Today most western countries have evolved into post-industrial economies and, with the exception of the USA, have also largely evolved to post-Christian societies in which religious attendance, adherence and belief, characterised by single digit percentages, have largely fallen from the national consciousness.  So what has happened to that fervour?

Although I’d defer to expert psychological advice on the matter, there would appear to be an impulse in many of us, perhaps too many of us, to believe in something absolutely with a scatoma to all evidence that contradicts this absolute belief.  For such persons who no longer believe in a god, they are likely to believe in something else just as fervently and unable to be swayed by solid contradictory evidence.

Some channel this belief into politics and usually not close to the political centre.  Some channel it into quasi-political causes such as environmental or social issues.  Although they are largely a nuisance, they can force mainstream political parties to sharpen their policy focus in these areas.  Some channel it into matters of health and become obsessive followers of dietary or other health fads.  At the extreme this can be dangerous but generally only to the persons themselves.  And then there are those in the IT field who channel their obsession genes into matters within the IT field, and here it can cause problems.

When I entered the field of IT during the height of the mainframe era, many practitioners, especially academics, hated IBM with an evangelical fervour.  Why?  They just did.  It was a time when commercial programming was Cobol and engineering programming was Fortran.  Yet, although they often covertly used Fortran, academics praised, many to the point of worship, the Algol language, despite many shortcomings including its lack of formatable input and output functions.  Then, there was the arithmetic programming language APL, which enabled all but the most arcane of mathematical formulae to be programmed, albeit with a purpose-built keyboard with equally arcane symbols and APL, too, had its fervent devotees.  But where are Algol and APL today?

A decade later saw the peak of the minicomputer era and the primary means of connecting terminals and, to a much lesser extent, PCs, to minis was the LAN.  At the time, every computer manufacturer, except one, adopted the Ethernet LAN technology.  IBM, alone, opted for token ring.  Yet there were those who were unswervingly devoted to token ring, even though token ring was not designed for terminal to mainframe communications.  But it didn’t end there.  Within the Ethernet community, every computer manufacturer, again except just one, had standardised on the TCP/IP protocol and most enterprises used it.  However, DEC alone opted for its proprietary and unroutable LAT protocol.  And just as with token ring, there were fanatics just as obsessively devoted to LAT.

Whatever the technology, there is a need to differentiate a genuine trend from a supplier-promoted fad and that differentiation is usually borne out over time, not by supplier fiat.  Fax machines replaced telex machines.  Servers did not replace mainframe computers.  PCs with printers did replace typewriters.  Mobile phones have not replaced terrestrial phone lines.  Ethernet replaced token ring.  Windows PCs have not banished Mac PCs.  TCP/IP has replaced LAT.  C++ has not replaced Cobol.

As has always been the case, IT today is awash with completing technologies applications and architectures, some new, some established, some expanding, some holding steady.  Technologies currently generating headlines include cloud computing, voice over IP, thin client, kindle versus iPad and wireless Internet versus broadband.  The makeup of the technological smorgasbord in years to come is far from certain, but there will be competing technologies, architectures and products for almost every aspect of IT.  Hopefully, their relative merits with be debated professional using secular rational argument, not trumpeted with evangelical fervour.

In the years that followed, no one appears to have taken this up, not helped by CTR not effectively marketing the report and then going bankrupt.  When PABXs and interfacing was discussed in the IT media, they were alleged by their detractors to be “proprietary”.  This is nonsense.  The operating system within an Avaya or Alcatel PABX is proprietary but so is Microsoft Windows used by PC-based telephone systems.  Where proprietary vs standard matters in IT is where one component must interface with another.  What operating system is used within a PABX is irrelevant.  What is relevant and is proprietary to each PABX is its backplane.  This is not, itself, the issue – proprietary interface specifications can be licensed – but if any PABX manufacturer is willing to license its backplane specifications, they’ve been keeping quiet about it.

