Dennis McDonald's MANAGING TECHNOLOGY

A Project Manager’s Perspective on the Cost Impacts of the “Sequester”

2013-05-24T17:47:01Z

One of the realities of managing projects is that, the longer a project takes to complete, the more it usually costs. Because of this, the project manager usually estimates the impact of schedule changes on project costs so the money doesn’t run out before the project is finished. The smart project manager also incorporates a “change control” process so that the costs and risks associated with changing requirements and schedule can be effectively managed.

I thought about this when I received this email yesterday from a friend who works for the Federal government:

Friday, May 24 is a designated furlough day for [agency] employees. I will return to the office on Tuesday, May 28.

My friend’s agency is thinking about the direct cost savings made possible by reducing direct labor costs by a day a week. But what happens to ongoing projects that get delayed? Will they end up just taking more time to complete? For each day out cut from the workweek, won’t the project being worked on just get longer by one day?

Or, will schedule-induced cost increases eat up a significant portion of the furlough-associated savings hoped for by the sequester’s supporters because of downstream ripple effects of missing work days?

In some cases, based on my own project management experience, cutting a day out of the work week of key staff and managers might significantly increase total project costs. The reason has to do with the “ripple effects” that occur when a project managers and staff members are kept from making key decisions or from performing critical project activities that impact other people and other project tasks.

Here are some possible examples:

Failure to convene an important meeting or conference call due to the forced absence of key stakeholder results not just in a day’s delay but in a 2-week delay due to availability and travel schedules.
Contractors are involved in the project and their costs — and what they charge the government — are driven by schedule or level of effort.
Forced absence of a key player in a key task role delays completion of a “critical path” task with a resulting downstream ripple effect that impacts and delays other project tasks.
In order to meet an externally imposed milestone less qualified staff members have to be assigned to perform a task that cannot be delayed. Later on, work has to be re-done when quality measures are not met.

I’m not arguing about the wisdom or merits of the “sequester” as a way of controlling and reducing Federal government costs. That’s partly a political question. I am suggesting that failing to understand the impacts on total costs at the project level of the sequester leaves us vulnerable. Are these cost impacts undrstood? Or are we just “kicking the can down the road” again?

Related reading:

Copyright (c) 2013 by Dennis D. McDonald, Ph.D. Dennis is a Washington DC area consultant specializing in collaborative project management and new technology adoption. His clients have included the US Department of Veterans Affairs, the US Environmental Protection Agency, Jive Software, the National Library of Medicine, the National Academy of Engineering, Social Media Today and Oracle, and the World Bank Group. His experience includes government contract research, software and database product development, system integration and consolidation, and IT strategy consulting. Contact Dennis via email at ddmcd@yahoo.com or by phone at 703-402-7382.

Dennis McDonald's Weekly Top Ten

2013-05-24T12:14:20Z

For the seven day period ending Friday, May 24, 2013, the following were, in descending order, this web site’s most popular Managing Technology posts:

01	Cookies, Imrworldwide, and Nielsen Netratings: What’s the Connection?
02	Challenges Facing Recovery.gov and the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board
03	A Short Definition of “Strategic Planning”
04	What Are YOU Trying to Do with Mobile Technologies in the Enterprise?
05	Three Options for Self-Publishing: Scribd, Microsoft SkyDrive, and Google Drive
06	The EPA’s Mobile Web Site is Great (except for one thing)
07	Is Google’s Chrome Browser “Taking Over” Good or Bad?
08	A Framework for Transparency Program Planning and Assessment
09	Proposed Definition for “Expertise Management Systems”
10	Defining and Measuring Enterprise Collaboration

Copyright (c) 2013 by Dennis D. McDonald, Ph.D. Dennis is a Washington DC area consultant specializing in digital strategy, collaborative project management, and new technology adoption. His clients have included the US Department of Veterans Affairs, the US Environmental Protection Agency, Jive Software, the National Library of Medicine, the National Academy of Engineering, Social Media Today and Oracle, and the World Bank Group. Contact Dennis via email at ddmcd@yahoo.com or by phone at 703-402-7382.

Is Google's Chrome Browser "Taking Over" Good or Bad?

