So on the weekend I encountered the fear, that gut wrenching feeling you have when you are truly out of your depth, the lack of experience, the lack of knowledge, and an inability to know what I should do. Fortunately in Australia you can always call 000 (911 in America, 999 in the UK and 112 in Europe).

My daughter, two years old, had a temperature that spiked to 44.6 degrees Celsius and started to have a fit while in bed. Fortunately we were able to have the 000 operator talk me through my first aid basics, by which time the Ambulance had turned up. The next 5 hours were spent at Royal Children’s Hospital (RCH) while her temperature returned to normal.

So apparently this, febrile convulsions, happens to a group of children, they do not know what causes it or what gets you into the group, they know that it does not cause any long term effects as long as it does not last for long. In short my little girl is OK.

This fear is something that management teams around the world have to live with day in day out, in fact they have become so a tuned to it that they have built “the unknown” into their risk plans and rules of thumb that they run their businesses on every day.

The recent financial crisis has shown us just how devastating “the unknown” can be, leaving our management teams wondering how they can minimize the unknown. Risk Management in many organisations is evolving, and a detailed enterprise view is the vision with associated mitigation plans where possible.

Working at Teradata I have been involved in building solutions to manage the complexities of this vision, enabling management to spend time on determining the mitigation plans. Its very satisfying to feel you’re helping to prepare and lessen the impact of any potential future disasters. What is your organisation doing to mitigate the risk?

I do not believe that the fear will ever go away for management teams or for parents, but a little knowledge certainly makes coping easier.

P.S. A big thank you to the team at RCH

Daniel Tehan

Watching the news grabs and reading about the Haiti disaster highlights to me the vast, tragic human cost of such disasters and leaves me asking the question what could have been done better?

The importance of preparing, planning and acting to minimise the human cost of such events is important, however it does cost resources. In a country like Haiti, the economic situation would suggest disaster planning and risk mitigation for disaster events are a low priority as compared to simply finding enough food, water, shelter, medicine and infrastructure to keep its people sustained.

However, Western nations with stronger financial positions appear to see disaster planning as a pastime rather than a passion. Numerous catastrophes post 9/11 would suggest that the power to pre-empt and act prior to events or mitigate disasters before they reach their full potential would seem to be inadequate. Could we have managed better in disasters such as the Canberra Bushfires in 2003, the infamous Asia Pacific Tsunami of 2004, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Cyclone Larry in 2006, Californian Wildfires in 2007, and Black Saturday fires in 2009?

So what comprises the concept or event that is a disaster and what precipitates it? It’s all about understanding risks that form the disaster and taking actions to mitigate these risks through strong leadership and command and control. Without insight into what comprises the disaster and being able to measure it, they can only occur with little or fragmented mitigation. Continuity Central describes "...disaster recovery and business continuity as a holistic approach is changing...from business continuity planning being an option to being mandatory."

In the project context, tasks form activities, activities form projects and projects form programs or campaigns. Disasters are also systemic; the likelihood of all of the "moving parts" occurring in the critical path to make the disaster happen. Like projects, disasters have milestones that indicate their progress and trigger other risks in a sequence that form the disaster. These are the indicators and measures that enable organisations and individuals to track if a potential disaster is now more likely, mitigated or no longer possible. This may sound simple, however it is understanding and measuring causes at the micro level and understanding the broader effect on a macro scale.

When an event occurs it is generally because no-one could see it coming or the risks were apparent could not be seen as a sum of the parts to form the disaster concept. Once it has happened it would seem that responding without a plan is even worse than the former. You need relevant data to inform actions that matter. Without clear command and control of a situation, business continuity and disaster recovery can only occur with good luck. The disaster itself is a series of things, risks that have achieved a milestone that conglomerate with other risks to complete the devastation. If the risks that form the basis of the event are identified and understood, action can be taken to mitigate or remove the next sequence of risks on the critical path. Again, you need to know what is important, have near-to-real-time access to this information and have a model that provides a decision-support basis for accountable and empowered people to act.

The Hurricane Katrina disaster exemplifies this point. It was impossible for the US Government to stop Hurricane Katrina itself, however, the response could have been more decisive by understanding what would continue to unfold without a final evacuation. On the human side, which is most important, the inalienable human rights to water, food, air, care, hygiene and shelter are the basis for all action. While responses were made to these basic needs, they were mitigations rather than resolutions. They prolonged the goal of a relocation of those affected, leaving them in the heart of New Orleans and the disaster area. Timely acquisition of buses to evacuate the remaining citizens in New Orleans was the intent. This simply did not happen.