Assuming they were able to licence the backplane, manufacturers of peripherals with an inherent hardware component – voice mail systems, IVRs and audio call recording systems are the most obvious examples – would be able to offer their products as cards able to be installed within a PABX chassis connected directly to its backplane.  Instead of an E1 or SIP trunk card in the PABX connecting to an IVR, complete with its own E1 or SIP card, chassis and power supply, all taking up space in the comms rack, the IVR would be just a card taking up just the one card slot in the PABX.  This would cost a lot less and the IVR would be powered from the PABX’s battery backed up power supply.

At a glance, this might appear to be just what PC-based telephone systems from companies as Aspect, Interactive Intelligence, Shoretel and Swyx offer.  They do offer such integral modules, but as with the all-in-one stereo system, the specific modules of such systems are that system’s specific set and do not necessarily match the best on the market.  By offering the ability to select components as needed and install them within the one chassis, this approach would have offered the best of both worlds and could appropriately have been called the universal telephony architecture.

The universal telephony architecture would have changed the industry.  Even if just one manufacturer had adopted it, the others would have had to follow suit quick smart and that vendor would have had a big head start.  But no one did.

In 2010, the question is, is it too late?

While PABXs remain significant products, their manufacturers are now more focussed on developing their LAN-based telephone system products.  Being inherently composed of distributed components, there isn’t much of a chassis into which compatible components can be inserted and such systems are not typically powered from batteries with several hours capacity.  More significantly, do such systems enable interoperability so that one could deploy eMedia CT CTI software from Upstream Works, Softdial Plugin dialling software from Sytel, eGain Live collaboration software from eGain, Livecare MailCentre email software from Icona and a Marathon Evolution audio call recording system from ASC Telecom on a Fluency LAN-based telephone system from Braxtel if that was the organisation’s choice without the comms room looking like a hi fi shop?

Somehow, I doubt it.

The developed world came through that recession, enjoyed several years of prosperity and sure enough, ties soon were again boring.  During the 1990s, most ties on offer were fashioned, and that’s stretching the term, on a checkerboard rotated 90º with each square featuring – that’s another stretch – some non-descript pattern.  When designers ran out of variations of the rotated checkerboard – it’s amazing it ran as long as it did – they reverted to an old favourite, the diagonal stripe.

Although Australia has been largely spared, the developed world was once again abruptly plunged into recession in 2007 with the GFC.  However, the ties on sale, at least in Australia, are still boring diagonal stripes.  Why is that?  I maintain that Gilmour’s idea of neckties as an economic indicator has merit, but perhaps there’s a time lag.  As one of those who like ties to be bright, colourful and eyecatching, I can only hope it isn’t long.

As I also wrote in  To Bid or not to Bid, that is the Question, not responding to an RFT may result in the vendor not being considered for future procurement projects.  It goes without saying that vendors who rubbish one procurement project will lessen their chances of being considered for the next.

The vendor might perceive that the enterprise is biased towards a particular product or vendor. They may thus not bid, not realising that the enterprise has become dissatisfied with a previously-used or long term supplier. Conversely, they might perceive their selection to be in the bag and inflate the price only to be unpleasantly surprised.

One of the first lessons in sales school is that unless a salesperson has been in regular contact with the firm prior to the issuing of an RFT, they have almost no chance of winning. While contact is usually key to a sale, this notion presumes that no enterprise, with or without the assistant of a consultant is capable of preparing and issuing an RFT without having had some contact with a vendor and if isn’t “us”, it just must have been someone else. Vendors also sometimes decline to bid because, as some have put it, they “have not had several meetings with the enterprise to understand business requirements”. Do they not understand that’s what an RFT specifies? Why not just tell the persons involved that they are not capable of understanding and document the requirements or the business employing them? If you’re going to insult people, at least do so directly!

