Thursday, December 22. 2011A Stranger World We Live InJohn Linton We had our best ever corporate 'December sales day' yesterday with 20 new corporate data link orders; it was actually the second best corporate sales day 'ever'. Residential service orders were also well above this day last December and the forecasts for the remaining, usually 'very quiet' remaining days of December, are surprisingly strong. The 'dog days' have, apparently, not yet arrived for Exetel. Our announcement yesterday of our partnership with AAPT to sell their business services via a greatly expanded sales and support operation in Sri Lanka 'triggered' a surprising number of xenophobic responses which I find very strange in the 'globally integrated' world of late 2011. Apparently it has escaped the uninformed people who wrote to me yesterday that Australians, and residents of all 'developed' countries gain enormous benefits from the globalisation of world commerce. To make this, bleedingly obvious point, the fact that Japan has to 'export' automotive manufacturing jobs to the USA to save money sums up the issues in today's commercial world: In today's commercial world many changes are required that would have been 'unthinkable' in past decades....who could have imagined that the richest country, by a country mile, of the 1980s would be viewed as a cheap labour source in the 2000s? I responded to several of the people who accused Exetel of being part of the "bankrupting of Australia by 'off shoring' Australian jobs" by sending them that article and also pointing out that Exetel was in the process of increasing the number of corporate sales and engineering positions in Australia by 30% over the next 2 - 3 months as a result of it. There are no such things as 'Australian jobs' unless they are jobs that physically need someone in Australia to do them - dig things out of the ground, grow things in the ground, build things over the ground or provide services to people and infrastructures located on the ground (hotels, office buildings, residences, roads, rail links, airports). Everything else becomes a matter of cost effectiveness and skill availability and investment returns....and the willingness of people to do the required work - something 'Australians' are very 'picky' about. If our partnership with AAPT is successful then we will double the number of personnel in Sri Lanka over the next 12 - 15 months to around 200 professional employees - something that will be very good for a country that struggles to emply its university graduates in meaningful positions at reasonable salaries. AAPT will increase the number of Australian personnel employed because of the work being done in Sri Lanka as will Exetel in Australia. Would these additional people have been hired if the Sri Lankan venture did not happen and was successful? No. So the money invested in the Sri Lankan operation produces new jobs in Australia - apart from the fact that it also allows Exetel to continue to exist and allows AAPT in Australia to consolidate its Australian operations doing the things it is good at - employing more Australians to build new telecommunications infrastructures and providing telecommunications services that allow Australian businesses to reduce their communications costs. It's all very basic and very simple and it surprises me that such issues are even raised by anyone today. I must find a way of communicating simple facts better than I have done to date - but then I am continually surprised that people who comment on such issues have so little understanding of what they attempt to criticise. 'Old' jobs will continue to disappear from Australia (and every other country in the 'developed world') as new technologies make it more efficient to do the work in other locations - you wouldn't want to buy a flat screen TV or mobile telephone hand set made in Australia would you? Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2011
Wednesday, December 21. 2011Exetel And AAPT....Sign Strategic Partnership AgreementJohn Linton We had a 'formal' meeting with AAPT yesterday at which we signed a partnership agreement under which Exetel will sell AAPT's small and mid range business services to Australian users via its Colombo based sales and support operations which will be vastly expanded to meet the agreed targets. The costs of doing this will be equally shared between the two companies and Exetel will increase the Colombo sales force to 100 sales consultants by December 2012 under these arrangements and, if the targets under this agreement are met, to 240 sales consultants by December 2013. Currently Exetel sells around 50 AAPT business services each month averaging around $700 per service and these numbers are planned to increase to around 400 new business services per month by December 2012. We have been developing a business sales force in Colombo for just on a year now with Australian sales personnel visiting Colombo and managing the people that were being transferred to the new operation from residential sales and for the last few months being directly hired in to it. We have been following a slightly adapted 'Australian model' in terms of initial training but we have, obviously not been able to use the highly successful mentoring program that has been such a success in Australia - but a long distance version of it. To date that has worked well with there being no discernible difference in the times taken by the individual sales trainees in Colombo to make the first ten sales they need to get 'off probation'. The key to the success of this partnership will be, as always, the selection of the correctly skilled and motivated personnel and then the quality of initial and then the ongoing training with the day to day management being the final determining requirement. Can we find 240 people of the right temperament and drive and, most importantly, can we find 25 high performing managers for those people? I don't know at this time. What I do know is that over the past year we have succeeded in meeting each of the targets we have set ourselves in building this operation from ground zero and throughout those early days we have anticipated and correctly dealt with the issues that have arisen. Whether we can continue do that - only time will tell. Clarissa, Clare and I will go to Colombo to run a 'formal' sales school for the new recruits (plus the 'old hands') in which we will introduce the new ongoing technical and sales training processes that we have begun to put in place. Steve and Annette will also be in Sri Lanka at that time and we will see if we can generate some media coverage of this new program - not because we need any publicity for the program itself but because we need to ensure we get some greater exposure to possible new employees - which we see as being a major issue to be addressed - the number of new employees we need to attract over the coming year is one of the key challenges. This is a major change for Exetel - both in market place direction and in working with a partner for the first time, in the full sense of that word, to enable us to develop the company much faster than we would be able to do using our own financial and personnel resources. However we have put a lot of thought in to this change and we have tested almost all of the assumptions it is based on. A brave new world in several respects. Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2011 Tuesday, December 20. 