I don't often link to the Daily Hell but this is a special occasion. A4E in police fraud inquiry.
On a similar theme, here's a piece on Tory discontent with the NHS bill that names names. Specifically, Gove, IDS, Osborne, NI Secretary Owen Paterson, and horrible old thatcherite gargoyle Sir George Young. That sounds like a nice roundup of the hard right/neocon stahlhelm fraktion, so why are they unhappy? Apparently they don't think it's extreme enough now, but then that might be just pushing the blame on the Lib Dems.
Sunday, February 19, 2012
contacting the Government's media-buying function
Back in the summer, as the News International scandal (well, beyond the scandal of its very existence) cranked up, we had a look at how the government buys newspaper display advertising and made an effort to reach out and touch the people in charge of it. I see no reason not to go round the buoy with this for another try. Back then, the Central Office of Information still existed, with a sword hanging over it. Now, we have Novated Frameworks. What?
Well, rather than having its own media-buying desk, the government has contracted the job out, via the Government Procurement Service. Some details about novatin' a framework are here. Although it does seem that the end of COI is sliding right, there is a contact for the supplier here. Presumably, though, every agency now contracts with them on a per-project basis, thus saving literally thousands of pennies.
Well, rather than having its own media-buying desk, the government has contracted the job out, via the Government Procurement Service. Some details about novatin' a framework are here. Although it does seem that the end of COI is sliding right, there is a contact for the supplier here. Presumably, though, every agency now contracts with them on a per-project basis, thus saving literally thousands of pennies.
non-profit, but nonprofit for who?
This Afghan news item is telling.
The project was managed by an NGO, IRD, which managed to set a record for the price of road construction per mile, cause serious political tension, hire its own militia, fire with live ammunition into a protesting crowd, fund an Afghan flower-arranging project, and pay its executives one-quarter of the $269 million funding provided by USAID. Like our own dear A4E, it was mostly a "non-profit" organisation by virtue of considering the money its founders got paid to be salary rather than a dividend.
This is important. As the piece points out further on:
This now sounds like whistling past the flowers, abandoned building materials, and of course the graveyard. However, it was a genuinely important idea - David Kilcullen's Accidental Guerrilla is full of roads, notably in eastern Afghanistan. Armies have always tried to control the landscapes they operate in, and in this case road-building was meant to alter the terrain in several different ways.
Hard surfaces and wide cleared shoulders would make it harder to place (respectively) on-route and off-route IEDs, and easier to find them if they were placed. Better roads would change the economy of mobility, letting Afghan troops and police in light vehicles move around quickly where before, coalition forces had to use helicopters and medium armour the Afghans would never be able to afford.
It was hoped that better transport would lead to economic growth, of course. And the process was meant to be important. Beyond just spending money, it was hoped that the negotiations regarding road projects would be an opportunity for traditional leaders and Afghan officials to demonstrate that they had influence, a way of improving the government side's mobility in social terms.
All this activity though, was embedded in a wider context - the economy of the Afghan & Iraq wars, a huge and dubiously policed zone of opportunity on the borders of the US government, its contractors, and the NGO world. Fertilised with money, this swamp blossomed all kinds of strange flowers, and in this case, IRD seems to have recapped the Iraq war on a small scale.
Mr. Hasas' seven-mile road construction project went so awry that his security guards opened fire on some of the very villagers he was trying to woo on behalf of his American funders.
Mr. Hasas was a point man in a $400 million U.S. Agency for International Development campaign to build as much as 1,200 miles of roads in some of the Afghanistan's most remote and turbulent places.
Three years and nearly $270 million later, less than 100 miles of gravel road have been completed, according to American officials. More than 125 people were killed and 250 others were wounded in insurgent attacks aimed at derailing the project, USAID said. The agency shut down the road-building effort in December..
The project was managed by an NGO, IRD, which managed to set a record for the price of road construction per mile, cause serious political tension, hire its own militia, fire with live ammunition into a protesting crowd, fund an Afghan flower-arranging project, and pay its executives one-quarter of the $269 million funding provided by USAID. Like our own dear A4E, it was mostly a "non-profit" organisation by virtue of considering the money its founders got paid to be salary rather than a dividend.
This is important. As the piece points out further on:
Officials at USAID and IRD say that the Afghanistan Strategic Roads Project wasn't a roads program in the usual sense. They said building roads was, in many ways, a secondary goal; the main objective was spreading jobs and money to win over rural communities that harbor insurgents.
"As a grant, this was never intended to be a major road construction project," says Jeff Grieco, a former USAID official who now serves as communications director at IRD. "It was intended to be a capacity building program. We have dramatically improved Afghan capacity to build roads and to do community development work."
This now sounds like whistling past the flowers, abandoned building materials, and of course the graveyard. However, it was a genuinely important idea - David Kilcullen's Accidental Guerrilla is full of roads, notably in eastern Afghanistan. Armies have always tried to control the landscapes they operate in, and in this case road-building was meant to alter the terrain in several different ways.
Hard surfaces and wide cleared shoulders would make it harder to place (respectively) on-route and off-route IEDs, and easier to find them if they were placed. Better roads would change the economy of mobility, letting Afghan troops and police in light vehicles move around quickly where before, coalition forces had to use helicopters and medium armour the Afghans would never be able to afford.
It was hoped that better transport would lead to economic growth, of course. And the process was meant to be important. Beyond just spending money, it was hoped that the negotiations regarding road projects would be an opportunity for traditional leaders and Afghan officials to demonstrate that they had influence, a way of improving the government side's mobility in social terms.
All this activity though, was embedded in a wider context - the economy of the Afghan & Iraq wars, a huge and dubiously policed zone of opportunity on the borders of the US government, its contractors, and the NGO world. Fertilised with money, this swamp blossomed all kinds of strange flowers, and in this case, IRD seems to have recapped the Iraq war on a small scale.
Ajab Noor Mangal, a local construction-company owner hired to work on the project, said Mr. Hasas alienated the community by only hiring workers from two of the five local clans.
Afghans excluded from the project looted Mr. Hasas's construction sites and stripped them bare. At one point, Mr. Hasas said, four men affiliated with the project were kidnapped, killed and dumped in public with a warning note signed by insurgents. The deaths brought construction to a halt. "We couldn't find a single person to work on the road," Mr. Hasas recalls.
Under the IRD contract, Mr. Hasas and the other Afghan firms working on their roads were responsible for providing their own security. So Mr. Hasas said he cobbled together nearly 100 gunmen and armed them with rented rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine guns.
Things reached a nadir in the fall of 2010, when around 100 angry Afghans, including a small number of suspected insurgents, tried to storm the construction site, according to Messrs. Hasas and Mangal. Mr. Mangal, who was in Kabul at the time, says he ordered the contractor's gunmen to open fire on the demonstrators, including some armed protesters who he said shot at the security team. Mr. Mangal says he is still paying for the wounded villagers' medical treatment.
Villagers who took part in the demonstration told a different story. Two men involved in the protest said IRD security sparked a larger confrontation after opening fire on a dozen unarmed men protesting IRD's refusal to move staff from an office overlooking homes where outsiders could see into private family compounds—a major slight in the conservative culture.
Not particularly hidden persuaders
While we're back on the Murdoch trail, readers have probably seen this story, in which the police have taken steps to keep Rebekah Brooks' personal assistant from fleeing the country. And of course this bit:
That's putting it mildly - the website mostly exists to sell something called a "Slimpod" described as follows:
Rated by the Sun as a Top Weight Loss Trend for 2012, apparently. Fuck the unconscious, it's the cross-promotion that does it, to say nothing of the ferocious devotion to looking after your pals.
