Month: April 2014

So, how do Policing Statistics work?

ianwaring Blind Alleys, Police, Politicians, Statistics Leave a comment

Metropolitan Police Sign

I know I posted a previous note on the curious measures being handed down to police forces to “reduce crime”. While the police may be able to influence it slightly, in the final analysis they only have direct control over one part of the value chain – that of producing the related statistics (I really don’t think they commit all the crimes on which they are measured!). The much longer post was this: http://www.ianwaring.com/2014/04/05/police-metrics-and-the-missing-comedy-of-the-red-beads/

I’ve just had one of my occasional visits back to “Plumpergeddon” – not recommended in work environments for reasons that will become apparent later – which documents the ebbs and flows of the legal process following a mugging and theft (of a MacBook and a wallet containing a debit card) in London in November 2011. It is, to put it mildly, a shocking story.

The victim of the crime – and owner of the MacBook – had installed a piece of software on his machine that – once he’d enabled a tick box on an associated web site – started to “phone home” at regular intervals. Taking pictures of the person using the computer, shots of what was on the screen at the same time, and both tagged with it’s exact geographic location. He ended up with over 6,000 pictures, including some which showed sale of goods on eBay that matched purchases made on his stolen credit cards.

I’m not sure exactly how the flow of incidents get rolled up into the crime statistics that the Met publish, but having done a quick trawl through the Plumpergeddon Blog, starting at the first post here and (warning: ever more NSFW as the story unfolds, given what the user started paying for and viewing!) moving up to the current status 29 pages later, the count looks like:

  • 1 count of mugging
  • 1 theft of a MacBook Pro Personal Computer, plus Wallet containing Company Debit Card
  • 2 counts of obtaining money (from a cashpoint with a stolen card) by deception
  • 9 counts of obtaining goods (using a stolen debit card, using a PIN) by deception
  • 2 counts of obtaining goods (using a stolen debit card, signing for them) by deception
  • 11 counts of demonstrably selling stolen goods

So, I make that 26 individual crime incidents.

The automated data collection started off within 4 weeks of the theft phoning home (it took one shot of the user, a screenshot and reported location and connection details every 10 minutes of active use). He ended up assembling circa 6,000 pieces of evidence (including screenshots of the person using his MacBook, and screenshots documenting the disposal of the goods purchased with the stolen card using three separate accounts on eBay). All preserved with details of the physical location of the MacBook and the details of the WiFi network it was connected to.

Many ebbs and flows along the way, but the long and short of it was that the case was formally dropped “for lack of evidence”. This was then followed by a brief piece of interest when some media activity started picking up, but it then sort of ebbed away again. In May 2013, news came back as “The case file is back with the officer, and the case is closed pending further leads.”

Four weeks ago, the update said:

I Am No Longer the Victim. Apparently. I was told last night in a police station by a Detective Constable that because the £7,000 I was defrauded of was returned by my bank after 3-4 weeks, and the laptop was replaced by my insurance company after 4 months, I am no longer considered the victim for either of those crimes. I was told that my bank and insurance company are now the victims.

I assume this must mean that when a victim of an assault receives compensation, the attackers subsequently go free? Any UK based lawyers, police or other legal types care to shed some light on this obscure logic?

Cynical little me suspects i’m being told this because the police don’t want to pursue charges over those crimes, even though (as most readers will know and as I said in my previous post) I’ve done practically all the legwork for them.

I must admit to be completely appalled that a case like this. Given the amount of evidence submitted, it should have solved a string of fraudulent transactions and matching/associated Sale of Stolen Goods, that could have incremented the Metropolitan Police “crimes solved” counter like  jackpot machine. 26 crimes solved with all the evidence collecting leg work already done for them.

So, where does this case sit on the Metropolitan Police Statistics? Does it count as all 26 incidents “solved” because the insurance company have paid out and the debit card company have reversed the fraudulent transactions?And above all, is the Home Secretary really satisfied that she’s seeing an appropriate action under her “reducing crime” objective here??

The guy is still free and on the streets without any intervention since the day the crimes were committed. Free to become the sort of one-man crime wave that Bill Bratton managed to systematically get off the streets in New York during his first tenure as Police Chief there (I recall from his book The Turnaround that 70 individuals in custody completely changed the complexion of life in that City). Big effect when you can systematically follow up to root causes, as he did then.

However, back in London, I wonder how this string of events are mapped onto the crime statistics being widely published and cited. Any ideas?