2011Bread And Circuses.....John Linton .....are those times about to be repeated in the current generation of the human species? Personally I blame the current parlous state of so many countries around the world on the internet and the ability for so many people to steal other people's property more easily as causing the current slide into oblivion of at least the 'western world'. I mentioned a day or so ago that I was surprised to be told that many candidates faked their qualifications in their resumes when applying for engineering positions at Exetel. As some who has read 'creative' resumes for several decades now I am aware of candidates desires to make their resumes look as good as possible and often exaggerate their achievements but I have never seen people out right lie about the degrees they have achieved - and to an extent where it is quite blatant. It implies that the morals and ethics standards of "university graduates" have fallen dramatically over the past few years and you have to ask yourself why that might be? The countries of Europe are plunging into the abyss of total financial collapse, at least that is the only conclusion you can reach after reading the financial media of the EU over the past few years. Why has this happened? Again the only conclusion you can reach, based on the column inches, is that 60 years of socialism has removed the desire for many Europeans to actually do any work at all to produce the money required to keep them alive in the luxury they have come to believe that they deserve. The dumber 'citizens' now believe that a 'pension' from the cradle to the grave is a perfectly reasonable way of living and the smarter believe that ripping off all and sundry in banking or other service industries with retirement by 30 is a perfectly acceptable contribution to the societies they live in. There is the remainder of responsible people building Mercedes and BMWs but even they are beginning to drift into making weaponry to allow the rest of the world's countries to more effectively kill each other in their own pursuit of wealth without work. Farmers are more than happy to be paid not to grow crops or produce dairy products and those that do bother any more are using cruelty unseen outside German concentration camps of the second world war to deliver protein in ways that would have caused their arrest and incarceration not long ago as cruel monsters. That's before many of these EU, and other, countries around the world, have turned the clocks back to the middle ages and allowed the crazier religions to again begin to dominate their societies with the insanest of 'Christian' cults in the US and the woman hating cults of the African deserts trying to turn France and the other countries that have 'welcomed them' back a thousand years in time. I am not sure which is worse - religion or socialism - in terms of destroying the reasonableness and productivity that allows people to live enjoyable lives but when, as in today's France, you have both then any country is totally screwed....and, as goes France, so goes mainland Europe (the UK has found its own, different, ways to ruin one of the most beautiful countries on the globe's surface). There's not even a chance of a good war to restore some sort of sanity any more which, apart from the inevitable loss of life, is regrettable because at least a good war forced people to remember that all individuals had to contribute to the society they lived in and what happens if they didn't. Thank goodness we have a mining industry that prevents most Australians from having to do any work to live in the luxury that is afforded them - but what happens when the Europeans and Americans have no money to buy Chinese exports? Never mind - Centrelink will continue to pay out....won't it?
Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2011 PS: while predictable it is still disappointing: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2011-12-19/att-tmobile-merger/52076342/1 Monday, December 19. 2011I Know It's Christmas.... But.....John Linton ....it certainly doesn't feel like any Christmas I have experienced in the past. Not the brightest day to start the last 'real' week of the commercial year with drizzle over the harbour and quite heavy cloud over the rest of the 'skyscape'.....it's not particularly warm either - even for this time of day. The EU financial press was equally gloomy and though I haven't read the Australian press this morning it's probably similar. The US media was as incomprehensible as usual, to me, with more space given to the Philippine floods than to financial maters - even the illegal migrant boat sinking off Indonesia got more space than the payroll tax credit extension. A sign of the time of year as far as the world's media is concerned. It's difficult among all the 'wind down' activities that are so evident around every aspect of Sydney at the moment to maintain a sensible focus on year end commercial life. Even the roads were semi empty when we went in to the city yesterday for a Japanese lunch at The Rocks - far less traffic than any 'ordinary' Sunday. I re-made a 'must do before the end of year' list earlier this morning and it was surprisingly short - either reflecting an unusual level of efficiency this year or a lack of desire to complete the usual amount of work......I suspect a bit of both. We have been doing a higher level of recruiting in Australia than we have done at any previous time in Exetel's brief 'life' - both for trainee sales personnel and for pre and post sales engineers. The number of applicants for engineering jobs is extraordinary high but the 'quality' of the applicants is far from the levels we are looking for which has been very disappointing to date and it is going to take much longer to fill those positions than we had planned. For the first time we are noticing that an increasing number of applicants are faking their qualifications rater than just faking their work experience attainments (a common practice of all types of applicants in Australia and probably most other countries). That is something I find quite strange and perhaps is a sign of today's society where theft, lies and pretences have infiltrated to an alarming degree in so many parts of today's 'life'. In any event we are finding it more difficult than we expected to recruit good engineers and slightly less difficult to recruit sales trainees in Australia than in the past. This is, undoubtedly, partly due to applying slightly higher standards than in the past but mostly due to a lower percentage of candidates possessing the 'right' attributes. Perhaps, for reasons I can't determine, Exetel has become a less attractive potential employer than it has been in the past....or alternatively perhaps their are more attractive potential employers than have previously been available right now? For whatever reason we need to re-look at our recruiting methods that have been so successful in the past - just one more example of the need to constantly change and improve everything a commercial company does. Apart from attempting to complete our recruiting, which it now seems we will not be able to do before the end of this coming week, there are only a few things that need to be done over the next few days....which is somewhat eerie as I don't recall experiencing this 'lack of pressure' in the past. Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2011 Sunday, December 18. 