Thinkingslimmer.com's WHOIS record lists one Sandra Roycroft-Davis as its administrative contact, who is none other than Chris Roycroft-Davis's wife. Chris Roycroft-Davis? Who he? The former executive editor of the Sun, seen excelling in the aspirational job dismissal industry here, who also acted as its chief leader writer ('cos words of one syllabub take the cake) and David Cameron's speech writer, as well as being an editor of the Daily Diana Tits and a contributor to The Times's Thunderer column, and playing some part in the launch of Sky TV.
He's now available for media training, consultancies, and as an after-dinner speaker. No word on weddings or barmitzvahs, but if you're really unlucky he might be on the same bill as Smash It! That's if he's not editing his own wikipedia article. Someone who only ever edits his page, in a favourable sense, and uses the word "insuperior" to boot is still at it.
Meanwhile, who is this Silvester character? He turns out to be a former Metropolitan policeman according to his website.
Scroll down to the dog, it's worth it in a vomity sort of way. And what is it with News International and moonlighting coppers? Anyway, apparently Carole Caplin's phone was tapped, but in the light of all this one can only conclude they were after some kind of trade secret in the crystals-and-guff game, perhaps the patent formula for Peter Foster's famous slimming tea. That's cheap snark, of course, but it is telling that the Blair-Caplin-Foster pattern was closely mirrored among News International types.
End note: The company, Thinkingslimmer Ltd., changed its name from Jenstar UK Ltd in 2010. The trademarks are registered to this company, but Sandra Roycroft-Davis's Linkedin profile describes it as a "celebrity management" company.
Ms Carter was also a beauty editor for The Sun and is a partner in a cosmetics business with former model and celebrity make-up artist Sue Moxley, and has also offered beauty tips on the website Thinkingslimmer.com.
That's putting it mildly - the website mostly exists to sell something called a "Slimpod" described as follows:
A Slimpod is a 10-minute recording of the voice of Trevor Silvester, creator of a technique known as WordWeaving which uses language in a special way to gently retune your unconscious mind to think differently about food and exercise and the way you feel about yourself. For many people it is having a remarkable effect on their eating habits and their confidence and self-esteem.
Why is the unconscious mind important? Because it is responsible for most of what you do and feel every day. Listening to a Slimpod works like a guidance mechanism, retuning your unconscious mind to change your habits....It’s a bit like retuning a TV so that it no longer picks up the fat channel because it’s tuned to “slim” TV.
A lot of money has been spent on discovering how to influence our unconscious – mainly by advertisers wanting you to buy things. Now Thinking Slimmer’s experts have taken their specialist knowledge of the science of unconscious persuasion and are using it for your benefit.
Rated by the Sun as a Top Weight Loss Trend for 2012, apparently. Fuck the unconscious, it's the cross-promotion that does it, to say nothing of the ferocious devotion to looking after your pals.
Thinkingslimmer.com's WHOIS record lists one Sandra Roycroft-Davis as its administrative contact, who is none other than Chris Roycroft-Davis's wife. Chris Roycroft-Davis? Who he? The former executive editor of the Sun, seen excelling in the aspirational job dismissal industry here, who also acted as its chief leader writer ('cos words of one syllabub take the cake) and David Cameron's speech writer, as well as being an editor of the Daily Diana Tits and a contributor to The Times's Thunderer column, and playing some part in the launch of Sky TV.
He's now available for media training, consultancies, and as an after-dinner speaker. No word on weddings or barmitzvahs, but if you're really unlucky he might be on the same bill as Smash It! That's if he's not editing his own wikipedia article. Someone who only ever edits his page, in a favourable sense, and uses the word "insuperior" to boot is still at it.
Chris, having been sued by the queen at least 3 times, being one of the co-owners of sky and being on first name terms with several prime ministers, has now settled down in Pinner with his family. Perhaps most notably his son, James, a notorious womanizer, much like his father, who prides himself to be a saracens-level rugby player who's rugby skill, until fairly recently, was insuperior to that of his 9 year old brother.
Meanwhile, who is this Silvester character? He turns out to be a former Metropolitan policeman according to his website.
We were Police Officers for many years before finding a fascinating new way of helping people. While trainers at the Metropolitan Police Training School in Hendon, we pioneered the use of NLP and hypnosis in a unit dedicated to improving the performance of students who were failing their training. Over a three year period we developed a learning system based on NLP principles that could guarantee an improvement of 10-30% with only two and a half hours of coaching. Simultaneously I (Trevor) was establishing a hypnotherapy clinic that I ran in the evenings and weekends – a busy three years!
Scroll down to the dog, it's worth it in a vomity sort of way. And what is it with News International and moonlighting coppers? Anyway, apparently Carole Caplin's phone was tapped, but in the light of all this one can only conclude they were after some kind of trade secret in the crystals-and-guff game, perhaps the patent formula for Peter Foster's famous slimming tea. That's cheap snark, of course, but it is telling that the Blair-Caplin-Foster pattern was closely mirrored among News International types.
End note: The company, Thinkingslimmer Ltd., changed its name from Jenstar UK Ltd in 2010. The trademarks are registered to this company, but Sandra Roycroft-Davis's Linkedin profile describes it as a "celebrity management" company.
A slight return to 2004. Wasn't that fun.
Tom Watson runs for the gap, specifically yet another ugly little employment law story at the Sun. Readers will know that they're like that among themselves and there's something of a press tradition of not mentioning the names. On this occasion it's Our Boys Go In Editor "Tom" "Newton" "Dunn" vs. their Whitehall editor Clodagh Hartley.
The other story is that Watson is suggesting that Trevor Kavanagh took the credit for publishing the Hutton whitewash ahead of time when Hartley was in fact responsible.
Sadly this just recalls Labour's relationship with the Sun. A close reading of this explains all:
Access to the document, no financial or political interest, someone who had Kavanagh (or Hartley)'s direct phone number = i.e. they were a civil servant operating with permission from their boss who was in contact with them, or to put it another way, a government press officer.
As is fairly well known, Alistair Campbell got powers to give the career COI officials orders in May 1997. His departure didn't end that. The source was probably Godric Smith or Tom "Walter Mitty figure" Kelly. Kavanagh was lionised by the media establishment for having what was, in fact, the government's line-to-take read out into his ear by a government press officer. It wasn't as if the Blair governments were averse to racking up brownie points with Murdoch where possible, was it?
On the other hand, perhaps the most repellent of the Murdoch/Met cases was the Forest Gate raid of 2006, when the police launched a miniature Operation OVERLORD (or rather, MOTORMAN - I don't think they used a boat) in Walthamstow in pursuit of a "chemical dirty bomb suicide vest" which was capable of attacking aircraft up to 5,000 feet overhead in their opinion, accidentally shot someone because their hand slipped, tore the building apart, found nothing, and satisfied themselves by having the News of the World smear the suspects as paedophiles, before spending ages trying to seize their savings. It wasn't so much a police operation as a sort of wildly overdone high-camp mashup of 2000s tropes. News International columnist Andy Hayman was in charge, but perhaps we were spared worse:
So when did they start tapping Prescott's phone?
It remains the case that Labour's half of the twisted relationship with Murdoch was very different to the Tories'. It was transactional and contingent and that's one of the reasons why it was so horrible at the time, but that also made it possible to leave. When you are one entity you cannot cooperate, said Montgomery. It's also very hard to stop.
Production note: part of this post was originally a comment on Tom Watson's blog and was never released from moderation. I might have been nice about this, but you know.
The other story is that Watson is suggesting that Trevor Kavanagh took the credit for publishing the Hutton whitewash ahead of time when Hartley was in fact responsible.