Not bidding has risks beyond having no chance at winning the business on offer. A tender for “just” one or a small system may result in subsequent orders for more or a bigger system by that company that are not tendered. A vendor that doesn’t bid to an RFT may not be invited to another by the same company or, more significantly, by the consultants for a different client. But from my own perspective as a consultant, the biggest risk of not bidding is that when involved in a project for which the client wants me to select a product, or nominate just a few to negotiate with, one that hasn’t been bid to previous RFT has little change of getting a look-in.

While not arguing that every vendor should respond to every RFT, they need to consider more than the likelihood of winning the RFT in front of them. The risk of responding to an RFT is that the effort may not be recouped from a resulting sale. The risk of not responding may be much greater.

Advertising claims being what they are, the underlying premise of CRM advertising is that buying and installing the product will alone achieve these and other benefits.  In advertising and brochures, implementation time and cost are downplayed to the point of omission.  More significantly, the matter of corporate commitment to customer service and customer relationships is completely ignored.  Those interested will find the following contrasting example of true CRM quite enlightening.

Many my age will have, as children, played with Meccano, a collection of metal bars, panels, girders, angled corner pieces and other assorted components with which one could build just about anything.  (I had an Erector set or sets, manufactured by the former A. C. Gilbert company, a competitor to the more famous Meccano.)  The history of Meccano and its founder, Frank Hornby, is detailed in The Toy Story: The Life and Times of Inventor Frank Hornby, by Anthony McReavy.  This was a company that practiced true customer relationship management.

The book begins with Hornby’s development of what were to become the first Mechanics Made Easy (subsequently Meccano) kits and the establishment of the company itself.  What tweaked my interest from a CRM perspective was the account of the company which, when still young and only partially to promote its famous kits and support its customers, published the Meccano Magazine, assisted enthusiasts’ clubs, ran competitions and hosted factory tours.  But arguably the strength of its customer relationship management was its management of correspondence.

Frank Hornby described the management of correspondence in Life Story of Meccano.  “Correspondents are of all ages, living in all parts of the world.  Many of them write monthly, or even weekly, and their letters make it clear that their correspondence plays an important part of their life … They are written simply in the spirit in which one writes to a friend – that is to tell of one’s everyday doings, and of little personal incidents that may be of interest”.  McReavy explained “the editor was receiving around 200 letters a day and Hornby wrote with evident satisfaction that the postbag was ‘unique in its intimate character’ … It was this point of contact with the company – or more properly the company’s recognition of its importance – that set Meccano apart“ and “boys could almost imagine Hornby sitting in his mechanical wonderland answering letters like some Liverpudlian Santa Claus. …”  Clearly, the company saw the relationship with its customers to be important and this was key – Meccano recognised and maintained the relationship with his customers long before the advent of the term “CRM” and without the aid of any CRM software.

A key element of the maintenance of these customer relationships was service.  McReavy again, “the growing correspondence the company was receiving underlined the fact that Meccano was more than simply a toy; it was becoming a phenomenon not confined to the world of toys.  … To the toys must be added service, and a service that was geared to children.  …” and “boys could write in and ask for information, tips and help.  They could also send broken parts and receive replacements at a fraction of their list price.”  None of this depended upon an assessment of the likelihood that any specific customer was likely to make additional purchases.  There was no “targeting of marketing promotions”.

As Hornby noted “Each child received a personal reply to his letter ‘in the spirit in which he writes’ and, equally important, in his own language – no matter whether it be to ask for advice in some difficult situation that has arisen, or merely to announce the arrival of a family of baby rabbits!”  Contact tracking and workflow were presumably achieved using an in basket and an out basket.  Knowledge management was between the ears of the Mr. Hornby and the secretary who was employed to write the responses.  When my father began his career, all letters were either responded to acknowledged the day they were received.  Frank Hornby was clearly from the same mould.

