Posts from July 2006

I just watched this but I am starting to wish I hadnt.

Knowledge management presents a difficult challenge particularly when you work in a relatively small department of highly intelligent, technical consultants who are scattered around the globe and travel a lot.

I just started another blog as an experiment to see whether we can try to improve the way in which we share knowledge and communicate with each other. Searching email archives is so 1990's, don't you think ?

The blogging interface and the set of CMS features isn't as rich as WordPress (or alternative Content Management Systems) but that's not really the point.

Oh and another thing. Unless you happen to work for Oracle Corporation, you can't actually see this embryonic blog. Sorry.

Arrived at a clients offices in Birmingham this morning just as Radio Five news reported a major power cut affecting businesses and homes in the area.

Apparently, vandals had set fire to two tyres and rolled them into the electricity sub-station last night.

Whatever happened to the good old days of getting drunk, singing songs and placing red cones on top of traffic lights.

Still, the outage freed up two hours for an interesting discussion about disaster recovery.

As predicted, another fantastic weekend.

Far, far away by Slade, from 1974, as the music used to entertain customers placed on hold.

Hats off to Vodafone corporate. I was actually a little disappointed to miss the end of the song when my conversation with the agent resumed.

He (Ruud van Nistelrooy) is a striker who can score upwards of 20 goals a season and there are not many of those going around.

So why are we selling him them ?

Let's wait and see if Saha, Rossi, Ronaldo and Ole manage more than 20 goals (between them).

Norton Internet Security

Our love affair began back in the days of running a cable across my bedroom for my meagre dialup connection and the protection (Firewall, Virus Checker) you offered. After that. I felt obliged to renew my subscription every July.

Each new version looked very similar and you hardly ever notified me of viruses or security breaches. Maybe you eliminated them all ruthlessly and silently but for 35 GBP per year, you need to 'add value'.

Tonight, I was shocked to discover that your 'CCPROXY.EXE' application was consuming more than half my paltry 512 MB of memory and spinning the CPU at 100% when I am trying to watch important music videos.

I wouldn't mind but that is with 'Norton Internet Security' disabled !

So, farewell then, Norton Internet Security/AntiVirus. Thanks to Tim Hall, I am now using the freely available AVG and the firewall provided with my Linksys wireless router.

Whats weird about this video is that it appears to be culled from the same speech.

Oh and that he doesn't screw up once.

Quelle horreur !

A female UK blogger is sacked by a French company, supposedly for 'gross misconduct'.

I went to look at the actual blog to discover what juicy office gossip she had revealed, but the blog is such an incoherent, rambling mess of disjointed thoughts using pseudonyms to conceal her true identity, I simply gave up.

Inevitably, Robert Scoble thinks this is very, very important. I don't.

Many years ago, in a parallel universe not far from here, I was involved in a CRM proof of concept. This involved producing a demonstration of a callcenter application accessing customer and product data from disparate legacy systems in a polished, unified, modern user interface.

The scenario was pretty standard fare. A motor insurance company where a customer calls in to renew his motor policy and the callcenter agent walks through a standard 'question-answer-retort' guided dialogue.

The demo climaxes in a superb cross-sell to add the customers son who has just turned 17 as a named driver to the existing policy (the pre-sales guy was positively orgasmic about this addition) with a substantial discount as part of some campaign.

Now, choosing names is very important so of course the demo initially used dead pop stars, politicians, historic figures, alternative comedians and footballers. This was mainly because the marketing guy thought TEST USER wouldn't impress the CEO's of blue chip companies.

The initial novelty of using celebrity names soon wore off as we struggled to make the software components actually do what we wanted. In fact, we were desperately tired of the endless repetitions of the dialogue ('Take 369'), that we were completely oblivious to the names appearing.

We were just hoping and praying just that the demo behaved and ran through to completion without an hourglass, a blue screen or an unexpected 'cross-sell' opportunity emerging from the 'Home, Buildings & Contents' division.

Finally, the proof of concept was finished, we were exhausted and the demanding marketing man was (finally) happy.

Imagine our surprise, a few weeks later when he returned with two complimentary CD's. 'Great job guys. The Sales MD was absolutely delighted and thinks this collateral will really help us make that breakthrough into SME in Q3. I thought you might be curious to see the fruits of your labour.'

So we thanked him, waved goodbye, then sat down to watch the CD. We were both genuinely dumbfounded when the following words, spoken in best BBC English, came out of the tinny PC speaker:

'Norman Whiteside of Manchester is looking for a competitive quote for his car insurance. '