John Linton
Since we started offering communications services to end users in January 2004 one of the most impressive, to me, things we have done is to build an internal reporting system that enables our very scarce 'management' resources to track every aspect of
the technical and commercial aspects of the business on a second by second basis. The current system was, obviously, built step by step as we began to install infrastructure and to sign up customers.
As we added different services that required different types of infrastructure we obviously had to expand the engineering controls for
those services as well as building the commercial controls needed to manage a continually growing amount of payments and receipts. We also had to comply with more and more, and more and more intrusive, legislation.
I start my day, every day of the week reviewing most/all aspects of how our company is performing by looking at over 60 different aspects of our business displayed to me via graphs or other reports. What used to take me a few minutes in the 'old days' now takes me over 90 minutes and, as constantly amuses Annette, involves me writing many columns of numbers throughout the day to keep track of how the day develops - because while we've done a truly great job of implementing reports and controls from our routers, servers and financial data base, the company's growing complexity has defied the rationalisation of the simple reporting structures we started with.
All the information is available, and I and other people, are still able to 'micro-manage' every aspect of the business with the
availability of real time data but it now takes some time because much of the data now needs to be concatenated differently than previous iterations needed to be done.
So, yesterday morning we held the first brief meeting to start the process of completely re-designing our internal management systems
along completely different lines to the one we've built piece by piece over the past 4 years (and which had their genesis in the consulting work done for successive companies for many years before that).
Our aim is to produce a completely new way of looking at the 'internals' of Exetel from multiple viewpoints:
- Senior management
- Operational management
- Each different individual staff member
- Our customers (for 10 different services)
- Our major suppliers
I looked at the data base management systems from the big three software companies where the concept of relational database and user based query languages has been 'sold' to major corporations for at least three decades and decided that they didn’t suit the purposes we had in mind and certainly not the budgets we have in mind. We've survived/grown using mysql and very bright and amazingly competent programming and systems administration personnel for so long and
they've produced so many exceptionally good tools that my belief is that we can do more, and do it more quickly, ourselves than investing half a million dollars in new software and tripling our programming staff - maybe I'll be proved wrong.
So I have high hopes that we can develop the software that will link our many different services provided via an ever growing number of
different hardware and infrastructure implementations (this year alone we've added Quintum Voip switches, Iron Port spam filtering, Allot P2P management and, shortly, PeerApp P2P caching - as well as increasing our PoPs from one to four) but do it in a totally innovative way that will reduce the current 'report reading/decision making time' back tothe few minutes at the start of each day it used to be and remove the necessity for manually linking those reports.
The final goal is to give everyone who's associated with our business much better information (that's relevant to them) than we do
at the moment.