Telco wars

Those who follow me on Twitter will have seen a berating of Optus and who am I not to explain?

Optus sent me a bill for $1500 and whilst I was expecting a slightly larger phone bill for my new iPhone... this bill missed the mark by a long shot.

This resulted in the desperately avoided call to 'customer service'... Now a telephone company should not drop the customer's call 3 times... Sensing some KPI Management, I changed my tact by showing a seemingly new operator that their system could possibly be wrong... I did this by demonstrating that the $900 charge was actually meant to be $0... After another long stint on hold, the 'customer care assistant' offered a $400 discount on the amount, she even sounded convinced that it was a good offer...

When I explained that the offer was the equivalent of fining me $500, she placed me back on hold.

At this point I could imagine the flashing red lights of KPI failure...  when the new offer was made at less than a tenth of the original bill. But accepting this wasn't ever going to be the end of the saga... was it?

Dishonour fees (for not paying $1500), calls from their finance section (asking why I haven't paid the $1500) and 2 weeks later... Still not resolved.

So a communications company, maybe not getting the billing right is understandable but not being able to transfer the metadata of the customer from one person to another (let alone the computer that captures it at the beginning of the call) is really going to struggle in their bid.

Innovation is not subsidising Corporate R&D

I recall the debates over Digital TV in 1998 here in Australia, and Government was faced with mandating not only a rollout period but a format for delivery. To grossly simplify, the choices were between Broad- and Datacasting. Datacasting would move Australia to the forefront of the Information Age. Datacasting essentially allows the consumer to pull the program at their leisure looking like a souped up version of i-view rather than the Broadcast model which centrally controls what and when is available to be consumed, just a digitisation of the contemporary system. One might see that an investment in such a program might have helped our lagging broadband issue...

I raise this in light of some more myopic Australian Innovation Sponsorship... take our stance on environmental technologies. Once again it appears our government chooses to support the Commercially-favourable technologies over real innovation. Surely government should be investing in potentials and not the R&D budgets of Industry.

FARR CIO

I am not one to give out too many compliments, but I guess this case is special coz I also don't like to agree with the crowd. With this in mind, I have to take my hat off to Defence's CIO who's efforts have notedly changed the direction of CIOG over his tenure. I have no doubt that the tides had started to move under Monaghan, but I must say that the improvements in the Restricted Network has been phenomenal under Farr...


But it is a long way from being able to significantly input to Network-Centricity. A move toward being a Defence Capability with a tad of change management project could allow CIOG to drive Defence technology innovation.



If there were a Change Management Project underway somewhere, potentially dropping CIOG a copy of the Guide could help to allow the use of freeware in locally supervised sandboxes.


Help us if they think we are ready for this

Androgyny

Apparently my likelihood of being FEMALE is 47% Likelihood and of being MALE is 53%