Here is an excellent article by Darren Hardy about how to turn the business down-turn in December into a success-generating engine.
Belgian Labor Laws Must be Different…
…to be able to write an article like this. I would not dare to do that in this country.
System Uptime through Hurricane Sandy
Our company is serving a large Eastern U.S. state with an Internet-based system that needs to be up 24/7. Some 40,000 childcare providers and 200,000 children in care statewide depend on this system for attendance tracking and payments for care provided. Our datacenter for the system is located in downtown Jersey City, right across the Hudson with a spectacular view of the Manhattan skyline. Our partner for the datacenter is IBM through their subcontractor QTS.
When Hurricane Sandy loomed on Sunday, we had decisions to make. We have a failover site in Atlanta that we can switch to in an emergency at any time. This failover is constantly kept up to date for this purpose. We decided to ride out the storm, looming as it was.
QTS, in preparation to support their servers and related infrastructure through the storm, stocked up on gasoline for generators, food and water for staff, and communicated their plans regularly to all its customers, including us. On Monday night around 9:00 pm, the datacenter lost utility power and switched to generators. Our system remained unaffected. QTS updated us regularly about the current status, including when they obtained a special permission from the local authorities to allow a fuel truck to drive into downtown to refill tanks after about a day of running on generators. On Wednesday morning around 10:00am, after about 36 hours of operation on backup generators, utility power was restored to downtown Jersey City and we were switched back to utility power without a hitch.
We chose well when we decided on IBM and QTS to serve us with data center capability. We were kept informed before and during the weather catastrophe on the east coast and metropolitan New York and New Jersey. Our system stayed up through the worst hurricane on the east coast on record, with not a second of downtime, with the datacenter right in the eye of the storm. We didn’t even need to switch to failover which was available to us the entire time. This system has now withstood the full attack of two severe hurricanes within the last 15 months of operations and has experienced zero downtime.
Lessons learned:
- It is beneficial to be a bi-coastal company. While we could not count on our support center staff in New York to come to work to answer the phones during the storm, our staff in California was on standby to answer calls and make critical decisions on a 24/7 system.
- IBM and QTS performed flawlessly. Again, we chose our partners well.
- Having a failover site geographically removed from the primary site has a very calming effect on the nerves of those of us who are responsible to keep a 24/7 system running.
Thanks to our partners for their flawless work, to our staff members for their vigilance through a few tough nights and to our customers for their patience and trust while we weathered the storm.
It is an honor to serve you all.
Using Social Media and Facebook Changes
When Facebook changed its look and feel from tabs to the new “timeline” look, landing pages for companies no longer worked they way they were designed. See this article for more detail.
Before the change, companies could design a crafty landing page and all users went to that first. Now – that is gone.
Of course, social media is designed to promote active interaction between people. Now Coca Cola has to write something meaningful and fresh every day to be recognized as a contributor. No longer can a brand hire a consulting firm to design a flashy landing page one time and be done with it. Somebody has to keep things updated constantly.
That means work.
Unfriend, Unfollow, Unlike – Oh No!
Has this ever happened to you? You proudly look at your Facebook friend count on your profile: 72 (I know I don’t have a lot of friends on Facebook, but that’s another subject altogether). Then, the next morning, you check and it’s 71. Somebody unfriended you! Your immediate reaction is to take it personally.
Of course, in the “old world” that didn’t happen. You didn’t notice it when Joe stopped calling you, at least not right away, and a year later you’d wonder whatever happened to Joe, you haven’t seen him for a while. Joe could just fade away without an immediate alert.
But when a friend on Facebook unfriends you, and you have a habit of looking at your count, it’s right there. If you are anything like I am, you don’t know who left. All you know is SOMEBODY did. You’d have to keep a spreadsheet on the side to monitor. If you have a small friend count like I do, that’s not too hard.
I think it’s important that we don’t take it personally, and I have resorted to not checking in the first place. I actually didn’t know my friend count of 72 until I wrote this article and I wanted to use the real number. If it was 73 yesterday, I wouldn’t know it, and that’s just fine with me.
There is more than Facebook, though. We have followers on Twitter (even though I still can’t quite figure out Twitter and its real purpose in life, and that too is another subject altogether), and I just found this article that shows that Twitter has bug that disconnects followers occasionally for no apparent reason. Relax. It’s not about counting.
Here are my own rules:
Facebook – I try to only friend people I actually know and have some personal relationship with. I keep it personal there.