Rumours: be careful what you allege

ianwaring Music Leave a comment

City to City Gerry Rafferty Album Cover

I recall a couple of years ago listening to Simon Mayo’s Confessions on Radio 2 while driving back from the local train station. Radio 2 presenter Stuart Maconie admitted making up several whoppers from his sordid past when he was a journalist for NME (New Musical Express – popular music weekly newspaper). Most, such as David Bowie inventing the game Connect 4, and Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys being a part time Rugby League Referee, are largely long forgotten. However, one took on a life of it’s own; he alleged that Bob Holness (of Blockbusters fame) played the Saxaphone sequence on Baker Street, the lead track on Gerry Rafferty’s City to City album. He’s now insistent that it was his lie on June 14th 1991.

He shut his phone off when Gerry Rafferty died after he saw Bob Holness trending on Twitter that day. He met Bob Holness later on, who said he thought the rumour was hilariously funny. When Bob Holness died, Gerry Rafferty started trending on Twitter too.

The one remaining missing piece of data is whether or not “Baker Street” was played at Bob’s funeral. Does anyone know?

Update: True. Played at his own request. A fitting end (with a twist of good humour) to a great man.

Intellectual Property: the best lessons avoid public subsidies

ianwaring Copyright, Intellectual Property, Money, Patents, Politicians Leave a comment

Nixon Follow the Money

One thing I find particularly sad is one of the items my MP sent out on his latest weekly newsletter, in a section entitled “Intellectual Property”. It reads:

Mike Weatherley, Intellectual Property Adviser to the PM, has called on the Prime Minister to establish permanent funding for the newly-formed Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU), which tackles IP crime across the country and is based within the City of London Police. More here, Twitter: @mike_weatherley. In his letter Mike said, “I appreciate that funding for this new unit is not permanent. However, I would like to put on record my support for committing future funding to fighting IP crime and boosting the current level of financial support that is available for PIPCU. As I am sure that you are aware, the creative industries add over £70 billion to our economy each year and so it really is in our national interest to protect that revenue.”

It’s difficult to know where to begin to unpick this, but for me, the immediate red flag is the familiar use of common fallacies to support an argument. A full collection can be found here. The “It’s big so must be protected” doesn’t even start to hold water on further analysis, albeit he’s done everyone a slight favour by not dragging in allegations that to do otherwise is to support terrorism – a line i’ve heard in the past from a spokesman for the “Federation against Copyright Theft” (aka FACT). Effectively, i’d suggest the “creative industries” are choosing a business model built on scarcity, and then asking the general public to subsidise the associated cost of that choice. A civil offence morphed into a criminal one in the vain hope to play King Canute.

I wouldn’t knowing mind the source of that £70 Billion figure, and the geography over which that is spread. These sort of numbers are routinely banded around, but often found to be wanting when traced back to their original source.

A few years back, one commentator noted that you could get five years imprisonment for stealing a Michael Jackson track, while Conrad Murray got four years for killing him. A British guy queued for extradition to the USA for having a web site publishing links to torrent sites, and a Dutch National queued for extradition from Australia to the USA, both of whom have committed no crime in the legal jurisdiction in which they reside. Finishing that same week with SOPA and PIPA legislation shelved for the time being, with the MPAA explicitly reminding US politicians whose pocket they were supposed to be in.

The central allegation coming back is an old chestnut on piracy costing the Entertainment Industry money and/or jobs. Does that really hold up to any scrutiny? Is it not more related to the pace at which material is released into other territories and lining up the economics to put a quality product in the hands of customers willing to buy where there is demand? And to do so at a price point where there is little incentive to invest time and effort to subvert the process??

I think that’s a lesson that Apple helped solve in the early days of iTunes. It’s easy for consumers to do the right thing. Right now, if my wife sees that the latest series of Dallas is airing in the USA, where can she send money to see it now? Answer: nowhere. Would someone like to take her money please? No??

I recall some excellent work done by Claire Enders in the days of Napster. Claire at one point earlier in her career worked on strategy for EMI Music, was adept at turning 500+ pages of BMRB research tables into pithy summaries of Music/Internet/Telco market directions, and was outrageously unPC when numbers she uncovered contradicted public statements by senior media company execs. A joy to listen to. Claire now runs Enders Analysis, and is often on Sky and Bloomberg exercising her “take no prisoners” views. But I digress.

The thing she found was that the only people who suffered any loss from Napster and similar music sharing services were the top 10 artists at each of the 5 or so big record labels. Everyone else benefited, by way of exposure of their music to a wider audience, and related secondary businesses like concerts and merchandise. So, at face value, the RIAA strings were being operated on behalf of 50 or so economic entities in total, some of whom are well known for their adept tax avoidance and deployment of their wealth in offshore tax havens.

