Death by librarian!

Electroacoustic popsters from the antipodes, Haunted Love, provide this seductive pop ditty, paying tribute the to craft of librarianship - although I don't recall squashing patrons in between the book stacks as part of this craft. Interesting too is the absence of any ICT!

The video has been around for a while, but I thought it might be a welcome distraction from the usual blog postings, which are necessarily academic.

Wearing an Information System Hair Shirt (Talk Talk)

What have we done. I’ve been forced to wear an information system hair shirt, here’s why.

Popular consciousness would have us think that scientists seem to amble through life inventing weaponry and new life forms that probably won’t mutate into the wild. We wonder if they will ask themselves ‘what have we done’. There is another breed of scientist who takes their own action on the cheek injecting themselves with disease and the trial vaccines. In the information systems world we are also producing mutant commercial life forms in the form of giant workflow driven operations. My 15 month effort to get ‘Free Broadband’ with UK telco TalkTalk (www.talktalk.co.uk other dysfunctional telephone companies are available) leaves me thinking ‘what have I done’.

Commercial IS analysts and developers seek to breakdown tasks into a series of workflows and then build information systems that offer operators, or via e-commerce the punters themselves, access to these workflows. This has allowed us to create low cost call centre led support operations for giant machines such as telephone companies, other utilities and banks. This works cheaply and well until your workflow relationship with the company falls, on the one less travelled by.

It is a bit like printing out a Google map for how to get from A to B. You get a set of instructions ‘Turn right at Missing Sign Road 780 yards’. This all works well until you fall off the path laid down for you then you realise you are lost and haven’t got a real map in the car.

So it seems to be with workflow driven companies you operate cheaply and well until you fall off the path, at this point you enter a Kafka’s ‘The Trial’ strangely held down by a faceless system.

In the case of my experience with TalkTalk my original promised go live date November 2006 is now a distant memory. There have been dozens of phone calls and many hours on hold after which you are met by well trained customer professionals to calm and ease your mind. From my side of the phone it feels like they look up your file see that something has gone wrong with ‘provisioning’ and then on screen have a huge button marked ‘re-provision then wish customer a happy day’. I spend my time trying to dissuade them from pressing that button while I try to explain that their predecessors have already tried that.

That puts me on the very edge of the workflow, in desperation they suggest I phone back a different number or on some occasions put me through to the experts departments with names such as ‘sales’, ‘engineering escalation’, ‘customer retention’ and ‘complaints’. These people operate on the outer edge of the workflow and attempt to push you back into the mainstream, although in my case I think I am beyond help as they end up assuring me that they will phone back in the next 48 hours, 72 hours tops. However much I argue that that is what the last guy said they explain that they can’t understand what went wrong there and they will definitely phone back scouts honour. No one ever has.

Every time I go through this loop (I try to every 5 or 6 weeks) it makes me frustrated and angry so why do I bother you and my wife ask. Well it is a bit like the scientist injecting the vaccine into himself. By living at the rough end of a large companies workflow systems I remember my own humanity and perhaps approach the giant Information Systems we espouse with a bit more caution.

Talk Talk is my hair shirt that reminds me of the danger of Information System sin. Perhaps next time the operator at Talk Talk will instead of putting me through to the department of ‘Repentance, Platitude and False Promises’ they could put me through to the company chaplain.