2011Management Training........John Linton .....something Exetel has never considered. Throughout my long commercial life I have had only one good manager and a large number of bad ones. I have worked for four multinationals in my first years in the industry (NCR, IBM, Univac and Fujitsu) from the age of 18 to 35 and I think that length and breadth of experience enabled me to judge fairly accurately the 'goodness' and 'badness' I experienced across the years. I think it would be fair to say that the universally awful quality of level 1, 2 and 3 management at those companies (and, of course in those days from the mid 1960s to the early 1980s) did not prevent any of them from 'prospering' in some senses but it's equally true that the awfulness of the management at Univac from level 1 to the CEO did cause that company to close down and the genuinely terrible management at Fujitsu, from MD to level 1 meant it wasted almost ten years before it began to make headway. If I look back at my level 1, 2 and 3 management years (sales management, branch management, national sales management) I could say I was an excellent manager judged in terms of consistency of results produced (uniformly excellent over almost two decades), personnel retention (close to 100% over the same period) and the fact that so many of the people I managed in previous companies applied to work with me again when I moved to a new company. Although I had attended both sales management and more general management courses at IBM (never at any other employer) I don't recall ever learning anything of any importance other than the 'plane crash object' type games that demonstrated to overly self confident people in their own judgments (such as me) that group decisions involving people summarily judged to be of inferior intellect invariably produced better decisions than the ones the brightest individual in the group could achieve....something I have never forgotten....a chastening experience. As our number of personnel move slowly, but inexorably, upwards and will pass 150 professional employees in the not too distant future how the various aspects of the company will be managed in the future is something that needs to be addressed. With almost no exceptions we have built Exetel by employing new or recent graduates and relying on the 'command economy style' of management common in start up companies of the founders/directors providing 'global' management of all aspects of the business. Over the years, as the first people we have hired grew in experience and knowledge they assumed the various management roles though the people management skills were restricted to what, as highly intelligent people, they learned as they went. Pretty much like multi-national companies have always done and still do - and as IBM continues to demonstrate - that works just fine. As a person who made a handsome living from running management schools up to MBA level back in the old days I have never actually changed my mind about how someone becomes a good manager which was crystalised for me by the only good manager I ever met when I was about to go to my first IBM management school. Jim Gallagher, the best manager I ever worked for or met, gave me this advice. "Have a good time and maybe there will be something new you will learn. Always remember that there are only three characteristics of being a good manager and they are all inherent traits and no-one can teach you them. Only pick people, after they have met the criteria you can check in their resume, who you like instantly and you are prepared to love like a brother (we had no girls in IBM sales in those days so no gender attraction could compromise the meaning ) - never compromise. Once you have employed someone always give them whatever they need from you to be successful in their current job and then also help them develop the abilities to be successful in their future career....everything else is irrelevant. I am not sure how you actually 'run a management school' to put over those points.....though I used to spin it out over four and a half days and charge mega money for the privilege of attending. Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2011 Saturday, December 17. 2011Sales Training.........John Linton .....something that we have never done at Exetel. It's the last weekend before Christmas and I have time to do my, limited, Christmas shopping instead of having to use the afternoon of Christmas Eve as has been my unvaried custom over the decades. I don't know whether that means I am more organised than in past years or whether I just have less to do as I become less relevant. Yesterday, as predicted by every similar day of every year that I can remember, was a very good sales day with a big 'surge' in corporate data orders and even residential ADSL being over 30% up on the previous Friday with above average results being achieved by most other services. There was even a significant increase in account payments from even the more dilatory of late paying business customers. So a very satisfactory 'last real' day before the Christmas holidays. We began our own Christmas preparations last night though we broke with 'tradition' this year and did not buy a 'real' Christmas tree - I am not sure whether that means anything in particular. Over the past few days I have put some time into developing a 90 minute sales presentation to be given to our 36 sales reps in Colombo in early January. I cn't be sure but I think it must be over 30 years since I did any sort of 'formal' sales training and that was in the year of my life when I did nothing else - the original "Exetel" was a consulting company (of two people) and our major service was sales and sales management training for IT companies. It was a lot of fun and very lucrative but I eventually gave it up because it was deeply unsatisfying to spend a week or so training sales people knowing that they would go back to being managed by less than stellar sales management (or training sales managers that would go back to being crushed by dumb 'senior sales management' who would never permit them to manage sales forces humanely and effectively. So I have got some quite disproportionate measures of pleasure from first sketching out and then adding the details of a ninety minute 'session' that aims to teach some rookie sales people everything they need to know and carry out to be more successful in selling than anyone else they will compete with (no matter how experienced they are, how knowledgeable they are or what company they work for) from day one of their 'selling career'. It is a useful intellectual challenge and, in these circumstances, something that we have to get exactly right to ensure that our new ventures in to corporate data services is as successful as we can make it from 'day one'. It is only the first part of a newly developed sales training program which, over the coming fifteen months, is aimed at training over 100, perhaps up to 200 new sales personnel. I haven't 'done anything different' for well over three years now as we have been forced to fight through the Telstra induced changes to the residential data and telephony marketplaces. Since we first planned to change to developing our business services I have only been able to 'spare' very little of my own time to helping to build the sales and support personnel on which we will depend so heavily from now onwards. It is refreshing, not quite the right word, to be able to spend some time being involved in the training and planning of something new and exciting rather than spending endless hours trying to figure out how we can reduce our costs to allow us to reduce our residential prices in marketplaces where 'price', if it is not at or below cost, is a "rip off" according to the majority of people who buy residential services. I am not complaining - that's the way it is - but it's a dispiriting way of spending three years. So I will finish preparing the backbone of the presentation over the next week or so and then plan the three follow up presentations before the end of January after I get some feed back from the first one. Exciting times. Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2011 Friday, December 16. 2011Where Did 2011 Go......John Linton ....as we reach the start of the last 'full' working day of 2011? In every past year I can remember the Christmas 'exodus' emptying of offices and factories round Australia (but presumably not mines) begins today with business people heading off on their annual holidays signallng the end of contract decision making with only the hardy few leaving their departure until the days up to next Friday. Residential orders begin to diminish as home buyers get on their planes and into their cars that will take them to destinations where they will not need to buy personal internet connections except to cancel them or put in churn orders for when they return. The large student 'population' of users will have cancelled their internet services by now (the honest ones) with the growing number of dishonest ones simply leaving their rental accommodation and allowing their unpaid internet and telephone service bills to cancel the services for them in the hope/expectation that they will not be chased for the money owing in their homes in some obscure Chinese town or anonymous Australian city suburb. Today is likely to be a very good day for business orders (it always has been in past years) as IT managers around the country begin to 'clear their desks' or take their last chance to get other people within their company who are going on holidays today to sign off on their proposals before it is too late. We have had a good December so far with more than a few of our service categories already well over their end of month targets - reflecting the understanding and reality that December is, effectively, almost a 'two week month'. We will continue to get orders next week from the people who have had to leave contract signing to the very last minute but it will now rapidly tail away....and so all that remains is to 'tidy up' all of the undone things next week and then take a few days to contemplate the future. We had our final, informal, board meeting of the year at a very nice Sydney restaurant (EST) yesterday. We discussed the key aspects of the company over one of the best lunches I have ever had in Australia matched with beautiful wine and finished off with superb Cognac - a once a year indulgence as a minor reward for working so hard for the previous twelve months with the only future reward being to do it all over again next year. We ratified the decision to enter in to the arrangements I mentioned yesterday and discussed how/if we would proceed with the other transaction we have been discussing over the previous month or so as well as some lesser issues....but mainly we just enjoyed the food and talked about non-business issues. So the Christmas party and the last board meeting of the year conclude 2011 and the remaining days of the year will be spent polishing up the plans for the first and second week of 2012. For the first time, all three Exetel directors will be in Colombo at the same time in early January to, as well as many other things, formally mark the commencement of our new venture there and to participate in the final education/training sessions with the two Australian managers of the program before the full program gets under way on January 16th. It will be a very different 'start of year' to the past eight and as equally exciting in it's way as January 1st 2004 when Exetel commenced offering ADSL residential services. So there will be no somnolent December/January for any of us this year....not that I can recall one being that way in any past year. Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2011 Thursday, December 15. 20112012 Financial Outlook........John Linton .......is not that good. The financial 'status' of the world's national economies is a complete mystery to the world's national leaders according to the financial sections of the world's media. According to Whine Swan and Ms Faustus - Australia has nothing to worry about because of the 'mining boom' which they apparently haven't noticed is dependent on the rest of the world's nations buying Chines exports. I have zero/less than zero knowledge of world financial scenarios but I assume that unemployment is a bell wether guide to any country's overall economy as is the ratio of 'public servant employment' to 'private sector' employment. I tend to read the EU and US financial media more than I do the Australian financial media as it is less hysterical and appears to be much better informed and this particular piece of statistical reporting caught my eye earlier this morning: and appeared to be provide a sensible view about the will there/wont there be a recession versus a recovery in 2012....a recession is likely....as did this: http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-business/greek-pm-warns-economy-to-shrink-20111215-1ovj5.html I have experienced two recessions in my time in Australia and both were extremely unpleasant for a large percentage of Australians although not for me personally - in fact the second one enabled us to buy the house we still live in almost 20 years later for "half price" - at least less than 60% of its high point asking price - so I do understand that recessions are not necessarily bad for everyone. Perhaps the dummies in the ALP are right - and we will dig out of the ground our protection from recessions in EU countries, the UK and the US? It's completely beyond my non-existent knowledge to comprehend what will happen in Australia's economies over the coming year. I did sell all of our shares back in February because my untutored view was that it was all bad news in financial terms and that financial decision 'saved' me 20% of the value of our shares at that time. It was therefore not without some trepidation yesterday that we shook hands on a deal to quasi JV a significantly increased investment in Sri Lanka in terms of additional employees and the associated 'floor space and ancillary costs' yesterday on the basis that now is the right time to rapidly grow our capabilities to sell and support small and medium business services around Australia. This is a very different decision for Exetel as we have always guarded our 'independence' very jealously so that we always had total control of our own future. This has not always been a good thing but it has been the way we have chosen to operate the company from day one. We would expect both parties to sign the formal agreement before Christmas once the two remaining, very minor, issues are resolved and begin the quasi JV program in mid January. We still have another major decision to make to complete our planning for the next six months but that is looking increasingly harder to bring to a positive resolution.....though that shouldn't be the case. Although I still retain vestiges of my reckless 'business youth' I am far more conservative these days and I have too many reservations to proceed as it currently stands - although I realise my concerns are almost certainly groundless. So it might only be one out of two rather than two out of three - but it still "ain't bad".......as the quote on the front of our web site reminds us - "you can't eat money". Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2011 Wednesday, December 14. 2011The Twelve Days Of Christmas Have Begun.....John Linton .....or have they? As yesterday was December 13th perhaps the 12 days of Christmas started then ending on Christmas Day? Long ago (and when only an austere encyclopaedia were available as a reference) I, and a number of other sub teens at an English boarding prep school spent some time as the weather got progressively more Arctic and the Christmas holidays drew ever nearer trying to determine when the 12 days actually started. We failed miserably in our clumsy 'research' and eventually asked the vicar at the local Anglican church after, compulsory, Sunday church attendance one Sunday. He told us that the ancient song had nothing to do with Christmas or any particular time frame but was written by Roman Catholic catechists in the 1600s as a way of reminding young RC children of the major tenets of their faith during times when to be a Catholic was a punishable offence and nothing could be written down. I have been reminded of this arcane piece of knowledge/folk lore several times lately when different Exetel personnel have quite seriously told me when questioned about some strange action that "that's the way we've always done it". As one of Exetel's 'founders' the one thing I know about our business is that it has constantly changed since our 'first day' yet I now hear this silliness many times a month. Not only is it silly it's really scary to think we now have people who are not aware of the need for constant improvement (change) in every aspect of a telecommunications business and their need to be part of initiating that, real, change by always looking for things to improve - of course not changing things for the sake of it. Believing that there is some immutable way/process of doing anything in our business is as silly as a bunch of 11 year old English schoolboys trying to find out the period described in a 400 year old folk song when it had been written as a memory aid for a forbidden 'religion' with no relationship to time/dates/geese/hens/partridges/milk maids/etc whatsoever. How does anyone 'manage' people in ways that totally promote sensible change when any commercial organisation has grown beyond 20 or 30 people, all of whom constantly communicate with each other? How do you overcome the tendencies of people who seldom meet each other to accept as "gospel" what the last person who trained or managed them said?.....bearing in mind that what is the best/only way to do something one day will need to be varied as products/services/process inevitably change over time? It is becoming a major challenge for our company - particularly as our operations are split over two very different geographic and 'cultural' areas. Our industry has an overwhelming need for precision which is significantly complicated by dealing with several different suppliers whose systems and processes vary widely. Obviously not in the ways we are addressing these issues at the moment. So......among all the other things that take up all the time in any particular day we also need to change our management processes - fundamentally - over the coming years to move away from whatever we currently have in place to something completely different. What that may be is unclear to me and I don't think I have heard any useful suggestions 'internally' nor do any of my business acquaintances have much to offer when this subject has arisen. They, like me all those years ago, tend to see the problem as stupidly as looking for the actual period covered by the 12 days of Christmas song - i.e. we start from a totally wrong premise when trying to find a solution to a question...we don't realise that the question we are asking is complete nonsense. Something to ponder on during this "12 Day Christmas Season". PS: And talking of Christmas - is God alive and well in Geneva? Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2011
Tuesday, December 13. 2011Automation And SimplicityJohn Linton We are sorting through the various actions required by the various operating plan changes completed last week. If you create a business process and it runs well/faultlessly for many years it tends to come as a surprise to begin to notice that problems have begun to develop that never existed in the past. This, in a company that constantly monitors every aspect of its systems via our own and constant customer feed back, is even more surprising to me. Nevertheless it has become clear that things once taken for granted are not being done as faultlessly as they have been in the past. It's disappointing and also surprising given the automated nature of the overwhelming majority of Exetel's business processes. The issue, now that we are subjecting it to some ongoing scrutiny, appears to be that newer people within Exetel have been introducing more and more manual ad hockery in to previously fully automated systems to address changing needs. I have become so reliant on our automated reporting systems which I constantly update and change that I have not participated in ensuring all other parts of the company have continued to develop the systems and processes which they have 'inherited'. So, it's becoming apparent that we will need to do a more formal, and more complete, audit of our long established processes and recover the long established mantra of "every process must be fully automated - there is no such thing as semi-automated". It sounds simple enough to accomplish and I have always thought it was - but it seems that over time and with less than total attention it is not as simple for people who have not come from a background where total automation is simply the only way to do things. As few/none of our major suppliers (and none of our smaller suppliers) have fully automated systems it requires a lot of effort to make full automation 'happen' and it appears to be that difficulty that, as products and services change, has allowed an increasing amount of manual processes to infect the 'purity' of previous standards. I am not sure just what we need to do to recover the current situation but it is going to take some time and a different approach from many of our people. Having thought about it for not long enough it appears to me that it falls in to the same category as everything else in life that is 'inherited' - it is just taken for granted and no effort is put in to 'maintaining it' because it 'just is'. There can be no recognition that it' took a lot of time and effort by 'predecessors' to firstly realise it was necessary and then the efforts and time required to actually put it in place. How you go about engendering that thinking into 'newer' people is something that may be difficult to do. While it's part of an inevitable transition from one 'size' company to another it doesn't make it any easier to accomplish. Food for thought. Just what to do to recover the simplicity of our first five years and the people and processes that delivered those, in their minor way, exceptional results. Perhaps the huge difficulties of the past three successive years have contributed to those circumstances more than I have realised and it's now past time to return to our simple objectives and, more importantly, methods. Monday, December 12. 2011Service Quality Continues To Dominate.......John Linton
