me a coupon that covers the cost difference. No word of an explanation though. My nasty suspicious mind is thinking that perhaps someone inside Bol has got a nice little scam going on. It may be only a few cents on each transaction, but spread over enough customers and enough purchases, and it could add up to a tidy sum. On the other hand, it might have been just a single mistake at the keyboard. I guess I’ll never know.

  • Thinking On Your Feet

    Lateral thinking is a useful skill to have. The Times reports that would-be entrants to Oxford and Cambridge are asked apparently bizarre questions by tutors to test their ability to think on their feet. One question that came up last year was:
    If there were three beautiful, naked women standing in front of you, which one would you pick? Does this have any relevance to economics?
    Stumbling and Mumbling provides a particularly good answer to this tricky little poser. One would hope that the tutor asking that question didn’t think this answer was given by a tricky little poseur.