John Linton Yesterday morning I heard Ted Turner make an address on behalf of International Malaria day from the NYSE where he rang the closing bell before addressing the people there. I ‘met’ Ted Turner many, many years ago when I was in Atlanta and a friend and I were outside the old Fulton County Stadium on our way to a ball game and, he was clearly ‘taken’ with my companion (he has a life long reputation as a ‘womaniser’) and offered us seats in the Atlanta owner’s box which we gratefully accepted and became life long Braves fans ever since.
His address yesterday was his usual forthright and cogent set of statements encouraging his audience to pony up $US20.00 to send a mosquito net to an African family.
Towards the end he made reference to the problems being caused to the environment by people travelling to work pointing out that commuter travel (car, bus, train and air travel) was the single largest contributor to global warming and making the point that he had eliminated his own contribution to that problem by living in an ‘apartment’ on the top floor of the building he works in and therefore taking one flight of stairs to and from work.
I found it ironic that Exetel in Australia has been gradually developing the systems and processes to allow people to work from their homes should they choose to do so and, currently 15% of Exetel’s personnel actually work from home either full time or for large parts of it and, yet, this morning Annette and I are going to Sri Lanka to (among other things) finalise the lease for office premises that will, eventually, mean that our current four Columbo employee’s will move from working from home to commuting to an office.
In the longer term, late 2009 to early 2010 we will revert to the work from home methodology in Sri Lanka and, by that time, we will have increased the percentage of work from home Australian employees to close to 50% if we continue to meet the objectives we have set.
My hesitation in making the main telephone support function not a work from home process in Columbo, and it would be the same in Australia to a lesser degree, is that power outages and storms seem to affect the local ADSL residential services more acutely than they do in Australia. Therefore to make the long transfer of some support functions from Australia to Columbo it’s going to be necessary to take a very conservative approach which, by definition, has to include business grade data lines and duplicating the lines with a second carrier on a second infrastructure.
That isn’t possible to do on a ‘work from home’ scenario.
There is also the need for us to hire personnel on a continual basis and to train them in a ‘live’ situation. For the first four engineers we employed we did this by bringing them to Australia for 3 weeks initially and then 2 weeks a year or so later. Once the Columbo operation is set up we will do it using the central office facility.
I’m looking forward to going back to Sri Lanka and although the schedule is very busy it isn’t as mercilessly punishing 10 – 12 meetings a day we put ourselves through last time. Of course, just as were preparing to pack the news showed new attacks in Columbo and despite some misgivings we have decided to stay right in the centre of city to reduce the to and fro travel time. It's an inconvenient trip from Sydney to Columbo bec ause there are no connecting flights and it's necessary to break the journey with an overnight stay in Singapore and then getting up at 5 am the next morning to get the only flight to Columbo which leaves at 7 am in the morning. The alternativeis to have a 9 hour flight and then wait 7 hours at the airport - not something I'm prepared to do at this time of my life.
I had expected to be further advanced in settling all of the lease/legal/accounting/banking issues after we made so much progress on the initial trip in February but that has not proven to be the case. Hopefully we will be able to get past all of the current ‘road blocks’ over the next few days and get this important project back on schedule.