.....ISP Land in Australia....at least it dominates the ISP's chatter about themselves. Apart from the nonsense that is the TIO (which if you believed any word it published you would be lead to believe that 'service and services' provided by telecommunications companies is continually getting worse) most companies keep hyping all the efforts they are making to improve all aspects of the services and service they provide to their customers. Whether they are being forced to do this in a set of marketplaces in which there is almost no differentiation other than price or the user experience in solving problems is not for me to say...my view is there is no more ability to cut prices (other than cosmetically) so only service (as opposed to services) remains to promote a telecommunications offering. I downloaded this earlier this morning from an ad in the WSJ: http://c190499.r99.cf1.rackcdn.com/Aberdeen_Service_Revenue.pdf it's hardly Earth shattering or ground breaking in any way but it does provide a, somewhat simplistic, view of service as a product that needs to be combined with other products in the overall offering to increase customer retention (it can't play much of a part in customer acquisition). This is hardly 'news' but the fact that is being treated like that indicates something about today's service providers. Anecdotaly Telstra provides some of the worst service in Australia but continues to dominate every service sector in which it operates - so don't get too carried away with this concept......also take this with a grain or sack of salt or so: One of the issues that Exetel have been addressing for over four years now has been how to improve our, customer perceived, levels of service. It has been an impossibly difficult aspect of business to address given that any unreasonable customer defines service as meeting whatever unreasonable needs they may have at any given time and what even reasonable customers require on occasions. We recently changed our definition of support away from what it had been for our entire 'existence' - we only supported the actual service we provided (if we could successfully 'ping' the customer's modem then we had fulfilled our service obligations) to helping the customer fix their own set up problems and wait on the line to help them correct their configuration and/or set up mistakes. This goes far beyond what any service organisation is required to provide (fixing the customer's inadequaces or that of equipment the bought from another supplier)nand should not be required - but then meeting unreasonable customer's needs is how unreasonable customers define "service". The immediate result of making this change, unsurprisingly, is greater dissatisfaction with the service we provide with average call response times 'blowing out' from around 2 minutes to around 8 minutes. So the move to 'complete service' is currently a failure in those terms. How we address that issue is yet to be seen but we have achieved the main objective of the move whereby over 80% of all support calls (that do not require carrier intervention) are now 'fixed' on the first call and it seems likely that we can 'ratchet up' that percentage over the coming months....depending on being able to do a number of things which include some quite difficult ones like changing the ambitions of our support engineers and providing ongoing training in the ever growing array of hardware used by residential ADSL users these days. We need to be successful in these endeavours, not purely to improve what unreasonable residential customers perceive as 'adequate' service levels but to address the new type of user we expect to be dealing with in 2012. We already have a sizable percentage of our ADSL customers who use their service for business and we expect this to grow more rapidly over the coming three years. While a residential user who can't play his latest game because he has been fiddling with his router settings is a personal tragedy for him but a small business customer who can't use the internet because he/his wife/his children/his co worker(s) etc have "done something" to his set up is a lot more serious. Providing service to the small business sector of the market place is a real challenge to do well. If it also improves the residential user experience then that will be a bonus. Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2011
Sunday, December 11. 2011Email - Here To Stay.......John Linton .......for as long as Mr Hill's inspired concept of postage stamps has lasted......"texting"....I'm not so sure. I read this earlier this morning: and considered what I have seen over the last few years in terms of business internet usage. I exclude myself from this consideration because I don't think I know anyone who uses the telephone (fixed line or mobile) less than I do or uses email more. I do this because I prefer the 'audit trail' of email compared to the lack of a 'audit trail' with phone calls and I have got in to the habit of seldom turning my mobile on except when I want to make a call - which is rarely. So I found the article interesting in its dissection of reply patterns and just general timings. I have read two other articles recently on the 'demise' of email caused by social texting which were just garbage opinion pieces (as this article is largely restricted to being) with no possibility of ever acquiring the research to support the views expressed - how could you ever attempt to measure the comparative usage changes in email and text across any population sector? Obviously you can't do that in any meaningful way. So whether the desire for various sections of any population to 'text' (strange how a noun has morphed into an adjective or adverb in current usage again demonstrating the paucity of education in these barbaric times) various 'friends' constantly during the day and night has changed their business email usage is impossible to gauge - as the two correspondents are totally different it would seem highly unlikely....at least to me. Email serves an obvious and immediately useful purpose - communicating with other people in business immediately and easily. It's replacement of Australia Post is equally obvious and the changes in the speed of iterative correspondence cannot be underestimated. A telephone call cannot provide an adequate substitute and a written 'letter' cannot begin to be as efficient. Over the past 20 years (since OzEmail/Malcom Turnbull/Etc recognised the need to introduce the concept in to Australia) email has dominated the ways all business operate to a degree that is impossible to estimate. Just how would any business operate in Australia today without email? It certainly couldn't use SMS or 'texting'. Not since the four posts a day stage of the UK postal system has their been any reason for something like email to exist -it beggars the imagination that you could once exchange correspondence with someone via the early morning, 11 am, afternoon and evening post if you were in the same city/town which, in those days, would have taken care of most business dealing let alone personal correspondence. deleted. I have to confess that I have never actually sent an SMS and the few I have received I have simply deleted. I understand my peculiarities are totally irrelevant to the ongoing development of instant communications. What I do wonder is just how far SMS/its equivalents will develop from here into the medium term future. Will SMS last two or so centuries as postage did? Does SMS have any truly long standing usefulness other than conveying notice of being late for 'face to face' meetings? I now work with people who seem to receive a stream of, I assume purely personal, 'messages' in meetings, during lunch and when you are talking to them at their desk or in the street. Many of them consider it to be perfectly OK to not only read the messages but then reply to them while you are engaged in talking to them. I wonder how long their 'face to face' interlocuters will put up with this gross rudeness before they snatch the offending device and hurl it to the ground and then stamp on the pieces? Then again, perhaps everyone else in the world except for me has the mental capacity to 'converse' on two completely different subjects simultaneously. Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2011 Saturday, December 10. 2011End Of Year - Time For Contemplation - PerhapsJohn Linton We had the Exetel Christmas party last night for our Australian personnel which was at a new location within the casino (Bistro 80) as they have demolished the old section that contained our long term venue - the Mill Room. We followed the same format as in the past six years - a lot of high quality finger food (more than sufficient for even the most voracious eaters) and an open bar with high quality alcohol. The entertainment was a reprise of the tarot card fortune teller, the caricaturist and the up close 'magician ' who have been a 'hit' for a number of years plus a, very, short 'speech' on the main achievements of 2011 (few) and some insights in to the changes planned for 2012 (many). Two and a half hours of accelerated alcohol consumption before most people headed for the gambling floor to turn their gift chips into a small fortune - or not - as the case may be and others went to party on at some other locations. From the volume of general noise and laughter it was a very pleasant party. We also had a good sales day yesterday in most aspects of the corporate and business product sets though there are the first signs of the Christmas 'slow down' in residential land with Friday probably being a major company function day/night with many people concentrating on getting to and from their Christmas parties to bother much about ordering as many residential telecommunications services as they would normally do from Friday afternoon on into the night....certainly the dearth of residential orders so far today indicates a much higher rate of morning afteritis than is usual on a 'normal' Saturday morning. I feel slightly more like 'Christmas' with only trying to make the most of the remaining 'working' days that remain in December. http://www.abc.net.au/technology/articles/2011/12/09/3387365.htm There is now 'breathing space' to consider the key aspect of providing telecommunications services beyond 2013 - and of course that is what part the NBNCo will play in future business and residential services and depends on whether or not there still be a sort of Labor government beyond the next election?....which of course is impossible to predict. Looking at the 'roll out' plans from NBNCo, nothing much will happen over 2012 in terms of new service delivery and even in 2013 not much extra 'coverage' will be provided. In residential terms this makes absolutely no difference to what Exetel, or most other ISPs, will provide in terms of percentages of NBNCo services versus Telstra/their own DSLAM services. The issue now is - is it possible to put some sort of small business strategy in place in those areas where there is NBNCo coverage? We will spend some time over the balance of December and then most of Why business rather than residential? Because, really, at this time the 'need' for 100mbps fibre is simply not required by more than a handful of residential users (and that is wildly exaggerating the demand) and as there is no cost saving from replacing an ADSL service with fibre what demand there will be will be in places where no ADSL is available - and those are the most expensive markets to service - for all the obvious reasons. Business users in those areas will be a far more sensible 'market' to address because of their very different needs and the requirement to provide a real set of 'add on' services such as business telephone, fax, SMS, hardware and - above everything else - real support beyond a 'connection up' level. Assuming the NBNCo continues beyond the next federal election (and it is pretty difficult to run a 'wait and see' strategy for two years) then any telecommunications company has to have a sensible strategy to address a change from ADSL to fibre and that is not going to be based on providing residential services in the same nightmare scenario that now exists in supplying residential ADSL services - what sane person would ever contemplate doing that? So there is now some six weeks to try and work out, assuming it's possible, just what will happen if the Telstra monopoly is actually going to be replaced with another federal government monopoly and, if that is the case, what should a company of Exetel's size do in that scenario? I wouldn't want to pre-judge the results of some sensible thinking but I would be surprised if it involved providing residential services. Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2011 Friday, December 9. 2011Dog Day Weeks Will Now Replace Dog Day Afternoons......John Linton .....for the next month or so. We have one day to go to complete our revisions to this years business plan for the remaining six months of this financial year in terms of figures and targets and can then put the 'documentation' in place notifying the various people concerned about the changes that will effect them. It has been a different process this time and, from my viewpoint, much more frustrating as it has involved more people who, by definition, haven't had the 'starting point knowledge' to have made any sensible contributions and have slowed the overall processes resulting in a great deal of 'frustration'. We had two major decisions to make in terms of 2012 and have been unable to make either of them - one because we have not managed to get enough information from a third party and the other because we have not been brave enough to fnalise the decision. These are small matters in the general 'sweep' of business but they are very large to us - or more particularly to me personally. However, we will make the last minor changes to the overall objectives of Exetel in a series of meetings today and then move back to making as much as we can happen in these, dying, days of 2011 and seeing just what we managed to accomplish over the past twelve months which has seen so many changes in the telecommunications industry in Australia and particularly for our part of it. One of the things that I have noticed has changed the most is the attitudes of almost all the main suppliers of residential ADSL and voice telephony services to both the markets and the services that are offered to the different markets. I struggle to find the right words to describe this change - the closest I can get is 'a progressive lessening of interest'. Perhaps Telstra's relentless 'win back campaigns' and therefore