John Linton ......I got sick, truly devastatingly sick, from food poisoning last night. Having been blessed with a boarding school education (and therefore the food that accompanied it) for 12 years of my life during the 1950s and 1960s I have always been able to eat anything put in front of me without suffering any consequences irrespective of what nauseous mess the plate contained - and so it has been throughout my life from then on and on 9 previous visits to Sri Lanka I have eaten without a care in the world where everyone else I have met has regaled me with some horrific food derived sickness experiences they have endured. I won't revolt you with any details but it is an agonisingly painful experience not only hurting to a point where you don't think that you can bear the pain but it turns your brain to mush and delivers a headache of cataclysmic proportions. Enough of self pity but I have only just been able to get out of bed and am making some attempt at pulling myself together - for someone who has barely been unwell throughout their life it is a chastening experience.
We made a start on addressing some of the key issues relating to the Sri Lankan operation yesterday afternoon and sketched out the key areas that need to be looked at and actions put in to place improve every aspect of the operation in Colombo. As with all service organisations the issues almost all revolve around personnel and particularly their retention, knowledge acquisition and reward. One of the key aspects of knowledge acquisition has been addressed by the efforts of one of the Australian 'trainers' who has been working on the creation of a knowledge base for the training of new SL personnel and also for easy reference by Exetel customers. We have been building this almost since 'day one' of our existence but Martin has taken it way beyond what he 'inherited' when he was given the responsibility for delivering a truly workable system - the current results can be seen on the Exetel web site here:
http://exewiki.exetel.com.au/index.php?title=Main_Page
As it stands at the moment it contains over 1,000 commonly asked questions and their complete, and detailed, answers. One of the objectives is to increase the number from 1,000 to 2,000 plus over the coming year. In terms of knowledge acquisition each staff member is asked to do an 'exam' each month based on 60 questions selected by a random number generator from the 1,000 plus topics.The score they achieve over each month of the past year determines one aspect of the remuneration increase but also pinpoints areas of their knowledge that require improving by both the staff member and their supervisor.
All staff members are encouraged to add questions and topics to the wiki and from now on all Exetel's customers that wish to do so are also asked to submit suitable topics. As I mentioned yesterday we have endowed a professorship at SLIT to work on state of the art Artificial Intelligence system which, in part, will be trialled on the ExeWiki to make it even easier for customers to find the answers to almost every question they wish to ask.
That is one of the key aspects of the Sri Lankan operation that needs to have a lot more work done on it to fully integrate it with both the company's operating objectives as well as completely integrating it with our GURUs personnel data base performance management system. We have made a lot of progress over the past year and it is looking good for the coming twelve months.
PS: My youngest son sent me the following article earlier this morning.I wonder what difference this innovation by WOW will make to on line 'behaviour':
http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-technology/byebye-trolls-blizzard-forums-to-use-real-names-20100708-100vx.html
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