That got me thinking. Whose interests are being compromised by the recipients of the aggressive pursuits across the world? Who are these people who are besmirching the reputation of lawmakers in foreign lands by their heavy handed approach to playing King Canute on individuals who will have little impact on the cause they are PR’ing? Why are the amounts being sought so out of proportion to the actual monetary amounts involved??

Clue is to follow the money. In the USA (and which then spills over here), the folks funding the effort are giving major money to politicians. The funds are massive. Chief beneficiary of the politicians spend is the TV Networks. Aren’t the TV networks mainly owned by the few big, vertically integrated media companies? So the money appears to go full circle.

Lest we forget, even Copyright and Patents were put in place as servants of the Public Good. To do the right thing to prevent hoarding of good works that benefit society as a whole. Unfortunately, the public the laws were passed to serve are rarely represented in the reviews that affect their implementation – and their misuse by bodies with agendas that subvert the public good for which they were designed. I think our MPs would do us all greater favours by demanding – at bare minimum – proposals to be more explicit in the aspects or areas of Intellectual Property that they feel need criminal law protection by this Police Unit – and that any which are contingent on a poor choice of business model should be passed back instead to be funded by the party choosing the demonstrably defective business model alone.

Wouldn’t the resources be better spent improving the access, timeliness and expense of content across the world? I suspect (and research bears this out) that most consumers want to do the right thing, and piracy would be a meaningless economic niche. With that, a useful saving to be made in times of austerity, and police could spend their resources doing what the public who fund them to want them to do alone.

Having someone more forward-thinking in government circles – and to push back appropriately – would make the world a better place.

Dear Water Cooler, if this person talks, please listen in for me

ianwaring Journalism, Open Source, Twitter Leave a comment

Twitter Bird Logo

Having only a small proportion of your registered users classified in your Monthly Active User (“MAU”) count is one of the surprising poor things about Twitter compared to most social media sites. However, some of the content there is absolute gold – if only there was a way to bottle it effectively.

The sort of thing that often happens is that a big announcement in the industry occurs (like Facebook taking over Virtual Reality Headset Maker Oculus, or Google buying Titan Aerospace, the manufacturer of solar powered drones that fly several miles up – above aircraft traffic – nominally as WiFi hotspots of the future where Internet Access is not yet available). There is then a collection of Venture Capitalists, Industry Analysts and folks with excellent industry backgrounds who mill around a virtual water cooler, and start bouncing views off each other on “what it means”.

Alternatively, you get someone like Marc Andreessen (@pmarca – one of the cofounders of Netscape and of VC Andreessen Horowitz, aka “A16Z”) rattling off a few observations about Venture Capital, and a myriad of people join in with views or differences of opinion. Again, another water cooler chat comes to life. The top level looked like this earlier today:

Points 1-11 of Marc Andreessen Talking about VC funding

Marc Andreessen Water Cooler points 11-15 re VC funding

I’m lucky in that when I get up, these folks on the West Coast of the USA are tweeting late into their night, so I get to see these posts at all. The one gotcha is that you have to step through each of his tweets to see the reposts and discussion around each point. When you do, it’s actually much better than a summary that a single quality journalist can put together – and bang up to date with the latest news in the industry. I waxed lyrical at this with a reply to Marc:

pmarca (Mark Andreessen) favouriting a post about Twitter water coolers

And then remembered i’d said the same thing to Kevin Marks during a Gillmor Gang podcast (on the live chat as the podcast was progressing, one Friday evening a week or two back). At the time, he suggested looking at a service called “Storify”. I did, but it hooks into Twitter based on subject matter, and not the way I thought would help. So, tweeted that as a comment back to Marc and to Kevin Marks:

Kevin Marks lays another golden nugget

And back came a reply from Kevin minutes later (he’s based in San Jose). Brilliant tip, so I went and had a look:

Aaron Swatz's Twitter Water Cooler Viewer

Bingo. Albeit it no longer works (as Kevin suggested), and we know that unfortunately, Aaron is no longer with us. So, time to go find his code and see if there’s a way to tweak it to work with the latest versions of the Twitter API, and then to lie in wait for any water cooler conversation taking place that involves one or more of a specific list of people I personally find valuable to listen to.

There are people in real life like that. You listen intently to what they say as gold nuggets keep getting brushed off their shoulders. I remember people like Tony Batchelor at Camborne School of Mines was like that (his expertise was geological and drilling for hot water far underground in Cornwall as a potential energy source, but his expertise in all sorts of related industries really fascinating to hear).