the reactions of every other ADSL supplier to the residential market campaigns reduced profitability from ADSL so much that even the wealthiest of providers ended up not caring as much as they had in the past. Possibly more surprising than the changes in attitude, from the suppliers view point, has been the virtual abandonment of many suppliers in their pursuit of major profits from wire line telephone call charge profits.....not Telstra of course (though that also lessened over the year) but the offers of first VoIP and now massive reductions in PSTN charges ($10.00 a month retail for 'unlimited' local, national and calls to Optus mobiles from Optus is a stand out change of emphasis) - I guess that just indicates that VoIP has finally become the de facto cost standard for telephone calls and these newish PSTN prices are the belated reaction to the ongoing loss of telephone call revenue by the carriers (Telstra). Mind you the profits on wire line calls are still gigantic - at least for the carriers: http://www.smh.com.au/business/fees-ruling-puts-a-smile-on-telstras-dial-20111208-1olau.html Another noticeable change over the past year or so has been the abandonment of 'naked' ADSL by all but the very silly elements of the marketing/buying sections of the industry. A few years ago 'naked' ADSL (always a particularly stupid appellation) became trendy as really dumb people thought that they were somehow "not paying money to Telstra for a worthless PSTN line" by buying a 'naked' ADSL service. Of course, all they were doing was spending more money to cripple the necessary PSTN line that delivers the ADSL service and make it more difficult to change suppliers. They saved nothing but the suppliers were happy to do it because it made it harder for the customer to 'churn away' from them. One of the crazier marketing nonsenses I have ever seen - but then the buyer decisions made in the ADSL marketplaces are as crazy as those in any other set of marketplaces I suppose. So, we will have the Exetel Christmas party this evening which marks the 'formal' end to another year with only the final 'tallying up' to be done over the coming days - it's almost 2012. Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2011
Thursday, December 8. 2011Self Regulation - It Would Be A Farce........John Linton .....if it wasn't such a ridiculous concept that it moved beyond farce a long time ago. The TIO has always been a commercial tragedy - dreamed up by Telstra to serve its own interests (it was much cheaper than fixing its own support and provisioning problems) and blindly followed by Optus which meant that, between the two of them, they accounted for 95% of the complaints about telephone wire driven services. It was much cheaper for Telstra to pretend to 'self regulate' than fix its appallingly bad customer service problems and the TIO was, from the start, staffed by moronic dross from the unemployment queues whose knowledge of the simplicities, let alone the complexities, of the telephony industry could have been written on the back of half a bus ticket. So you read articles such as this: http://www.smh.com.au/business/telcos-should-hang-up-on-selfregulation-plan-accc-20111207-1oj6l.html and despair about the nannyism that has become so prevalent in Australian society, especially over the past four years. The key areas of problems mentioned in the article are, of course, not self regulated and never have been - "New standards for advertising, pricing information and spend-management tools". ACMA does all that 'litigation' based on their own lack of understanding of what telecommunications is all about and the labyrinthine ways of displaying such data that Telstra, closely followed by Optus have put in place over the past 20 years which has been slavishly copied by the vast majority of their wholesalers and then other very small 'independent' telecommunication providers. Does any of this need to be 'regulated' in the first place? Personally I can't see any reason at all.....unless Australian society is aiming at an East German Sovietisation of governmental control over every aspect of societal interaction.....and before you jump down my throat for expressing such an exaggerated view.....tell me what improvement ACMA has actually delivered over its existence and then tell me what it has cost the tax payer over that time? You can't do that can you?....and neither can I because the figures are impossible to find and people like you and me just accept that all governments are wasteful of our money and they all create sheltered workshops on the Federal payroll to provide the unemployable with somewhere to spend the days they want to go into the office to use the internet and telephone for their personal purposes. If a company (like Telstra) falsely advertises then 'self regulation' is not going to stop them doing that and ACMA, on its record to date, is not going to do anything effective either - what will happen is that people (with half a brain) will see the lies for what they are and not buy the products or services and the people (without half a brain) will be conned and not notice because they are stupid and that's what happens to the stupid in very aspect of life. If the government nannies want to protect the stupid from the inevitable results of their stupidities perhaps they should close all the betting shops and pubs so that these dummies won't spend their dole money on picking losing horses or station police at every hotel bar to stop the stupid from tipping too much alcohol down their throats. Perhaps the same nannies should raise the age of 'marriage' to 35 to stop the stupidities that arise when people without a skerrick of commonsense pledge their undying love to each other at 18 and then screw their own, any everyone around them, lives in to chaos? You get the point - where does nannyism actually stop once you try and protect the terminally stupid from the results of their own decisions? If any federal government really wanted to 'protect the Australian public from nasty commercial exploitation the would ban tobacco and alcohol and close all race courses and casinos. But no - why not 'regulate' the telecommunications industry - that's a really pernicious bunch of financial rapists and looters. I have a better idea. Abolish the War Department (it isn't a Department of Defence - we haven't had to defend anything since 1944 but we sure have made war on a lot of people who we never knew and posed no threat of any kind to us since then) thereby returning $1,500 in taxes every year to every human being in Australia and then progressively close all the money spending for no discernible result federal sinecures, such as ACMA, to return a further $1,500 to every human being in Australia. Then cut Federal politicians by 75%, abolish State government entirely and invest all this money in education, German and Japanese manufacturers to ensure that the population is well educated and can easily afford Mercedes, Porsches and Flat Screen TVs now that they have stopped pissing their money away on booze, gambling and smoking (we would also need 75% less hospitals and health care 'professionals' as a side bonus). Makes much more sense than telecommunications self regulation. Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2011 PS: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/labor-now-practises-what-greens-preach-20111207-1oj3m.html |
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