Sadly this just recalls Labour's relationship with the Sun. A close reading of this explains all:
Kavanagh, who claimed he had been read the contents of the report over the telephone by an “impartial” source went on to tell the BBC “the source had nothing to gain financially or politically, no axe to grind, no vested interest"
Access to the document, no financial or political interest, someone who had Kavanagh (or Hartley)'s direct phone number = i.e. they were a civil servant operating with permission from their boss who was in contact with them, or to put it another way, a government press officer.
As is fairly well known, Alistair Campbell got powers to give the career COI officials orders in May 1997. His departure didn't end that. The source was probably Godric Smith or Tom "Walter Mitty figure" Kelly. Kavanagh was lionised by the media establishment for having what was, in fact, the government's line-to-take read out into his ear by a government press officer. It wasn't as if the Blair governments were averse to racking up brownie points with Murdoch where possible, was it?
On the other hand, perhaps the most repellent of the Murdoch/Met cases was the Forest Gate raid of 2006, when the police launched a miniature Operation OVERLORD (or rather, MOTORMAN - I don't think they used a boat) in Walthamstow in pursuit of a "chemical dirty bomb suicide vest" which was capable of attacking aircraft up to 5,000 feet overhead in their opinion, accidentally shot someone because their hand slipped, tore the building apart, found nothing, and satisfied themselves by having the News of the World smear the suspects as paedophiles, before spending ages trying to seize their savings. It wasn't so much a police operation as a sort of wildly overdone high-camp mashup of 2000s tropes. News International columnist Andy Hayman was in charge, but perhaps we were spared worse:
The police always argue that (many things they do) are a matter of operations and politicians should not be involved. Well, I'm afraid I have a big argument with that."
Citing the 2006 raid on a street in Forest Gate, he added: "At one stage the police were going to turn out all the residents of the street at 2am in the morning. John Reid was the home secretary and I was working with him.
"Andy Hayman, who was in charge, wanted to turn them out and I said to John Reid - no, you can't do that. He said 'John, it's operational'. I said 'S** operational, there are political considerations here' - turning out a street of Asians at 2am with the allegations of a gas plot and we don't know what the evidence is for that."
So when did they start tapping Prescott's phone?
It remains the case that Labour's half of the twisted relationship with Murdoch was very different to the Tories'. It was transactional and contingent and that's one of the reasons why it was so horrible at the time, but that also made it possible to leave. When you are one entity you cannot cooperate, said Montgomery. It's also very hard to stop.
Production note: part of this post was originally a comment on Tom Watson's blog and was never released from moderation. I might have been nice about this, but you know.
Thursday, February 16, 2012
How to control the newspapers (aka. Explicit is better than implicit)
Ho hum, a spun day at the Guardian with this piece covering a double page spread on 8-9. Amelia Hill interviews a panel of prominent feminists about the Prime Minister's new "women's advisor". You may have already guessed that they aren't particularly impressed (an accurate headline might have been Thinking Individuals Find Sop Unsatisfying, Faintly Offensive), but the problem is not the content of the story, but its existence.
A quick search on Journalisted shows what's actually going on here. Ever since the first weekend in October, roughly twice a month, the Government has been briefing the media that it's doing something "to listen to women voters".
Women as a demographic have turned sharply against the Tories quite some time ago. In fact, the polling shows a dramatic shift over Christmas, 2010, for reasons I've wondered about but never been able to make any conclusions on. See this chart of Anthony Wells's.
But this got very little press right up to September. A decision was taken at some point in early September to spin the issue in the run-up to the Conservative conference, and on the 13th, the story was trailed by leaking it to the Daily Mail (i.e. to the intended target audience).
The 2nd of October saw the full-scale launch, with the local press being especially targeted (load the search - they hit syndication like a hammer and pretty much every local rag got it). Bypassing the nationals and briefing the local papers is an old Alistair Campbell trick you may remember from the Iraq war spin campaign, of course.
Since then, it's been regularly re-announced, about twice a month. One can presume that there is a recurring item on the No.10 media grid for it.
So far, the sum total of actual action on this front consists of double-hatting the head of Francis Maude's office, a bit of title inflation that the Guardian interviewees were rightly scornful of. But the real point here is that hours of work and a hugely prominent chunk of a national newspaper were dedicated to discussing this utterly content-free paper shuffle. And this has been going on for months, needing only a one-line e-mail to the cabinet secretary to support it in reality.
The return on investment is enormous. Great chunks of media space, time, and effort have been essentially neutralised, man-marked out of the game, all with a few press releases. This is the point of the exercise. If you are discussing the latest eye-catching initiative you are by definition not discussing anything else. Your eye has been caught. It's why they're called that.
Meanwhile, the latest on the Sun. Note this bit:
Well, no, why would it be? Operation ELVEDEN is explicitly an investigation into bribes paid to police officers. What has it got to do with journalistic expenses, a private and trivial matter internal to News International? The answer is almost certainly that during Trevor Kavanagh's comedy Ardennes Offensive earlier this week, it was privately briefed to the media that the police were arresting people over "£50 dinners for sources" (the figure actually appears in another Guardian story). This is clearly guff. But it achieved its purpose; in terms of cognitive anchoring, putting the notion out there sets the limits of what is expected. Even without its being mentioned explicitly, it controlled the content of this story!
It would obviously have been better if the Guardian had stated in so many words that "Representatives of News International [ideally NAMES TO GO HERE] have repeatedly suggested that journalists were arrested over expenses. The police source denied that this was the case and specifically said that the investigation has nothing to do with expenses". Then we could, at least, make up our minds.
A quick search on Journalisted shows what's actually going on here. Ever since the first weekend in October, roughly twice a month, the Government has been briefing the media that it's doing something "to listen to women voters".
Women as a demographic have turned sharply against the Tories quite some time ago. In fact, the polling shows a dramatic shift over Christmas, 2010, for reasons I've wondered about but never been able to make any conclusions on. See this chart of Anthony Wells's.
But this got very little press right up to September. A decision was taken at some point in early September to spin the issue in the run-up to the Conservative conference, and on the 13th, the story was trailed by leaking it to the Daily Mail (i.e. to the intended target audience).
The 2nd of October saw the full-scale launch, with the local press being especially targeted (load the search - they hit syndication like a hammer and pretty much every local rag got it). Bypassing the nationals and briefing the local papers is an old Alistair Campbell trick you may remember from the Iraq war spin campaign, of course.
Since then, it's been regularly re-announced, about twice a month. One can presume that there is a recurring item on the No.10 media grid for it.
So far, the sum total of actual action on this front consists of double-hatting the head of Francis Maude's office, a bit of title inflation that the Guardian interviewees were rightly scornful of. But the real point here is that hours of work and a hugely prominent chunk of a national newspaper were dedicated to discussing this utterly content-free paper shuffle. And this has been going on for months, needing only a one-line e-mail to the cabinet secretary to support it in reality.
The return on investment is enormous. Great chunks of media space, time, and effort have been essentially neutralised, man-marked out of the game, all with a few press releases. This is the point of the exercise. If you are discussing the latest eye-catching initiative you are by definition not discussing anything else. Your eye has been caught. It's why they're called that.
Meanwhile, the latest on the Sun. Note this bit:
The source said that the investigation is not to do with "sources or expenses" claims by journalists.
Well, no, why would it be? Operation ELVEDEN is explicitly an investigation into bribes paid to police officers. What has it got to do with journalistic expenses, a private and trivial matter internal to News International? The answer is almost certainly that during Trevor Kavanagh's comedy Ardennes Offensive earlier this week, it was privately briefed to the media that the police were arresting people over "£50 dinners for sources" (the figure actually appears in another Guardian story). This is clearly guff. But it achieved its purpose; in terms of cognitive anchoring, putting the notion out there sets the limits of what is expected. Even without its being mentioned explicitly, it controlled the content of this story!
