John Linton I would think, for all the obvious reasons, that the communications industry, in any country, would have the highest level of automated systems of any industry - simply because of the nature of its services and the need to diagnose and maintain those services - similar to those used to control electricity grids and atomic power stations only easier because the basic communications structure to monitor and maintain communications is inbuilt in to the end user service.
I'm sure that's the case.
What I'm equally sure about is that the internal and customer support systems that many of the carriers and other communications suppliers that Exetel deal with are certainly not "21st Century" and, from what I've become all too well aware of over the past 18 months, not even late 20th Century.
Exetel will 'finish' the implementation of the company wide/service wide/discipline wide automation of every aspect of operating a small communications company sometime towards the end of 2008. It will have have taken us almost 5 years of building systems from the ground up using open source software (Linux, MySQL) but it has resulted in this sort of comment from new users:
"I'm a recent Exetel convert, I ordered an ADSL2 INCPHONE C service back in February and have been using the service for almost a month now.
I am extremely happy to report that absolutely everything went smoothly with the provisioning of the service and I was blown away by the level of automation and the excellent communication throughout the process.
The forums, usage widgets and online reporting tools are outstanding if you take the time to read and use them properly.
All without having to speak to a human! "
http://forum.exetel.com.au/viewtopic.php?t=26438
I doubt that we could have achieved the level of automation that is now in place if we hadn't been prepared to take some pain, sometimes extreme pain, throughout the building process and didn't have extremely tough minded management and investors able and prepared to accept the cost of that pain - both personally and financially.
Our major remaining 'build' now is to complete the automation of the personnel management and task/process management system that will provide the overall reporting management of every aspect of Exetel based on the Director's agreed business plan that is then 'automatically broken down into the individual minute by minute objectives for each aspect of Exetel's operations and for the minute by minute monitoring of each person and supplier involved with delivering those objectives.
We have made a solid start to the 'final implementation' of this system and are planning to have Support fully functional by the end of this month with the other 9 'departments' fully implemented on a, roughly, monthly schedule before the end of 2008.
Effectively the only things to be done are to continue to build the data collectors that the system requires to 'feed' the display of data relating to the performance of an individual or the ongoing achievement of a task.
This is, of course, easy to do for data base 'elements' such as number of applications received for different product and service types.
It's also pretty easy to take data from Cisco and Foundry hardware as they have management interfaces designed to provide data to other monitoring programs.
It's slightly more difficult to do for, say, the Mitel PBX or the Cerberus help desk software where we have to take raw data from a third party product and system software that isn't designed for easy transposition.
It gets more difficult again to access our bank's reports to us (versus our reports to them) to get 'instantaneous' cash flow data.
....and, of course, there are some even more difficult data collectors than those.
However, at the end of the day they are simply programming challenges that will be overcome with some ingenuity and programming skills.
It's by no means certain that we will succeed in putting everything in place, 100%, by the end of this year but it looks as though it will be possible to get in the high 90 per cents of a complete implementation by then which will 'revolutionise' the levels of efficiency that a commercial enterprise can achieve.
Apart from the obvious advantages of having true 'exception reporting' for every required task within a relatively complex operation it has been designed to both enhance personnel development and management while 'slashing' personnel management time. As Exetel continues along the 'path' of personnel working remotely this is going to be a key 'pay back' for managing a diversely located work force that also has to work in tight integration in terms of their daily jobs with other diversely located personnel. (already we have people working in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Mosman, Canberra, NSW Central Coast, Perth and will be continuing that process as we move forward.
We will also make this software available to any other organisation that might want to use it on an Open Source basis once it's sufficiently complete to be useful and will continue to publish updates on what level of usefulness it's reached here:
http://whitepapers.exetel.com.au/mediawiki/index.php?title=GURUS_-_Ultimate_Personnel_Management
We would welcome other people's input in to how to further develop and improve the effectiveness of this system and we would especially appreciate an exchange of data collectors for different devices beyond the ones we will keep developing for ourselves.
Who knows - one day our suppliers may be able to actually do things as efficiently as their small wholesale customers do things?