CRM for Mr. Hornby was not a purchasable product but an aspect of business practice.  Ultimately, neither CRM nor Hornby’s drive was able to prevent the company going bankrupt in the 1960s, long after the founder’s death and thanks largely to Lego.  Nontheless, there can be no doubt that the practice of CRM by Meccano’s during its heyday in the 1920s and 1930s, long before the advent of CRM software contributed to the company’s prosperity.  According to McReavy, Hornby “recognised that his unique relationship was perhaps the greatest asset the business had.  It maintaining it, he developed his brand yet further.”  Such recognition, more than any commercial CRM product, could potentially be the most valuable asset of any business today.

The Toy Story: The Life and Times of Inventor Frank Hornby

Author: Anthony McReavy

Publisher: Ebury Press / Random House

Many years ago, someone at the Miami municipal sewerage treatment works had a brainwave. Instead of disposing the solid waste the millions of loos in this large American city receive using the conventional means of burying it or dumping it at sea, they decided to sell it as fertiliser. Not only would they reduce the volume of what goes by the sanitised name of “organic solid waste” they would otherwise have to dump, they would generate some revenue and help green the city at the same time.

The idea seemed to work. Large volumes of this waste were sold to the many householders in the city who spread it on their lawns, vegetable gardens and flower beds. The sewage works received revenue, the homeowners were happy and the city was a little greener. All was well, it seemed, unless one happened to be in the business of selling tomatoes.

Why? Well just as nature intended, when Miamians ate their tomatoes, the seeds just passed through. The city’s sewage department took care of the distribution and all those lawns, vegetable gardens and flower beds that had received this fertiliser were, the following season, sprouting tomato plants.

While I found this rather amusing after reading it in a letter from my parents some years ago, I didn’t give it much thought, let alone connect it with gardening. That was, until I was descending the steps to the front of my house when I saw my cat Midnight adding a little of her own organic solid waste to my garden. Putting two and two together, I decided to put my idea to the test at next morning’s breakfast. Reasoning that no matter how hungry they were, Midnight and Vicky (my sister in Victoria, BC, Canada named her cat Sydney) wouldn’t tackle even the most carefully cut tomato, I extracted some tomato seeds and mixed them with the cat food. It was all eaten without a meow.

Not content to stop with tomatoes, I looked for other possibilities. Cucumber seeds, capsicum seeds, melon seeds and strawberry seeds went down without complaint. Orange seeds were licked, but not eaten. Cherry pits required negotiation.

OK, I got the seeds in, but would they make their way to my garden? Surely if tomato seeds could survive a trip through the stomach, colon and semi colon (small intestines) accompanied by garlic, feta cheese and red wine, and then endure a trip through Miami’s sewers, the alternative of 5kg of feline in the company of ocean fish platter shouldn’t be too harsh.

After some months during which my two felines had unknowingly assisted with my gardening, a search of the property located only one tomato plant, and it was growing in a pot. I had not planted anything in that pot, but it was watered occasionally.

That was it. Given that dry winter, the seeds they had planted elsewhere had not received enough water. The problem was, as I had no idea where the cats had planted the seeds, I couldn’t water them with certainty. At first, it seemed I had hit a roadblock, but I then though of the solution and it again involved the cats. All I had to do was to train them to drink beer!

When I was a young teenager, one of my interests was studying the Second World War, especially the navies and naval encounters.  I read a lot of books on the subject and also assembled quite a number of plastic model warships.  After assembling them, I painted them, melted and stretched plastic for rigging and added flags.  So in addition to learning about naval history during this period, I also began to learn a little about the selection of products the various manufacturers of plastic model kits brought to the market.

In his City and the Stars, Arthur C. Clark describes Diaspar, a civilisation living an idyllic life within an enormous mountain, complete with artificial reincarnation using computer memory at the end of each 1,000 year life.  This world is preserved by a combination of an innate fear of going outside and a super computer system which controls all aspects of the environment without any system management.  Life would continue in this environment, seemingly for eternity, but for one Alvin, the first person born, not reincarnated, for millennia, who lacks the fear of the outside and whose venturing outside leads to contact with Lys, a very different civilisation and which, in turn, brings their cocooned existence to an end.