It would obviously have been better if the Guardian had stated in so many words that "Representatives of News International [ideally NAMES TO GO HERE] have repeatedly suggested that journalists were arrested over expenses. The police source denied that this was the case and specifically said that the investigation has nothing to do with expenses". Then we could, at least, make up our minds.
Sunday, February 05, 2012
non-Thursday music link
Music!
Bonus extra:
If I scripted something to chuck random music links into a G+ hangout, would anyone listen?
Bonus extra:
If I scripted something to chuck random music links into a G+ hangout, would anyone listen?
we know where your dog goes to school
A while ago I noticed that a detailed story in Le Monde about their telecoms-interception-scandal-of-the-week had bizarrely vanished from their archives. It is baaack and I can share it with you! So if you read French and want to know what happens, in operational detail, when a prosecutor orders an illegal trawl of call-detail records to find out if a journalist has spoken to another prosecutor, there you go.
Actually, there is no dog, but they did track down his daughter's pony.
Actually, there is no dog, but they did track down his daughter's pony.
nonlinear response to interest rates
Just to recover something from my twitter feed, last Friday, BT announced its Q4 results and (among other things) its management said that they were scaling down their capital investment plans, and that one of the reasons was low interest rates. What? Well, as a UK company BT has to capitalise the net surplus or deficit in its pension fund every year and take a charge to profits for it. As pension funds have to hold a lot of bonds, low interest rates mean a bigger notional pension deficit. Whether or not BT has to put more cash into it, or whether it might just be more expensive to raise money, doesn't really matter. The impact is the same, completely counter-intuitively. Lower interest rates shouldn't discourage economic actors from undertaking capital projects.
A couple of things as a result. One, this tends to support the idea that there is no such thing as an economy-wide (Wicksellian) interest rate. If BT's pension fund were big enough, lower interest rates on its bonds might actually drive up rates on BT's own borrowings. Two, what about other companies? US firms often have big health insurance liabilities, and insurers typically have to own lots of bonds (and it wasn't the insurers that blew up, now was it, so best not fiddle). Do they experience this? Three, this may not be a thing as it may just be management spinning a pretty dreadful quarter, and Verizon in the US, a very similar business, decided to go ahead and lay a lot more fibre.
A couple of things as a result. One, this tends to support the idea that there is no such thing as an economy-wide (Wicksellian) interest rate. If BT's pension fund were big enough, lower interest rates on its bonds might actually drive up rates on BT's own borrowings. Two, what about other companies? US firms often have big health insurance liabilities, and insurers typically have to own lots of bonds (and it wasn't the insurers that blew up, now was it, so best not fiddle). Do they experience this? Three, this may not be a thing as it may just be management spinning a pretty dreadful quarter, and Verizon in the US, a very similar business, decided to go ahead and lay a lot more fibre.
Churchill was wrong for most of his career, you know...
This Ha'aretz piece is interesting for the insight it gives into Israeli policy and especially into process, but also for a couple of other things. Notably, it's remarkably frank about the Obama administration deliberately trying to stop Netanyahu going to war, and the role of dodgy casino guy Sheldon Adelson in both US and Israeli right-wing politics, and it provides the new information that the Americans have given up on the formal diplomatic channel and concentrated on influencing the Israeli military directly, on a brasshat to brasshat basis. The implied conclusion is that the IDF leadership are interested in external reality while Bibi is too busy being Winston Churchill, and further that they are interested in getting information from the Americans about what their own prime minister is thinking.
Also, Netanyahu considers himself an expert on US politics. The danger here is that the America he is an expert on may not be the same America everyone else is dealing with. If, as I suspect, he is getting a lot of his information from his Republican contacts, he's living in an alternate universe. In so far as people like Sheldon Adelson are impressed by US politicians who know Bibi Netanyahu personally, his contacts are literally being paid to tell him what he wants to hear. It's ironically similar to Bush before the Iraq war, just with the stove-pipe reversed.
However, I was astonished by this quote:
Well, no, they're not, are they? Some tabloid journalists keep a few paragraphs of general-purposes "sexy" in a file they can drop into a story as required and just change a couple of parameters to fit. This sounds like the same thing, but with Churchill!
Meanwhile, Colin Kahl, and this. It does look like there's a coordinated push-back against the bullshit, which is good news for those of us who remember 2002. The US Navy bombs Iran...with love. Of a purely Platonic form between comrades of the sea. Oops. while also bringing the carrier back.
US policy does look like it's trying to achieve three goals - 1) no war with Iran, 2) reassure the GCC countries (so they don't start one), 3) restrain the Israelis (without pressing so hard they freak and start one). These are partly contradictory, but then what isn't? Certainly, the combination of being ostentatiously nice to Iranian sailors while also sailing a giant carrier up and down the Gulf does fit the needs of 1) and 2).
Also, Netanyahu considers himself an expert on US politics. The danger here is that the America he is an expert on may not be the same America everyone else is dealing with. If, as I suspect, he is getting a lot of his information from his Republican contacts, he's living in an alternate universe. In so far as people like Sheldon Adelson are impressed by US politicians who know Bibi Netanyahu personally, his contacts are literally being paid to tell him what he wants to hear. It's ironically similar to Bush before the Iraq war, just with the stove-pipe reversed.
However, I was astonished by this quote:
While the Fifth Fleet of the U.S. Navy is operating in the Straits of Hormuz, just as the Pacific Fleet was anchored at its home base near Honolulu on the fateful morning of December 7, 1941, the two instances are not really comparable.
Well, no, they're not, are they? Some tabloid journalists keep a few paragraphs of general-purposes "sexy" in a file they can drop into a story as required and just change a couple of parameters to fit. This sounds like the same thing, but with Churchill!
Meanwhile, Colin Kahl, and this. It does look like there's a coordinated push-back against the bullshit, which is good news for those of us who remember 2002. The US Navy bombs Iran...with love. Of a purely Platonic form between comrades of the sea. Oops. while also bringing the carrier back.
US policy does look like it's trying to achieve three goals - 1) no war with Iran, 2) reassure the GCC countries (so they don't start one), 3) restrain the Israelis (without pressing so hard they freak and start one). These are partly contradictory, but then what isn't? Certainly, the combination of being ostentatiously nice to Iranian sailors while also sailing a giant carrier up and down the Gulf does fit the needs of 1) and 2).
fighting the real enemy
Con "WMD" Coughlin's piece in the Torygraph is worthy of close reading. You'll note that this:
isn't actually sourced to either General Richards, who is the ostensible subject of the piece, or to Sandy Gall's book mentioned later in it. Also, the piece contains extensive quotes from Richards that turn out to have been dug out of Gall's book, when a over-rapid look at the piece might give you the impression Coughlin spoke to Richards.
Reid's remark has gone down in the annals of stupidity, but the notion that "most Labour ministers" agreed with him isn't sourced to anyone at all. In fact, the policy was repeatedly re-debated and altered, as I blogged here over the winter of 2005-2006, which doesn't suggest everyone agreed on it. Further, it's news that "intelligence assessments" accurately forecast what would happen - especially as any assessment carried out before the deployment would have been an assessment of the original plan, not the plan as it was radically altered in the field.
I suspect Coughlin is talking the secret services' book here, and they are fighting the real enemy - the uniformed services' Defence Intelligence Staff, which would have been responsible for such an assessment. Further, DIS was notoriously right about Iraq (if you believe Brian Jones' telling) and this is inexcusable to the spooks (who weren't) or Coughlin (who wasn't, and who culpably published their nonsense).
Further, does this quote sound convincing to you? For an American general, he sounds a lot like a British journalist trying to sound tough.