Twitter – I follow a very few number of folks I have come across and respect, and I am sure that list will grow over time. I check Twitter for inspiration by my gurus. And it really does work for that for me. Pretty much nobody follows me. But I only tweat when I publish blog entries. I do have direct blog subscribers however, outside of Twitter.
LinkedIn – This is huge. You have to be on Linkedin if you are serious about your work, your career and your future. Resumes are going away. LinkedIn keeps you on the pulse of what’s going on in your industry. I invite connections only when I really know the person in the real world, and very occasionally when I SHOULD KNOW the person but don’t yet.
Pinterest – Hmm, if you are a woman between 18 and 27, you’d better be there. The rest of us, I am not sure about yet. I am still figuring this one out.
Death of the Cold Call – or Warm Call
Sales gurus tell us that cold calls no longer work. Check out this article by Gitomer that has many great points about the subject, particularly if you are still making cold calls, or if you work for somebody who is making you.
I was lucky that I have never been in a position where I needed to make cold calls. Some of our staff call me “a great sales person” but that’s not because I “do good phone.” I don’t, and I know it. It’s because I love what I do and I am not afraid of letting it show.
But I do live in today’s society and I need to make phone calls. So let’s talk about the “warm call” for a minute. I just made that word up. A warm call is when I need to talk to somebody I know, for a reason that’s both important to me and to them. For instance, I want to talk to the director of an agency about a project we’re both working on. I have learned it’s almost useless to pick up the phone and call the number. It goes to some switchboard, voicemail, forwarding system, or – if I am lucky – a human assistant. I have to leave a message just about 100% of the time.
As a result, when I pick up the phone to make a warm call I am fully prepared to leave a voicemail, so prepared that I am even embarrassed when the person actually picks up – usually the cell phone, standing in line at Wal-Mart or just sitting down to dinner.
To make a call, I have learned to either request a time and receive an email invite, or issue an email invite, and schedule the call. Both parties are ready, prepared and the phone call occurs.
With warm calling being scheduled ahead of time, if you’re still cold calling, stop right now and figure out a better way.
Businesses Snooping in our Lives
An angry man waltzed into a Target store outside Minneapolis and waved a flyer in front of the manager:
“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”
The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.
On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”
The above is an excerpt of this full article that gives an example of how Target analyzes our shopping habits and can draw conclusions about our lives that are eerily accurate. In the above case, Target knew a high school girl was pregnant before her own father did.
In my early years as a computer programmer I spent much time analyzing how to predict things like prices of precious metals, the outcomes of horse races or other sports events, based on historical data and current events. I used neural network technologies to do that, but I got only lukewarm results since my Intel 486-33 processor, the most advanced you could buy in 1989, was simply not up to the job.
Today, with computers a thousand times more powerful than my trusty 486, predictive systems are becoming more and more feasible and commonplace.
And it’s not just Facebook that collects information about us, it’s Target too, and probably Starbucks, and Vons, and … you get the idea.
Is Head Start a Failure?
The American Thinker article of Feb 2, 2012, by Charles N.W. Keckler and Ryan L. Cole presents an interesting treatise of Head Start, the federal program designed some 50 years ago to mainly supply part-time care and education to three- to four-year-old children of impoverished parents.
The article calls Head Start and experiment, conceived by “liberals” and suggests that these liberals finally understand that Head Start is a failure.
In the 1980ies, it appeared clear that the High Scope approach, featuring the “Cognitively Orientated Curriculum,” was the path that Head Start should have taken. Experts state that this should have been mandated as a “Best Practice” approach.
More than 25 years have passed, and it looks like the leaders in Head Start have squandered them on ventures like the National Reporting System, and others. This created a massive bureaucracy around the Head Start program.
Head Start should have known that they needed to get the education component in order for a long time now.
Articles like this get written because research speaks to the failed leadership coming from the Head Start National Office.
Head Start, to date, has cost $170 billion over the years. This is contrasted in the referenced article to the $145 billion of the entire Apollo Moon Program by NASA. We know the Apollo program was expensive and this puts it into good perspective.
Our company serves the subsidized childcare space with systems for administration, time and attendance and fiscal control for children in childcare. For more than a dozen years now we have tried to adapt our systems, specifically designed for administration of government programs to take care of children, to meet the needs of the Head Start programs. Every attempt has eventually resulted in our throwing up our hands and giving up. There are a number of companies around this space in the nation, and none of “us” serve Head Start very well. There are different systems and software vendors, very similar to us, that serve childcare programs in Head Start exclusively, and there is little overlap between the two flavors.