Comparable themes can be found in other works of sci-fi.  At least one episode of Star Trek had the crew of the good ship Enterprise arriving on a small planet-sized space ship inhabited by a human civilization who had also been living an idyllic life for thousands, perhaps millions of years.  Life was controlled, as in Diaspar, by a fabulous computer system, but the difference being that the space ship’s inhabitants, having been inculcated with the belief that their world was controlled by a divinity and attempting to gain access to it was sacrilegious, were unaware of the computer’s existence.  Unfortunately, the space ship, due to a programming error (was it stardate 20,000 compliant?) was on a collision course with a real planet.  Of course the Enterprise crew, in this episode lead by the multi-talented Dr. McCoy, diagnosed and correct the problem.

Switch from fiction to fact.  Although the computer systems we use don’t control the environment of planet earth, many do provide the backbone of the organisations that use them.  Most people who use these computer systems know they are using computer systems and few, if any, of them produce outcomes anywhere close to idyllic, vendor claims notwithstanding.

Nonetheless, there are many sites where a system, whether central or peripheral to an organisation’s business, gradually becomes shrouded in mystery.  The source code is held by an outsourced development company that goes broke or is acquired one or more times and eventually is lost.  Or documentation is not maintained and it too is eventually lost.  Staff move on and enhancements and reconfigurations become problematic.  Interfacing with new systems becomes particularly difficult.  It isn’t the boilerplate documentation that really matters here, it’s the documentation of business rules and processes that the system embodies.  And, as with the frog which, if dropped into boiling water will leap out but if placed in water that is gradually brought to a boil doesn’t notice the change and is boiled to death, it is more likely to happen with systems managing processes that are changed slowly.

The system gradually becomes hidden behind a black wall.

Although with most businesses allowing a black wall to hide some or other IT system will not lead to disaster even vaguely similar to the sci-fi examples cited above, there are risks.  An otherwise perfectly adequate system may be deactivated because a minor but necessary configuration change is unable to be made or a new system may be procured and implemented to effect changes that could have been made to the existing system, if only someone knew how.  An organisation might even buy new licences for software it already owns!

Without the intervention of a Dr. McCoy and his co-crew, the more a computer system becomes hidden behind a black wall, the greater the risk to the business concerned.

Not that I have attempted any formal tabulation or statistical analysis, but it would appear that almost a majority of recipes in a majority of cooking magazines, TV show internet sites and mainstream cookbooks require a copious quantity of some form of cream or butter. Whenever a dish leads my eye to the ingredients, I inevitably find that one of them is cream, double cream, triple cream, quadruple cream, sour cream, fresh cream, crème fresh, crème stale as well as butter or some other variant of milk fat and lots of it.

This supports my perception that most recipes are written only to be looked at but never actually prepared, or written on the assumption that readers cook baked beans on toast six nights a week and only pull out the cookbook for one weekend meal with friends, so if that meal includes an indulgence in cream and lots of it, what, one might presume, is the issue? I addressed the issue of recipes being written to accompany photos of food or filmshoots of its preparation but not to be prepared in Why do Recipes Invariable Serve Four? but perhaps there are other reasons.

Published and television-presented recipes can generally be divided into two categories: indulgence and austerity. A good many of the chefs presenting them, too young to concern themselves with such trivial issues as heart disease, are very comfortable with the “feel-good” image associated with indulgence cooking. Recipes to balance the diet are clearly the responsibility of “somebody else”.

But could it be that television shows and especially cooking magazines are susceptible to the invisible hand of the advertiser’s cheque book? The dairy industry’s promotional budget could very well be at work here, after all, every source of advertising revenue is revenue. But could those magazines and television programs be missing out on another source? Given their zeal for promoting high-fat recipes, they ought to be able to generate some sponsorship from cardiologists and manufacturers of coronary stents as well.