Whitehall was caught off guard by the seriousness of the situation in Helmand province, where British troops were deployed in Nato’s reconstruction programme. Most Labour ministers supported the view of John Reid, the defence secretary at the time, that “we would be perfectly happy to leave in three years’ time without firing one shot because our mission is to protect the reconstruction”.
Intelligence assessments conducted in southern Afghanistan concluded that they would receive a hostile reception.
isn't actually sourced to either General Richards, who is the ostensible subject of the piece, or to Sandy Gall's book mentioned later in it. Also, the piece contains extensive quotes from Richards that turn out to have been dug out of Gall's book, when a over-rapid look at the piece might give you the impression Coughlin spoke to Richards.
Reid's remark has gone down in the annals of stupidity, but the notion that "most Labour ministers" agreed with him isn't sourced to anyone at all. In fact, the policy was repeatedly re-debated and altered, as I blogged here over the winter of 2005-2006, which doesn't suggest everyone agreed on it. Further, it's news that "intelligence assessments" accurately forecast what would happen - especially as any assessment carried out before the deployment would have been an assessment of the original plan, not the plan as it was radically altered in the field.
I suspect Coughlin is talking the secret services' book here, and they are fighting the real enemy - the uniformed services' Defence Intelligence Staff, which would have been responsible for such an assessment. Further, DIS was notoriously right about Iraq (if you believe Brian Jones' telling) and this is inexcusable to the spooks (who weren't) or Coughlin (who wasn't, and who culpably published their nonsense).
Further, does this quote sound convincing to you? For an American general, he sounds a lot like a British journalist trying to sound tough.
Sir David also recounts a heated argument between Brigadier Ed Butler, the first British commander in Helmand, and an US general who took exception to him. “I nearly punched that damn Limey’s [Butler’s] lights out, he was so arrogant,” the US general said.
This is not a mafia business. This relies on credit!
Via Jamie Kenny, a must-read translation of a Chinese investigative report into the case of Wu Ying, a Chinese businesswoman who is in deep trouble with the law. What's interesting here is that the report provides a deep view into some of the most important interfaces in the political economy of China - between the official and shadow banking sectors, between both and the Party, and between the Party and organised crime. It's been suggested by quite a few people, notably Ken Livingstone's economic advisor John Ross, that Chinese macro-economic policy is basically all about investment - whereas other countries might target inflation, the money supply, nominal or real GDP, an exchange-rate peg, or full employment with a range of fiscal or monetary tools, Chinese policy makers have a primary policy target of maintaining sufficient employment growth to keep up with the growth of the urban workforce, and a primary policy tool of controlling the rate of capital investment. This is achieved through a combination of fiscal policy through the government budget, both formal regulation and informal influence over the banking sector, and monetary policy, specifically the management of the RMB exchange rate and the terms on which central bank intervention is sterilised or not.
An investment-centric view of the economy could be characterised as both palaeo-Keynesian - investment, driven by animal spirits and radical uncertainty, is the swing item in the national accounting identity and therefore the driver of the business cycle, and should be managed by government in order to maintain a stable growth path - and also Marxist, in that it puts the accumulation of capital and its allocation between sectors centre-stage and suggests that it's too important to be left to capitalists.
An alternative view, which we might pin on Patrick Chovanec, is that investment is the driver of the Chinese economy but that nobody's in anything that could be described as control. In this view, Chinese economic policy is more orthodox, leaning against the world recession in 2009 with a major stimulus plan and a monetary expansion, but its impact is very noisy. Much of the stimulus money went into an unsustainable property bubble, which is now deflating messily.
In a sense, these arguments are not all that different. The major differences are the degree of agency the central government is perceived to have, and the underlying call on the future of the economy. John Ross would argue that the surge in investment is creating the capital goods needed for future growth and removing inflationary constraints. Some Americans wonder at the system's capacity to pour money into a massive windpower infrastructure. On the other hand, the San Francisco Fed reckons that a very large proportion of Chinese goods exported to the US consists of imports to China, notably from the US - it's been estimated that out of the production cost of an iPhone, more of the value-added represents US than Chinese production. Isn't this strong evidence that there has been huge overinvestment in a very particular kind of low-margin export processing, plus property?
Now, back to Wu Ying's cell. This story is all about how the system tries to control investment, how Chinese entrepreneurs and officials try to subvert this control, what happens when it breaks down, and how it is then restored. It's fairly typical of economies with strong official controls on bank balance sheets that a big market in direct inter-company lending develops (it happened in post-war Britain). If you can't get a loan from the bank, perhaps you could arrange something with a business that happens to be awash with cash. Obviously, this is a lot easier if there is some sort of intermediary who can make the deal. And in China there are specific, geographically linked networks of entrepreneurs who have become specialised in this unofficial shadow-banking sector. Technically it is entirely illegal, so it's up to the intermediary to enforce the terms of the contract in their own sweet way. Which of course brings in another actor, organised crime or privatised protection.
This being China, though, it's more complicated than that. Wu Ying's creditor, Lin Weiping, was a former Cultural Bureau official turned moneylender or rather "funding coordinator", who acted as a sort of broker between savers and borrowers. Well, it started off like that but the business prospered and pretty soon people were depositing spare cash with him overnight. This is an important moment - he wasn't just introducing the two parties to a private arrangement any more, but rather, he was now operating a bank. The demand for credit outside the official system, and for high-yielding (2-5% monthly interest) deposits, was enormous. Fascinatingly, it turned out that the official banks were also keen to find sources of wholesale funding that let them get around the People's Bank of China's monetary policy - they started borrowing from him on overnight terms. This was implemented by sending a straw-man to open an account and deposit the cash. Lin, having turned himself into a bank, now went a step further and became a central bank. You might wonder how long it would have taken him to start issuing his own currency.
But Wu Xing would bring him down. He very rarely extended credit outside his home province, but made an exception for two of her projects, a tourist resort and another unofficial banking operation (which he may have thought of as being a branch of his own). It turned out, though, that she actually had an entirely different project in mind, in real estate. She justified this as necessary to influence important officials. In fact, the story was about to become a classic case of an entrepreneur who over-does the leverage and eventually runs out of credit, with the twist that one lot of creditors had her kidnapped by thugs in an effort to collect payment. However, Wu had become too big to fail, and eventually there was something like a race between Lin's shadow-banking empire and the very official Agricultural Bank of China to put together a lifeboat package, which Lin eventually won. A syndicate of unofficial lenders bought out the loan portfolio at 70% of its face value.
It seems that this was intolerable to the authorities, as Wu and Lin and many others were then arrested. Lin got six years and is now back on the out and apparently dedicated to studying Chinese culture, specifically the bits relating to keeping his mouth shut. Wu is still in the court system, facing charges of running an illegal bank.
Chinese regulators quoted seem to be more interested in the sources of capital going into the shadow-banking system, on the grounds that quite a lot of it is deeply illegal in nature, and also that concentrated rather than diversified sources of funding tend to cause systemic risks. In so far as it's the marginal transaction that matters, if this was to work it would represent an effort to make sure that it's the official financial sector that represents the marginal lender and that state control of investment continues.
But that's going to be very difficult in an environment where the central bank might be you.
An investment-centric view of the economy could be characterised as both palaeo-Keynesian - investment, driven by animal spirits and radical uncertainty, is the swing item in the national accounting identity and therefore the driver of the business cycle, and should be managed by government in order to maintain a stable growth path - and also Marxist, in that it puts the accumulation of capital and its allocation between sectors centre-stage and suggests that it's too important to be left to capitalists.