Twitter are sitting on the edge of being able to facilitate a sort of bottles of “TED Talk” quality conversations that they could farm from their own feeds. I’d even pay for those bottles – if they did a good job of keeping all eyes on those water cooler moments and could record them 24 hours/day, then deliver them to me succinctly. I fear I must miss most of them at the moment.

Becoming More Efficient; Moonshot scale ideas available

ianwaring Amazon, Books, Future Trends, Google, Management Leave a comment

 

Efficiency Straight Ahead

The statistics below are from an unashamed promotion of a new book, but I thought this was well articulated. The authors cite some statistics to think about:

Examples of Energy Inefficiency

  • The average car spends more than 95 percent of its time …. doing nothing.
  • Less than 40 percent of electrical transmission capacity is in use at any given time.
  • A calorie of beef requires 160 times more energy to produce than one of corn—and as the world grows richer, more people eat beef.
  • The cost of bringing an oil well online has more than tripled over the last decade.
  • A Motorway operating at peak throughput is less than 10 percent covered with cars.
  • Phnom Penh has a lower water leakage rate than London.

There used to be a very small detached house just inside Pamber Forest which I used to pass daily, and often wondered whether I could live quite happily in such a small place. Not quite as extreme as the Capsule Hotels you find in some areas of Japan, but a step in that direction nonetheless. This would probably mean quite a ruthless clean of the miscellaneous stuff we have all over the current house, but i’m sure there would be impressive efficiencies if we knuckled down to it.

The good thing about looking at stats like this is to start having thoughts of what Larry Page (CEO of Google) terms “Moonshots“. What could be done to improve things 10x, 100x or 1000x better than is considered normal by the rest of us, and what changes will that lead us to.

The authors feel that there’s a lot of waste in the status quo, and thus a great chance to produce and use resources much more effectively. But they don’t think it means that the sky is falling, and that our grandchildren are fated to inherit a poisoned, angry, gloomy, planet. That is also the argument of their new book, Resource Revolution: How to Capture the Biggest Business Opportunity in a Century
by McKinsey’s Stefan Heck and Matt Rogers.

My brain starts to wander at this point, and I still have this nagging feeling that all the books in my bookcase could be summarised down to 1-2pages each of people really tried – or less than 30 if examples are cited. One of the neat things about Kindle Books is that Amazon actually allow you to produce and sell stuff at that length; the The Bitcoin Primer: Risks, Opportunities, And Possibilities book
I purchased was an excellent 27 page read.

In terms of manufacturing (I guess they must be manufacturing consultants by day), they suggest looking at five areas: substitution (replacing costly, clunky, or scarce materials with cheaper, better ones); optimization (using IT to improve the production and use of resources – to order rather than into stock?); virtualization (which must really mean sweating otherwise idle assets?); circularity (finding value in products after their initial use) and waste elimination.

However, then then start citing “having to deal with more complex supply chains”, while integrating “big data” (hmmm – fad alert!) and finding diverse talent with new skills in areas like software- and system-integration (while I thought those were pretty well established!).

They conclude, “any bet that we will succumb to a global economic crisis is a bet against human ingenuity. No such bet has ever paid off.”

Looks an interesting book nonetheless, and i’m sure some good nuggets to pick at. Duly added to my Wish List.

Coding for Young Kids: two weeks, only £10,000 to go

ianwaring Courses, Kickstarter, Kids, Learning, Maker Movement, Open Source, Software, Training Leave a comment

ScratchJr Screenshot

ScratchJr Logo

I’m one backer on Kickstarter of a project to bring the programming language Scratch to 5-7 year olds. Called ScratchJr, it’s already showing great promise on iPads in schools in Massachussetts. The project has already surpassed it’s original $25,000 goal to finish it’s development for the iPad, and last week made it over the $55,000 stretch goal to release an Android version too. With two weeks to go, we are some $15,000 short of the last remaining stretch target ($80,000) needed to fund associated curriculum and teaching notes.

The one danger of tablets is that they tend to be used in “lean back” applications, primarily as a media consumer delivery devices. Hence a fear amongst some teachers that we’re facing a “Disneyfication” of use, almost like teaching people to read, but not to write. ScratchJr will give young students their first exposure to the joy of programming; not only useful for a future in IT, but also providing logic and design skills useful for many other fields that may stimulate their interest. I thought the 7-year old kids in this video were brilliant and authoritative on what they’d achieved to date:

I opted to pledge $45 to contribute and to buy a branded project t-shirt for my 2 year old granddaughter; there are a range of other funding options:

  • $5 for an email from the ScratchJr Cat
  • $10 for your name in the credits
  • $20 for a ScratchJr Colouring Book
  • $35 for some ScratchJr Stickers
  • $40 (+$5 for outside USA delivery) ScratchJr T-Shirt (Kid or Adult sizes)
  • $50 for an invite to a post launch webinar
  • $100 for a pre-launch webinar with the 2 project leaders
  • $300 to receive a beta version ahead of the public launch
  • $500 for a post-launch workshop in the Boston, Mass area
  • $1000+ for a pre-launch workshop in the Boston, Mass area
  • $2000+ to be named as a Platinum Sponsor in the Credits
  • $5000+ for lunch for up to 4 people with the 2 Project Leaders

I once had a project earlier in my career where we managed to get branded teaching materials (about “The Internet”) professionally produced and used in over 95% of UK secondary schools for an investment of £50,000 – plus a further £10,000 to pay for individual and school prizes. In that context, the price of this program is an absolute steal, and I feel well worth every penny. Being able to use this across the full spectrum of Primary Schools in the UK would be fantastic if teachers here could take full advantage of this great work.

So, why not join the backers? Deadline for pledges is 30th April, so please be quick! If you’d like to do so, contributions can be pledged here on Kickstarter.

ScratchJr Logo

Footnote: a TED video that covers Project Leaders Mitch Resnick’s earlier work on Scratch (taught to slightly older kids) lasts 15 minutes and can be found here. Scratch is also available for the Raspberry Pi; for a 10 minute course on how to code in it, i’d recommend this from Miles Berry of Roehampton University.

Avoiding the strangling of your best future prospects

ianwaring Books, Budgets, Enterprise IT, Future Trends, Management, Marketing, Metrics Leave a comment

Escape Velocity Book Cover

I’m a big fan of the work of Geoffrey Moore, whose seminal work “Crossing the Chasm” i’ve cited before (in fact, the one page version is the #1 download from this blog). However, one of his other books is excellent if you’re faced with a very common issue in High Technology companies; having successful, large product line(s) thats suck all the life out of new, emerging businesses in the same enterprise. The book is “Escape Velocity”:

Unlike Crossing the Chasm, i’ve not yet summarised it on one sheet of A4, but have outlined the major steps on 14 slides. It sort of works like this:

The main revenue/profit engines in most organisations occur between the early and late majority consumers of the product or services; that can last a long time, denoted by the Elastic Middle:

Product Lifecycle

That said, there are normally products that sales will focus on to drive the current years Revenue and Profit targets; these routinely consume a majority of the resources available. Given a fair crack of the whip, there are normally emergent products that while not material in size today, are showing good signs of growth, and which may generate significant revenue and profits in the 1 to 3 year future. There are also likely to be some longer term punts which have yet to show promise, but which may do so in a 3 to 6 year timeframe:

3 Horizons

The chief way to categorise products/services against the relevant Product Horizon is to graph a scatter plot of revenue or profit for each line on one axis, against growth on the other (10% growth is a typical divider between the High and Low growth Quadrants):

3 Horizons to Category Power

Any products or services on Horizon 0 needs to be shielded from core resources and to be optimised to be cash generative while it lasts. The other product/service horizons are segregated and typically have a different go-to-market team (with appropriate Key Performance Indicators) assigned to each:

Focus Areas

The development pattern for Horizon 2 products are typical of the transition from “Chasm” into the “Tornado” stage on the normal Chasm lifecycle diagram. It’s a relentless learning experience, ruthlessly designing out custom services to form a standard offering for the market segments you target:

Free Resources to Context

As you execute through the various sales teams and move between financial years, there’s a lot of introspection to ensure that the focus on likely winners continues is appropriately ruthless:

Action

The sales teams driving Horizon 2 offerings should be seeking to aim high in customer organisations and drive strategies to establish a beachhead, then dominate, specific focus segments. In doing so, be mindful that a small supporting community tends to cross reference each other. Good salespeople get to know the people networks that do so, and work diligently to connect across them with their colleagues.

Trusted Advisor

The positioning of your Horizon 2 offers tend to vary depending on price and benefit; this in turn looks about like the findings from another seminal work, “The Discipline of Market Leaders”. That book suggested that really successful companies put their relentless effort into only one of three possible core competences; to be the Product Innovator, to be Customer Intimate or to be Operationally Excellent:

Benefit Sensitivity

Once you have the positioning, the Horizon 2 sales team relentlessly focus on the key people or organisations that make up their target market segment(s):

Drive to Share of Segment

The number of organisations they engage differ markedly between Enterprise (Complex) and Consumer (Volume) markets:

Target Customers

So the engagement checklist needs to address all these areas:

Target Market Initiatives

The sales team need to be able to articulate “What makes their offer different”:

Differentials

Then pick their targets:

Growing Horizon 2

Above all, be conscious who your competitors are and where you’re positioned against them:

From Whom

That’s largely it. Just a process to keep assessing the source of future revenue and profits, and ensuring you segment your sales teams to drive both this years business, and separately working on the green shoots that will provide your future. And avoiding what often happens, which is that the existing high revenue or high profit lines demand so much resources that they suffocate your future.