The San Francisco Chronicle quotes former FEMA head Michael Brown as saying "It was beyond the capacity of the state and local governments, and it was beyond the capacity of FEMA," To me, this highlights flaws in planning through to taking action, including Brown's admission that he "should have demanded the military sooner" to assist in the response as the authorities in charge were responsible but not in control of the situation..

Instead of as decisive response, actions were taken to cordon-off the city and extend the time people were camped out in the stadium and convention centre - where the human side of the disaster unfolded further. Violence and looting ensued as desperation took hold and the disaster became complete. This was a damage control response, acting on what did happen without understanding exactly what created the situation and what was needed to resolve it.

The City of New Orleans needed a plan in the event of multiple disasters including a Hurricane. Early warning systems that provide off-shore data on Hurricane-like conditions, the city's topography and its high risk of flooding, the number of civilians in potential flood zones at various elevations to work out the magnitude of disaster scenarios could have helped model and understand what needs to be planned and what needs to happen if a disaster event occurs.

Disasters are not just about governments and nations nor are they only about natural disasters. In the wake of 9/11 or Katrina, many organisations were challenged by disaster recovery resulting from a terrorist attack. Those without such preparations and insight suffered massive financial loss and, in some cases ceased to exist. Had they had the right information at the right time to act before and after to find the best path to recovery, they may have continued in profitable business. I would argue that in disaster there is opportunity. The retailer, service provider or bank that resumes service quickest will be most profitable in meeting immediate demand and may have a long-term advantage and trust with customers, being there when they are needed the most.

I would like to hear from organisations that are looking at disaster planning, business continuity planning, disaster recovery and discuss the capabilities needed to do this effectively. While we hope disaster never comes, we have to plan that if it does, we will then have the right information and plans to know what happened, what needs to happen and act.

David Bremstaller

All sales organisations try and address problems, or solve pain points and that’s routine. However, sometimes in the heavily prescribed selling activity do we forget to make sure we understand what the one thing is that could motivate the customer to deal with us?

I once worked with a sales person who could never get the customer to consider a system that helped reduce ‘Churn’ (customers defecting elsewhere). When I spoke with the customer I asked one simple question. “What do you get rewarded for in your job” – they replied, “Acquiring customers and that’s all!” … hmmm so the motivation this person had was purely getting new customers in the door, his bonus depended on that!  Selling him a system that helped stem the flow of customers to the competitor – he could care less about!

Another example was a call centre manager. No way was she buying anything we were trying to sell, she had no issues and no pain!… Eventually she said “Look, I get paid on number of calls handled, not the quality or the accuracy of information we can supply to the customer!”

My dogs, I assume love me, but the truth is I feed them, and they need me to serve up the food and that’s their true motivation!

If you guess what a customer’s motivation is and then ask them you may well be surprised when they are truthful… it may not be what you assumed at all!

I reckon that it is well worth making an effort to understand a person’s motivation. Usually people are quite frank about this and their answer helps you positively address their problem or sell them what the truly need to succeed. When we can do that, we will find we have very loyal customers!

Tony Whale

The mercury has just 43 degrees outside, the office air conditioner is starting to struggle and we are discussing what that new office smell that seems to have appeared during the Christmas break is. It can only mean that it is time for some more of my ramblings.

The Christmas holiday was spent mostly around the house playing with the kids; a nice break from the throws of analytics and databases. Over the break I was talking to some friends who traveled to the US on a new airline player, so needless to say I was interested to see how the experience was. The beauty of Twitter is that I knew just how bad it was within minutes of them landing. Having paid for premium economy, they were down graded to economy, missed their US connection and ended up having to spend 6 hours in LAX (no one should have to spend that much time in LAX)!

They were generally treated very poorly and they did what we should all do - provided feedback to the airline, mostly in the hope that they would be compensated in some way. So after two phone calls that ended in “sorry but we can not help you” my friend got onto the web site and complained through the web site, not surprisingly no correspondence from the airline.

The surprise came upon the return check-in, the entire family was upgraded – was this Twitter, the phone calls or the email? The big concern is not the final outcome (which was good) but what it tells you about their backend systems. 

    1. Their telephone complaints department does not track complaints.

    2. Their telephone complaints department is not empowered to resolve complaints.

    3. Their web site does resolve complaints, and does not appear to be connected to the telephone complaint department.

    4. The airline does not proactively communicate to customers.

For organisations that want to have the customer at the centre of what they do, they have to get some basic capabilities in place.

How well does your infrastructure manage the customer experience?