An alternative view, which we might pin on Patrick Chovanec, is that investment is the driver of the Chinese economy but that nobody's in anything that could be described as control. In this view, Chinese economic policy is more orthodox, leaning against the world recession in 2009 with a major stimulus plan and a monetary expansion, but its impact is very noisy. Much of the stimulus money went into an unsustainable property bubble, which is now deflating messily.
In a sense, these arguments are not all that different. The major differences are the degree of agency the central government is perceived to have, and the underlying call on the future of the economy. John Ross would argue that the surge in investment is creating the capital goods needed for future growth and removing inflationary constraints. Some Americans wonder at the system's capacity to pour money into a massive windpower infrastructure. On the other hand, the San Francisco Fed reckons that a very large proportion of Chinese goods exported to the US consists of imports to China, notably from the US - it's been estimated that out of the production cost of an iPhone, more of the value-added represents US than Chinese production. Isn't this strong evidence that there has been huge overinvestment in a very particular kind of low-margin export processing, plus property?
Now, back to Wu Ying's cell. This story is all about how the system tries to control investment, how Chinese entrepreneurs and officials try to subvert this control, what happens when it breaks down, and how it is then restored. It's fairly typical of economies with strong official controls on bank balance sheets that a big market in direct inter-company lending develops (it happened in post-war Britain). If you can't get a loan from the bank, perhaps you could arrange something with a business that happens to be awash with cash. Obviously, this is a lot easier if there is some sort of intermediary who can make the deal. And in China there are specific, geographically linked networks of entrepreneurs who have become specialised in this unofficial shadow-banking sector. Technically it is entirely illegal, so it's up to the intermediary to enforce the terms of the contract in their own sweet way. Which of course brings in another actor, organised crime or privatised protection.
This being China, though, it's more complicated than that. Wu Ying's creditor, Lin Weiping, was a former Cultural Bureau official turned moneylender or rather "funding coordinator", who acted as a sort of broker between savers and borrowers. Well, it started off like that but the business prospered and pretty soon people were depositing spare cash with him overnight. This is an important moment - he wasn't just introducing the two parties to a private arrangement any more, but rather, he was now operating a bank. The demand for credit outside the official system, and for high-yielding (2-5% monthly interest) deposits, was enormous. Fascinatingly, it turned out that the official banks were also keen to find sources of wholesale funding that let them get around the People's Bank of China's monetary policy - they started borrowing from him on overnight terms. This was implemented by sending a straw-man to open an account and deposit the cash. Lin, having turned himself into a bank, now went a step further and became a central bank. You might wonder how long it would have taken him to start issuing his own currency.
But Wu Xing would bring him down. He very rarely extended credit outside his home province, but made an exception for two of her projects, a tourist resort and another unofficial banking operation (which he may have thought of as being a branch of his own). It turned out, though, that she actually had an entirely different project in mind, in real estate. She justified this as necessary to influence important officials. In fact, the story was about to become a classic case of an entrepreneur who over-does the leverage and eventually runs out of credit, with the twist that one lot of creditors had her kidnapped by thugs in an effort to collect payment. However, Wu had become too big to fail, and eventually there was something like a race between Lin's shadow-banking empire and the very official Agricultural Bank of China to put together a lifeboat package, which Lin eventually won. A syndicate of unofficial lenders bought out the loan portfolio at 70% of its face value.
It seems that this was intolerable to the authorities, as Wu and Lin and many others were then arrested. Lin got six years and is now back on the out and apparently dedicated to studying Chinese culture, specifically the bits relating to keeping his mouth shut. Wu is still in the court system, facing charges of running an illegal bank.
Chinese regulators quoted seem to be more interested in the sources of capital going into the shadow-banking system, on the grounds that quite a lot of it is deeply illegal in nature, and also that concentrated rather than diversified sources of funding tend to cause systemic risks. In so far as it's the marginal transaction that matters, if this was to work it would represent an effort to make sure that it's the official financial sector that represents the marginal lender and that state control of investment continues.
But that's going to be very difficult in an environment where the central bank might be you.
Saturday, January 21, 2012
Politics of call centres, part three (really part three this time)
So we've looked at how they're dreadful and why. The stakes are important; a huge chunk of the economy is made up of services, and some of the places where they are located are becoming almost as much one-industry towns as they were before their one industry shut down. What if this sector was as productive and as valued as Rolls-Royce? (Especially as, all things considered, it is quite difficult to use them as a weapon of war, rather as the role of the orchestra in counter-insurgency is limited at best.)
We have the technology. Ticketing systems are as mature as anything gets, and a reader of this blog was moved to say that every software developer has at least once tried to write their own. Web-voice integration is a hugely creative field at the moment. Things like Fonolo and the Networked Helpdesk Protocol (API docs are here) show what can be done.
But the big issue is management, and I think expectations. People expect the experience to be terrible. People expect the job to be status-reducing and generally horrible. People expect that because it's a cost-centre, there's no way to improve it other than flogging the slaves harder.
We have the technology. Ticketing systems are as mature as anything gets, and a reader of this blog was moved to say that every software developer has at least once tried to write their own. Web-voice integration is a hugely creative field at the moment. Things like Fonolo and the Networked Helpdesk Protocol (API docs are here) show what can be done.
But the big issue is management, and I think expectations. People expect the experience to be terrible. People expect the job to be status-reducing and generally horrible. People expect that because it's a cost-centre, there's no way to improve it other than flogging the slaves harder.
The politics of call centres, part two: sources of failure
So, why did we get here? Back in the mists of time, in the US Bell System, there used to be something called a Business Office, by contrast to a Central Office (i.e. what we call a BT Local Exchange in the UK), whose features and functions were set down in numerous Bell System Practice documents. Basically, it was a site where the phone company took calls from the public, either for its own account or on behalf of a third party. Its practices were defined by Bell System standardisation, and its industrial relations were defined by the agreement between AT&T and the unions, which specified the pay and conditions for the various trades and workplace types inside the monster telco. If something was a Business Office according to the book, the union agreement covering those offices would apply.
In the Reaganite 80s, after the Bell System was broken up, someone realised that it would be possible to get rid of the union rules if they could re-define the site as something else. Not only could they change the rules, but they could move the site physically to a right-to-work state or even outside the USA. This is, it turns out, the origin of the phrase "call centre".
In the UK, of course, call centres proliferated in parallel with utility privatisation and financial deregulation. A major element in the business case for privatisation was getting rid of all those electricity showrooms and BT local offices and centralising customer service functions into `all centres. At the same time, of course, privatisation created the demand for customer service in that it was suddenly possible to change provider and therefore to generate a shit-load of admin. Banks were keen to get rid of their branches and to serve the hugely expanding credit card market. At another level, IT helpdesks made their appearance.
On the other hand, hard though it is to imagine it now, there was a broader vision of technology that expected it all to be provided centrally - in the cloud, if you will - down phone lines controlled by your favourite telco, or by the French Government, or perhaps Rupert Murdoch. This is one of the futures that didn't happen, of course, because PCs and the web happened instead, but you can bet I spent a lot of time listening to people as late as the mid-2000s still talking about multimedia services (and there are those who argue this is what stiffed Symbian). But we do get a sneak-preview of the digital future that Serious People wanted us to have, every time we have to ring the call centre. In many ways, call centres are the Anti-Web.
In Britain, starting in the 1990s, they were also part of the package of urban regeneration in the North. Along with your iconic eurobox apartments and AutoCAD-shaped arts centre, yup, you could expect to find a couple of gigantic decorated sheds full of striplighting and the precariat. Hey, he's like a stocky, Yorkshire Owen Hatherley. After all, it was fairly widely accepted that even if you pressed the button marked Arts and the money rolled in, there was a limit to the supply of yuppies and there had to be some jobs in there as well.