You can probably name a few companies that have done exactly that. Yours doesn’t need to be the next one now!

Gute Fahrt – 3 simple tips to make your drivers safer

ianwaring Cars, Courses, Driving, Training Leave a comment

Gute Fahrt - Safe Journey

That’s German for “Safe Journey”. Not directly related to computers or the IT industry, but a symptom of the sort of characters it attracts to the Sales ranks. A population of relatively young drivers of fairly expensive and quite powerful cars. In our case, one female manager in Welwyn who took it as a personal affront to be overtaken in her BMW. Another Salesman in Bristol, driving his boss to a meeting in Devon in his new Ford Capri 2.8 Injection; the mistake was to leave very late and to be told by his Manager to “step on it”. I think he’s still trying to remove the stain from the passenger seat.

With that, the rather inevitable bad accident statistics, not least as statistics suggest that 90% of drivers think they are better than average. As a result, every driver in the company got put on a mandatory one day course, an attempt to stem that tide. The first thing that surprised me that the whole one day course was spent in a classroom, and not a single minute driving a car. But the end result of attending that one class was very compelling.

As was the business change example given previously (in http://www.ianwaring.com/2014/03/24/jean-louis-gassee-priorities-targets-and-aims/), there were only three priorities that everyone followed to enact major changes – and to lower the accident rate considerably. In doing so, even my wife noticed subtle changes the very next time she rode in our car with me (a four hour family trip to Cornwall).

The three fundamentals were:

  1. Stay at least 2 seconds behind the car in front, independent of your speed. Just pick any fixed roadside object that the car in front goes past, and recite “only a fool breaks the two second rule”. As long as you haven’t passed the same object by the time you’ve finished reciting that in your mind, you’re in good shape. In rain, make that 4 seconds.
  2. If you’re stationary and waiting to turn right in the UK (or turning left in countries that drive on the right hand side of the road), keep the front wheels of your car facing directly forward. Resist all urges to point the wheels toward the road you’re turning into. A big cause of accidents is being rear-ended by a car behind you. If your front wheels are straight, you will just roll straight down the road; if turned, you’ll most likely to fund yourself colliding head on with fast oncoming traffic.
  3. Chill. Totally. Keep well away from other drivers who are behaving aggressively or taking unnecessary risks. Let them pass, keep out of the way and let them have their own accidents without your involvement. If you feel aggrieved, do not give chase; it’s an unnecessary risk to you, and if you catch them, you’ll only likely embarrass yourself and others. And never, ever seek solace in being able to prove blame; if you get to the stage when you’re trying to argue who’s fault it is, you’ve lost already. Avoid having the accident in the first place.

There were supplementary videos to prove the points, including the customary “spot the lorry drivers cab after the one at the back ran into another in front”. But the points themselves were easy to remember. After the initial running of the course in the branch office with the worst accident statistics, they found:

  • The accident rate effectively went to zero in the first three months since that course was run
  • The number of “unattended” accidents – such as those alleged in car parks when the driver was not present – also dropped like a stone. Someone telling porkie pies before!
  • As a result, overall costs reduced at the same time as staff could spend more face time with customers

That got replicated right across the company. If in doubt, try it. I bet everyone else who rides with you will notice – and feel more relaxed and comfortable by you doing so.

The Jelly Effect and the importance of focus on AFTERS

ianwaring Books, Enterprise IT, Marketing, Selling, Software, Training Leave a comment

Jelly Effect by Andy BoundsI have a few books in my bookcase that I keep for a specific reason. Normally that they are succinct enough to say the obvious things that most people miss. One of these is The Jelly Effect: How to Make Your Communication Stick by Andy Bounds.

His insight is that most people want problem solvers, not technicians. They typically don’t care two hoots about the history of your company, or all the detailed features of your products or services. What they do typically care about is what will have changed for them AFTER your assignment or project with them has been completed. Focussing on that is normally sufficient to be succinct, to the point and framed around delivering the goals that customer feels are important to them. All that without throwing large volumes of superfluous information at your prospect on that journey. Summarised:

“Customers don’t care what you do. They only care what they’re left with AFTER you’ve done it”.