Daniel Tehan

At first I thought the news reports of EFTPOS systems at a bank here in Australia not working with a ‘Y2K’ type of bug on New Year’s day were exaggerated – but the article in Tuesday’s Sydney Morning Herald Welcome to 2016: EFPOS Glitch Spreads points to a wider global problem. As soon as I read that 2010 was being interpreted as 2016 by the EFTPOS terminals I knew that the old HEX system was at the heart of it. But why? It is such an obvious thing to test for. Is ‘programming’ so easy and intuitive these days that some of the fundamentals are ignored? A rhetorical question maybe – but as someone who had to debug program dumps in octal I used to cringe at the thought of expanding my arithmetic literacy to HEX – adding A-F required a bit more mental agility than good old 0-7. Back then I thanked my lucky stars that I wasn’t working on the mainframe.

So what are some of the lessons learned?

Testing - Whether the bug was caused by the software itself at a code level or by interface protocols being incorrectly aligned doesn’t matter. The main issue for me is why wasn’t either scenario included as part of a testing plan? Have we gone so far with our ‘plug and play’ open interfaces that we assume one side of the plug is OK? If so then what are the specs?

Backup systems – well for this problem taxis are still very competent with the old ‘paper in the machine’ system – their electronic systems are regularly (and conveniently) out of order. Ever noticed that? Well, it seems that normal EFTPOS systems are so reliable that most people don’t seem to have the ‘old way’ on hand any more or staff trained in how to use them. I also expect the back-office paperwork and additional time just to get paid is also a significant disincentive and maybe this function has gone by the wayside as a cost saving measure.

Other commentary from an article in wmexperts Year 2016 bug plaguing text messages? on the issue points to a possible binary to hex misalignment:

Anyway, whatever the cause and domino effect the fact remains, in my opinion, that a fundamental building block of software, ie the use of codes (and/or notation), was not tested.

I am flabbergasted because so many of these types of issues have been known for so long they should not occur now, for example managing a divide by zero which would crash a system or doing all arithmetic in integer and cents because floating point would create non-reconcilable numbers. That was why you did it – it was just coding practices from experience.

What else can I say – I am lost for words that in this day and age such obvious errors can occur and I’m glad that I’m not accountable [for IT divisions] anymore ☺.

Hot off the press – bug now fixed! Back from the future: normal Eftpos service resumes

Christine Page-Hanify

Teradata Universe will be held in Sydney on Monday March 22, 2010 (Pre-conference Workshop) and Tuesday March 23, 2010 (Teradata Universe Sydney) and in Melbourne on Thursday March 25, 2010.

Senior Executives from global Teradata Customers Bank of America, DHL, eBay, JD Williams to name a few will present best practice case studies on the Advantage of Analytics, Unlocking ERP, Multiple Platforms, Information Consolidation, Value Management, Governance and Innovation.

These high level business focus presentations will be complimented throughout the day by an experience hall, featuring ‘birds of a feather’ stations, one on one meetings and ‘ask the expert’ discussions, coffee catch ups, and live demonstrations. A series of interactive industry specific workshops will bring all the information together and how this relates to you.

I encourage you to join our Linked In group for regular updates on What’s New at Teradata Universe. Please join us on the day and participate in valuable industry specific group discussions, get involved in the interactive demonstrations in the experience hall and finish the day by networking with colleagues and peers at the cocktail drinks.

Alec Gardner

So another year is fast approaching an end, the tree is up and the little people in my house are very excited about the prospect of presents.

When many of us think about Christmas we think about Santa Claus or Jesus’ birthday, however according to Wikipedia the Christians stole the festival from the pagan’s winter solstice festival, and Santa Claus was stolen from the Dutch Sinterklaas. Who would bring presents to the good Dutch children and take the bad Dutch children away to Spain, ironic that the Dutch now holiday in Spain (be aware that I may have taken some liberty in my interpretation of the Dutch holiday).

So in my stress filled Christmas shopping experience the other weekend, how do you buy a present for a little girl without her seeing you buying the present when you need to ensure that the helmet fits (she’s getting a bike but don’t tell her), I got to thinking about the logistics of Christmas.

I have to get the tree, the shop has to get hundreds of trees, I have to get the ham, the butcher has to get hundreds of hams, and so on. I get that retailers plan for this time of year for a very long time, but it is so easy for it to go very wrong. As an example Thomas the Tank Engine is particularly popular this year, I know as it took my parents three different shopping centres to source the James engine that was required for their grand daughter. Imagine having to ensure that you have enough stock ordered, then ensure that you have enough stock on the shelf every day before Christmas without having excess stock that has to be discounted come the 26th.

I have a list that has to be constantly updated in the lead up to the big day, I would hate to see a retailers list. I know that the retailers have advanced systems with lots of data and sophisticated planning algorithms combined with very smart people that bring it all together.

So to those people and systems and data, thank you for another year.

Daniel Tehan