You would be amazed at the degree of boosterism certain Yorkshire councils developed on this score, although you didn't need top futurist Popcorn Whatsname to work out that booming submarine cable capacity would pretty quickly make offshoring an option. Still, if Bradford didn't make half-arsed attempts to jump on every bandwagon going, leaving it cluttered with vaguely Sicilian failed boondoggles, it wouldn't be Bradford.
Anyway, I think I've made a case that this is an institution whose history has been pathological right from the start. It embodies a fantasy of managing a service industry in the way the US automakers were doing at the same time - and failing, catastrophically.
In the Reaganite 80s, after the Bell System was broken up, someone realised that it would be possible to get rid of the union rules if they could re-define the site as something else. Not only could they change the rules, but they could move the site physically to a right-to-work state or even outside the USA. This is, it turns out, the origin of the phrase "call centre".
In the UK, of course, call centres proliferated in parallel with utility privatisation and financial deregulation. A major element in the business case for privatisation was getting rid of all those electricity showrooms and BT local offices and centralising customer service functions into `all centres. At the same time, of course, privatisation created the demand for customer service in that it was suddenly possible to change provider and therefore to generate a shit-load of admin. Banks were keen to get rid of their branches and to serve the hugely expanding credit card market. At another level, IT helpdesks made their appearance.
On the other hand, hard though it is to imagine it now, there was a broader vision of technology that expected it all to be provided centrally - in the cloud, if you will - down phone lines controlled by your favourite telco, or by the French Government, or perhaps Rupert Murdoch. This is one of the futures that didn't happen, of course, because PCs and the web happened instead, but you can bet I spent a lot of time listening to people as late as the mid-2000s still talking about multimedia services (and there are those who argue this is what stiffed Symbian). But we do get a sneak-preview of the digital future that Serious People wanted us to have, every time we have to ring the call centre. In many ways, call centres are the Anti-Web.
In Britain, starting in the 1990s, they were also part of the package of urban regeneration in the North. Along with your iconic eurobox apartments and AutoCAD-shaped arts centre, yup, you could expect to find a couple of gigantic decorated sheds full of striplighting and the precariat. Hey, he's like a stocky, Yorkshire Owen Hatherley. After all, it was fairly widely accepted that even if you pressed the button marked Arts and the money rolled in, there was a limit to the supply of yuppies and there had to be some jobs in there as well.
You would be amazed at the degree of boosterism certain Yorkshire councils developed on this score, although you didn't need top futurist Popcorn Whatsname to work out that booming submarine cable capacity would pretty quickly make offshoring an option. Still, if Bradford didn't make half-arsed attempts to jump on every bandwagon going, leaving it cluttered with vaguely Sicilian failed boondoggles, it wouldn't be Bradford.
Anyway, I think I've made a case that this is an institution whose history has been pathological right from the start. It embodies a fantasy of managing a service industry in the way the US automakers were doing at the same time - and failing, catastrophically.
The politics of call centres, part one
What is it that makes call centres so uniquely awful as social institutions? This is something I've often touched on at Telco 2.0, and also something that's been unusually salient in my life recently - I moved house, and therefore had to interact with getting on for a dozen of the things, several repeatedly. (Vodafone and Thames Water were the best, npower and Virgin Media the worst.) But this isn't just going to be a consumer whine. In an economy that is over 70% services, the combination of service design, technology, and social relations that makes these things so awful is something we need to understand.
For example, why does E.ON (the electricity company, a branch of the German utility Rhein-Westfälische Elektrizitätswerke) want you to tell their IVR what class you are before they do anything else? This may sound paranoid, but when I called them, the first question I had to answer was whether I owned my home or was a tenant. What on earth did they want to know that for?
Call centres provide a horrible experience to the user. They are famously awful workplaces. And they are also hideously inefficient - some sites experience levels of failure demand, that is to say calls generated due to a prior failure to serve, over 50% of the total inbound calls. Manufacturing industry has long recognised that rework is the greatest enemy of productivity, taking up disproportionate amounts of time and resources and inevitably never quite fixing the problems.
So why are they so awful? Well, I'll get to that in the next post. Before we can answer that, we need to think about how they are so awful. I've made a list of anti-patterns - common or standard practices that embody error - that make me angry.
Our first anti-pattern is queueing. Call centres essentially all work on the basis of oversubscription and queueing. On the assumption that some percentage of calls will go away, they save on staff by queueing calls. This is not the only way to deal with peaks in demand, though - for example, rather than holding calls, there is no good technical reason why you couldn't instead have a call-back architecture, scheduling a call back sometime in the future.
Waiting on hold is interesting because it represents an imposition on the user - because telephony is a hot medium in McLuhan's terminology, your attention is demanded while you sit pointlessly in the queue. In essence, you're providing unpaid labour. Worse, companies are always tempted to impose on you while you wait - playing music on hold (does anybody actually like this?), or worse, nagging you about using the web site. We will see later on that this is especially pointless and stupid.
And the existence of the queue is important in the social relations of the workplace. If there are people queueing, it is obviously essential to get to them as soon as possible, which means there is a permanent pressure to speed up the line. Many centres use the queue as an operational KPI. It is also quality-destroying, in that both workers and managers' attention is always focused on the next call and how to get off the current call in order to get after the queue.
A related issue is polling. That is to say, repeatedly checking on something, rather than being informed pro-actively when it changes. This is of course implicit in the queueing model. It represents a waste of time for everyone involved.
Repetition is one of the most annoying of the anti-patterns, and it is caused by statelessness. It is always assumed that this interaction has never happened before, will never happen again, and is purely atomised. They don't know what happened in the last call, or even earlier in the call if it has been transferred. As a result, you have to provide your mother's maiden name and your account number, again, and they have to retype it, again. The decontextualised nature of interaction with a call centre is one of the worst things about it.
Pretty much every phone system these days uses SIP internally, so there is no excuse for not setting a header with a unique identifier that could be used to look up data in all the systems involved, and indeed given out as a ticket number to the user in case they need to call again, or - why not - used to share the record of the call.
That point leads us to another very important one. Assymetric legibility characterises call centres, and it's dreadful. Within, management tries to maintain a panopticon glare at the staff. Without, the user faces an unmapped territory, in which the paths are deliberately obscure, and the details the centre holds on you are kept secret. Call centres know a lot about you, but won't say; their managers endlessly spy on the galley slaves; you're not allowed to know how the system works.
So no wonder we get failure demand, in which people keep coming back because it was so awful last time. A few companies get this, and use first-call resolution (the percentage of cases that are closed first time) as a KPI rather than call rates, but you'd be surprised. Obviously, first-call resolution has a whole string of social implications - it requires re-skilling of the workforce and devolution of authority to them. No wonder it's rare.
Now, while we were in the queue, the robot voice kept telling us to bugger off and try the Web site. But this is futile. Inappropriate automation and human/machine confusion bedevil call centres. If you could solve your problem by filling in a web form, you probably would have done. The fact you're in the queue is evidence that your request is complicated, that something has gone wrong, or generally that human intervention is required.
However, exactly this flexibility and devolution of authority is what call centres try to design out of their processes and impose on their employees. The product is not valued, therefore it is awful. The job is not valued by the employer, and therefore, it is awful. And, I would add, it is not valued by society at large and therefore, nobody cares.
So, there's the how. Now for the why.
For example, why does E.ON (the electricity company, a branch of the German utility Rhein-Westfälische Elektrizitätswerke) want you to tell their IVR what class you are before they do anything else? This may sound paranoid, but when I called them, the first question I had to answer was whether I owned my home or was a tenant. What on earth did they want to know that for?