The end results of taking the deeper advice in the book include:

  • One bank, who won business from 18 pitches out of 18 after having implemented AFTERs
  • Another bank increased weekly sales by 47% based on focus on AFTERs
  • A PR and Marketing Company that have won every single sales pitch they have made after having previously won far less sales than their available skills deserved
  • The author suggests it’s worked for every single company he has worked with, from multinational blue-chips, to small local businesses, to charities looking to win National accounts, to family run businesses.

He describes the process outlined in the book in a short 5 minute video here.

I was once asked to write out the 10 reasons why customers should buy Software from my then Company – Computacenter, widely considered to be the largest IT reseller in Europe. Using the principles of “The Jelly Effect”, I duly wrote them out for use by our Marketing Team (they could choose which one of the 11 reasons to drop):

10 Reasons to buy Software from Computacenter

  1. Reducing your Costs. We compensate our folks on good advice, not sales or profits. We would rather show you ways to lower or eliminate your software spend, rather than stuffing you to the gills with products or services that you don’t need. Putting a commission hungry software salesperson rarely delivers cost savings in a tough economic environment; we think being synonymous with “help” is a better long term business strategy.
  2. Improving Service Levels. Your Internal Account Manager or Sales Support contact is the central hub through which we bring all our software skills to bear to help you. We expect to be able to answer any question, on any software or licensing related query, within four working hours.
  3. Access to Skills. Computacenter staff have top flight accreditation levels with almost all of the key infrastructure and PC software vendors, and a track record of doing the right thing, first time, to deliver it’s customers business objectives cost effectively and without surprises. Whether it’s the latest Microsoft technologies, virtualising your data centre, securing your network/data or weighing up the possible deployment of Open Source software, we have impartial experts available to assist.
  4. Freeing up your time. Computacenter has trading agreements in place with over 1,150 different software vendors and their local distribution channels, almost all signed up to advantageous commercial terms we make available to you. We can find most software quickly and buy it for you immediately on very cost effective commercial terms, and with minimal administration. Chances are we’re buying the same thing for many of your industry peers already.
  5. Reducing Invoice Volumes and associated costs. We’re happy to consolidate your spend so you receive just one invoice to process per month from us across all your hardware, software and services purchases from Computacenter. We often hear of cost-to-handle of £50 per invoice, as well as the time you staff take to process each one. Let us help you save money, and reduce your costs at the same time.
  6. Renewals without surprises. We can give you full visibility of your software renewals, enabling more effective budgeting, timely end user notifications, simpler co-termed plus consolidated contracts, and lower support costs. Scheduled reporting makes late penalty fees and interrupted support a thing of the past. Reduced management burden, and more time to focus on your key management challenges.
  7. Self Service without maverick buying. We work with IT and Purchasing Managers to make only their approved software products, at their most cost effective licensing levels, available using our CC Connect online purchasing service. This can often halve the spend that users would otherwise spend themselves on retail boxed versions.
  8. Purchase Power. Computacenter customers together account for the largest spend of any reseller on almost all of the major Software vendors we trade with. In the final analysis, you get the best prices and access to the best vendor, distributor and Computacenter skills to help achieve your business objectives.
  9. Spend Reporting. Knowing what license assets you have is the first step to ensuring you’re not inadvertently duplicating purchases; we’ve been known to deliver 23%+ savings on new software spend by giving IT Managers the ability to “farm” their existing license assets when staff leave or systems evolve in different parts of their organisation. Reporting on your historical purchase volumes via Computacenter is available without charge.
  10. Managed Procurement. We’re fairly adept at, and often manage, relationships for new and renewal purchases across 80-120 different software vendors on behalf of IT and Purchasing staff. If you’d like to delegate that to us, we’re be delighted to assist.
  11. Services. If you’ve not got time to work out what you’ve purchased down the years, and wish to consolidate this into a single “bank statement” of what your current and upgrade entitlements are, we can do this for you for a nominal cost (we use our own internal tools to do this fast and accurately for the major PC software vendors, independent of the mix of routes you used to procure your software assets). When times are tough, many vendors think “time to audit our software users”; your knowledge is your power, and even if you find there is some degree of non-compliance, we work to minimise the financial exposure and protect your reputation. We’ve been known to strip 75% off a vendors proposed multi million pound compliance bill using our licensing experts and some thorough research.

So can we help you?

I think that summarised things pretty well (my boss thought so too). Not least as the company were surrounded at the time by competitors that had a tendency to put software sales foxes straight into customer chicken coups. We always deliberately separated what media outlets consider a divide between advertising and editorial, or between church and state; we physically kept consultants measured on customer satisfaction and not on sales revenue. Computacenter are still pretty unique in that regard.

They still do that to this day, a long time after my involvement there as the Director of Merchandising and Operations of the Software Business Unit finished.