We all know each other, in some cases we serve the same clients, yet we can’t make one system to serve both requirements. This shows how drastically different the Head Start reporting and eligibility requirements are and how bureaucratic the process has become. It just seems to be easier to have one system for general childcare and another for Head Start, even to the degree where some agencies serving both programs have to accept duplicate data entry.
If this were a small program, I’d be less concerned, but after spending $170 billion, I sure would like to know what the money has done for us – and I don’t.
Ohio Swipe Card System in the News
The childcare time and attendance system recently implemented in Ohio gets lots of news coverage. Here is an aricle in the Dayton Daily News. There are some comments included about the benefits of biometric authentication versus swipe cards:
Ohio JFS directors prefer a system that would read a child and parent’s fingerprint or palm print to prove a child is actually there, said Joel Potts with the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services Directors’ Association.
But the state nixed that idea because of cost concerns. There would also likely be concerns from parents over fingerprinting their children, Johnson said.
“The swipe card provides the same benefit at a much lower cost to taxpayers,” Johnson said.
I do not agree with Mr. Johnson that swipe cards provide the same benefit to taxpayers. A swipe card, if it is kept by the provider and not with the child, does not help prevent fraud in any way and produces no better results than the old paper attendance sheets.
Using the old process, parents were supposed to sign their children in and out daily on attendance sheets, listing the exact time, and leaving a signature. If this was not done every day, there was nothing in place to prevent a parent from signing attendance sheets for an entire month at the end of the month all at once. This means that even if a child was not present, the parent could still indicate otherwise by putting an entry on the attendance sheet, even weeks later. We have found that some auditors actually look at pen and ink consistency for clues as to whether parents filled out attendance sheets in batch, presumably in cahouts with the provider.
The problem with swipe cards, however, goes beyond just leaving them with the provider. Children often are not dropped off and picked up by the same person. Mom may drop off children in the morning, and dad pick them up in the evening. Sometimes babysitters routinely pick up children. Many parents carpool, which requires that they not only pick up each other’s children, but also the swipe cards. The handing of the swipe cards between various authorized adults causes them to get lost or forgotten. The “fix” for this is for the parent to perform “backswiping” the next day. Typically, the parent then selects a previous date and time that was skipped.
As soon as backswiping is allowed, the system no longer is really a time and attendance system, but just an electronic record keeper.
Biometric authentication of children or parents at least proves that the child or parent was present at a given location at a given time. If backdating is prevented, and if the system has provisions to deal with forgotten entries, a real record of who was present where and when is established.
While biometric scanning is more expensive than swipe cards, it is far lest costly than the fraud that occurs when providers can “make up” ficticious children and claim reimbursement for their care (that never happened).
The concern by parents that their children are “fingerprinted” is valid – but it becomes less and less severe. Fingerscanning is now routinely used in theme parks to get access to rides, health clubs use scanning for their patrons to check in and out, and school cafeterias use scanning as a way for children to pay for school lunches. As a matter of fact, in the case of payment for school lunches, the scanning actually serves as an equalizer, since children that receive free and reduced meals are no longer stigmatized by using a different method of payment than the children buying full-cost lunches.
In today’s world, biometrics are becoming pervasive and are no longer assoicated with criminality as is was in decades past.
Biometric scanning for childcare subsidy programs is far more effective at curbing fraud than swipe cards are.
Facebook Valuation
Facebook gets a lot of press right now about its expected $100 billion valuation. There are a reported 850 million users. 150 million of those are in the United States. The other 700 million are spread around the rest of the world. About half of all Facebook users log in daily. I am one of those.
I have never paid anything to Facebook or bought anything off Facebook. If Facebook were to charge for its services, I’d stop using it. I have never really noticed any ads on Facebook and I don’t remember ever clicking on one, but I am sure I probably did subconsciously at times.
If Facebook is worth $100 billion, that means every Facebook user is worth $117.64. I don’t think I am worth $117 to Facebook, but somebody thinks I am.
We now talk about the dotcom bubble that burst in March of 2000. When will we talk about the Facebook bubble?
Of course, the founders, the employees and the original investors will do just fine. I am not sure there is a huge difference between $20 billion or $1 billion. It’s a lot of money. Nice job.
Articles and comments about the growing importance of technology in the human services sector.