Call centres provide a horrible experience to the user. They are famously awful workplaces. And they are also hideously inefficient - some sites experience levels of failure demand, that is to say calls generated due to a prior failure to serve, over 50% of the total inbound calls. Manufacturing industry has long recognised that rework is the greatest enemy of productivity, taking up disproportionate amounts of time and resources and inevitably never quite fixing the problems.
So why are they so awful? Well, I'll get to that in the next post. Before we can answer that, we need to think about how they are so awful. I've made a list of anti-patterns - common or standard practices that embody error - that make me angry.
Our first anti-pattern is queueing. Call centres essentially all work on the basis of oversubscription and queueing. On the assumption that some percentage of calls will go away, they save on staff by queueing calls. This is not the only way to deal with peaks in demand, though - for example, rather than holding calls, there is no good technical reason why you couldn't instead have a call-back architecture, scheduling a call back sometime in the future.
Waiting on hold is interesting because it represents an imposition on the user - because telephony is a hot medium in McLuhan's terminology, your attention is demanded while you sit pointlessly in the queue. In essence, you're providing unpaid labour. Worse, companies are always tempted to impose on you while you wait - playing music on hold (does anybody actually like this?), or worse, nagging you about using the web site. We will see later on that this is especially pointless and stupid.
And the existence of the queue is important in the social relations of the workplace. If there are people queueing, it is obviously essential to get to them as soon as possible, which means there is a permanent pressure to speed up the line. Many centres use the queue as an operational KPI. It is also quality-destroying, in that both workers and managers' attention is always focused on the next call and how to get off the current call in order to get after the queue.
A related issue is polling. That is to say, repeatedly checking on something, rather than being informed pro-actively when it changes. This is of course implicit in the queueing model. It represents a waste of time for everyone involved.
Repetition is one of the most annoying of the anti-patterns, and it is caused by statelessness. It is always assumed that this interaction has never happened before, will never happen again, and is purely atomised. They don't know what happened in the last call, or even earlier in the call if it has been transferred. As a result, you have to provide your mother's maiden name and your account number, again, and they have to retype it, again. The decontextualised nature of interaction with a call centre is one of the worst things about it.
Pretty much every phone system these days uses SIP internally, so there is no excuse for not setting a header with a unique identifier that could be used to look up data in all the systems involved, and indeed given out as a ticket number to the user in case they need to call again, or - why not - used to share the record of the call.
That point leads us to another very important one. Assymetric legibility characterises call centres, and it's dreadful. Within, management tries to maintain a panopticon glare at the staff. Without, the user faces an unmapped territory, in which the paths are deliberately obscure, and the details the centre holds on you are kept secret. Call centres know a lot about you, but won't say; their managers endlessly spy on the galley slaves; you're not allowed to know how the system works.
So no wonder we get failure demand, in which people keep coming back because it was so awful last time. A few companies get this, and use first-call resolution (the percentage of cases that are closed first time) as a KPI rather than call rates, but you'd be surprised. Obviously, first-call resolution has a whole string of social implications - it requires re-skilling of the workforce and devolution of authority to them. No wonder it's rare.
Now, while we were in the queue, the robot voice kept telling us to bugger off and try the Web site. But this is futile. Inappropriate automation and human/machine confusion bedevil call centres. If you could solve your problem by filling in a web form, you probably would have done. The fact you're in the queue is evidence that your request is complicated, that something has gone wrong, or generally that human intervention is required.
However, exactly this flexibility and devolution of authority is what call centres try to design out of their processes and impose on their employees. The product is not valued, therefore it is awful. The job is not valued by the employer, and therefore, it is awful. And, I would add, it is not valued by society at large and therefore, nobody cares.
So, there's the how. Now for the why.
Sunday, January 15, 2012
lazyweb: old budget forecasts
Dear Lazyweb, has anyone seen a data series showing the forecast for the UK government budget? Or will I have to download all the Treasury statements and re-chew it?
links...
Quick-hit update to the Baluchistan/US/Iran post; Daniel Drezner has a crack at rounding up the news and comes pretty close to arguing that the Americans are trying to stop the Israelis getting them into a war with Iran. Akbar Ahmed argues, in a must-read, that things in Baluchistan have been getting much worse lately and that this is very bad news for Pakistan, and it's all the government's fault. And US-Israel anti-missile live fire exercise gets called off.
A quick look back to the riots
Reading through tehgrauniad's riots deep-dive, the impression that I get is that the whole "riots as an insurgency" idea wasn't that far off. I've been indisciplined in that I took notes but didn't keep links (a problem with paying for and reading the actual newspaper), so you'll have to trust me on this. Obviously, blaming the whole thing on "criminality" is about as useful as blaming rain on "water falling from the sky".
The first common factor that struck me was that pretty much everyone they interviewed had a grudge against the police. Not in any broad theoretical sense, but a grudge - a specific and personal memory of perceived injustice and especially incivility, cherished over time. Now, it's in the nature of policing as a public service that nobody enjoys it. If you're interacting with policemen on duty, it's either because they suspect you of being a criminal, or because something bad has happened to you. Generally, everybody would quite like to minimise their lifetime consumption of policing.
There is something that motivates people to put up with it, though, and that something is legitimacy.
The second common factor was the attitude towards property. Quite a lot of the people the Guardian spoke to reported looting goods from shops, and then giving them away, or witnessing others doing so. Stealing goods is one thing, but immediately giving them away is rather different and very much a political act. So much so that there is a word for it (and I'm not the only one to notice this).
Of course, police legitimacy comes in a very large degree from their role as protectors of property, so this was a way of directly challenging their claim to provide security and to employ legitimate force.
Eyewitnesses often described a tactical, practical implementation of this - small groups of rioters harassing the police, in a sort of screening or covering operation, while many more looted or destroyed property. It's very interesting that this could all happen so quickly.
The first common factor that struck me was that pretty much everyone they interviewed had a grudge against the police. Not in any broad theoretical sense, but a grudge - a specific and personal memory of perceived injustice and especially incivility, cherished over time. Now, it's in the nature of policing as a public service that nobody enjoys it. If you're interacting with policemen on duty, it's either because they suspect you of being a criminal, or because something bad has happened to you. Generally, everybody would quite like to minimise their lifetime consumption of policing.
There is something that motivates people to put up with it, though, and that something is legitimacy.
The second common factor was the attitude towards property. Quite a lot of the people the Guardian spoke to reported looting goods from shops, and then giving them away, or witnessing others doing so. Stealing goods is one thing, but immediately giving them away is rather different and very much a political act. So much so that there is a word for it (and I'm not the only one to notice this).
Of course, police legitimacy comes in a very large degree from their role as protectors of property, so this was a way of directly challenging their claim to provide security and to employ legitimate force.
Eyewitnesses often described a tactical, practical implementation of this - small groups of rioters harassing the police, in a sort of screening or covering operation, while many more looted or destroyed property. It's very interesting that this could all happen so quickly.
404
Following up on the earlier post about IMSI catchers and shopping malls and Hezbollah, I wanted to link to a really excellent piece in Le Monde about mining call-detail records ("fadettes" in French, from "facture détaillée téléphonique"). The URI, here now leads to an annoyingly cutesy 404 page. However, the search function turns it up and even shows it as being free...but the link it returns doesn't work.
Jack Straw, still repellent after all these years
How much of a bastard was Jack Straw again? This much.
Scotland Yard has opened a criminal investigation into secret MI6 rendition operations that resulted in leading Libyan dissidents being abducted and flown to Tripoli where they were subsequently tortured in Muammar Gaddafi's prisons....The year after the joint UK-Libyan operations were mounted, Straw told MPs they must disbelieve allegations of UK involvement in rendition "unless we all start to believe in conspiracy theories and that the officials are lying, that I am lying, that behind this there is some kind of secret state which is in league with some dark forces in the United States".
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