I don’t think the Andy Bounds has overhyped his own book at all. Its lessons still work impeccably to this day.

 

Watches? Give me a Hearing Aid that knows when to psst… in my ear

ianwaring Apple, Google, Pebble, Samsung, Watches Leave a comment

iWatch Concept Devices

Speculation is still rife on the nature of Apple’s upcoming iWatch device, the latest of which was speculation of a $1000 price tag or a positioning against Rolex. If it is, I may need quite a bit of advance warning before Jane sends me to collect hers (if indeed Apple release such a device).

Probably the best overview of the watch industry i’ve heard was a Cubed Podcast featuring Bill Geiser, the CEO of MetaWatch, but who previously did work for Fossil and before that for Sony on their email capable watch ranges. If you have a spare hour in a car or train journey, it’s well worth the listen; it’s Episode 11 of the Cubed Podcast, downloadable from iTunes or listen here.

One of the statistics Bill cites is that the watch market is worth circa $1.2Billion per annum, with 85% of this revenue attributable to watches costing more than $500. He is also at pains to point out that they are a very visible fashion accessory, have many variations and focus on doing just one thing well – which is telling the time. A lot of forays into putting more intelligence into them in the past have failed to make a large impact.

Since the time of that Podcast, Pebble have come out with the second iteration of their popular watch (known as the “Pebble Steel“, Samsung have sprung out two attempts at their Samsung Gear, and Motorola (who are in the middle of transitioning ownership from Google to Lenovo) have “pre-announced” their Moto-360 concept device.

The Motorola concept looks impressive (the core competence of high technology companies is normally far removed from consumer-attractive fashionable design). A few samples are as follows (you’ll need to click on these images to blow them up to full size in order to see them animate properly – or alternatively, see all the related demos at https://moto360.motorola.com/):

Moto 360 Speed Reading

 

Moto 360 Set Alarm

The only gotcha is that space constraints usually kill the size of battery you can install in these devices, and the power required to drive the display and supporting electronics – while doing any of these applications – will empty their capacity in minutes. The acceptable norm would be at least a working day. As someone whos found their phone running out of power while trying to navigate myself around unfamiliar streets in Central and West London, this is something of a show stopper. And these Moto 360 concepts appear to be destined for science fiction only, as modern day physics will stop these becoming a reality – yet.

So, at face value, we may need new display technologies, and/or new batteries, and/or moving as much as possible away from the wrist and into powered packaging elsewhere on a person. I’m not sure if you can cast the display (like a TV using Google Chromecast, or using Apple Airplay) over low power Bluetooth, or if there are other charging mechanisms that could feed a decent display using the movement of the user, or daylight.

It’ll be interesting to see what Apple come to market with, but we may all have it wrong and find their device is a set of health sensors coupled with a simple notifications system.

While technologists may think a watch spewing the already compelling “Google Now” type notifications would be impressive, many should be reminded that looking at your watch in a meeting is often a social no-no. It’s a sign that the person doing so is disinterested in the subject of conversation and is keen to move on.

Likewise for the current generation of Google Glass, the devices look dorky and social norms around the presence of sound/picture/video recording have yet to be widely established. Sticking the glasses on top of your head is the one norm if you’re using public conveniences, but usage isn’t wide enough outside San Francisco and various tech conferences yet. And the screen real estate still too small to carry much data.

My Nexus 5 handset has one colour LED on the front that blinks White if i’ve received an email, Blue for a Facebook update, Yellow for a Snapchat and Green for an SMS. Even a service like IFTTT (“If this then that”) sitting in front of a notifications system could give a richer experience to help prioritise what is allowed to interrupt me, or what notifications get stored for review later.

Personally, i’d prefer an intelligent hearing aid type device that could slip the “psst…” into my ear at appropriate times. That would me much more useful to me in meetings and while on the move.

In the interim, the coming wave of intelligent, mobile connected electronics have yet to get evenly distributed across a very, very wide range of fashion accessories of all kinds. From the sound of Google’s work, it sounds like they are aiming at a large number of fashion OEMs – folks primarily fashion providers but who can embed licensed electronics that talk to the hub that is an Internet connected smartphone. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple’s approach will be similar, but allowing such devices to hook into Apple provided app platforms than sit on an iPhone (such as the widely expected HealthBook).

We’ll hopefully have all the answers – and the emergent ecosystems running at full clip – this side of Christmas 2014. Or at last have a good steer following Apple’s WWDC (Worldwide Developers Conference) and Google I/O (the Google equivalent) before mid-year, when developers should be let loose getting their software ready for these new (or at least, class of these new) devices.