2013-05-23T12:45:33Z

By Dennis D. McDonald

Click or tap above image to download a .pdf of this article.In How Google plans to rule the computing world through Chrome Peter Toffel describes a scenario for how Google plans to “take over” desktop computing by running more and more services — some exclusive — through its popular Chrome browser. The scenario might make sense if you’ve been paying attention to the increasing integration of ALL Google products and services with the social network Google+ as its backbone.

Whether you view this as nefarious or not is complex. You’ve got tech celebrities like Jeff Jarvis and Mike Elgan crowing about going “all Google.” The recent Google I/O conference was a love fest where Google’s Larry Page pondered out loud about how he wished everyone in the tech business could just get along better. Google continues to be a hotbed of new and exciting product development news.

What could possibly go wrong as Google tries to go down an “everything for everybody” path that sounds, to me at least, suspiciously similar to what Microsoft has attempted with diminishing success?

I have mixed feelings. Google+ is my social network of choice. I use Google Drive every day for file creation, storage, and sharing. Gmail, though bloated and clunky, does allow me to manage multiple email accounts and regular promotional campaigns. Google Search, of course, is everywhere. Google+ for iOS is one of the finest apps I’ve seen on the iPhone.

Still, I have cut back on my use of Chrome on my office’s Windows desktop machine and have been shifting more to Safari. While I like how Chrome synchronizes across platforms — I often use it via my Ubuntu Linux machine and occasionally use Chrome on my iPhone as well — Windows Chrome has become sluggish and does not render pages as quickly or as accurately (including Google+) as Safari.

I’ve turned Google Now off on my iPhone. I wasn’t getting much use out of it, its trip recommendations were rarely accurate, and it was draining my battery. I’m also pulling back from relying so heavily on Google+ for photo management and photo sharing, given the availability of alternatives that provide better editing and tagging features. I used to use Picasa a lot but its superior features have not yet been totally integrated with Google+.

Perhaps the prospect of Chrome “taking over” will be viewed by some as a good thing; another poke in Microsoft’s eye, perhaps? Yet, this increasing integration of everything, including social and mobile, by Google is potentially putting Google in the driver’s seat for managing not only what used to be an “open” internet” but for hardware-specific delivery devices as well.

Some will view this as good. Look at all the positive feedback Google Now for Android has received. Others will see the same moves by Google as inevitably restricting customer choice.

While I love Google and its free services, I am concerned that, if I don’t buy into the entire Google ecosystem, including the increasing linkage of web services with Google managed software and hardware, I might lose the ability to use more innovative or better performing applications. We already see this with iOS applications being delivered with less functionality than their Android brethren.

I used to think, along with most pundits on Google’s Google+, that the reason for that was simply Apple’s notorious insistence on keeping things “under its own control.”

Now I’m not so sure that Apple is entirely to blame. If you are building a fleet of services tied together by a social front end, coupled with algorithmic prediction and search engines in the back end that track and process online behavior as the basis for suggesting services and transactions, you’ll obviously, it seems to me, seek to maximize the likelihood that everything works together. Controlling the hardware and software points where people interact would seem a logical and reasonable strategy.

Perhaps that is exactly what Google is doing. Microsoft was never able to accomplish this integration and may now be suffering because of its failure to do so. Apple has attempted integration but is limited to its own devices. Now we have Google, better positioned than anyone else to tie everything together.

It’s an awesome opportunity. But just in my own case I’m seeing cracks around the edge where I’m not convinced that I want all the parts to be controlled by one entity. I’ve seen how the lack of choice over just cable TV and internet service leads to lousy service at the local level. What if such problems are scaled up by several orders of magnitude?

Copyright (c) 2013 by Dennis D. McDonald, Ph.D. Dennis is a Washington DC area consultant specializing in digital strategy, collaborative project management, and new technology adoption. His clients have included the US Department of Veterans Affairs, the US Environmental Protection Agency, Jive Software, the National Library of Medicine, the National Academy of Engineering, Social Media Today and Oracle, and the World Bank Group. His experience includes the management of projects involving the conversion or migration of financial and transaction data associated with large and small systems. Contact Dennis via email at ddmcd@yahoo.com or by phone at 703-402-7382.

Whom Do You Trust to Augment YOUR Reality?

2013-05-16T17:51:51Z

By Dennis D. McDonald

Click or tap image to download a .pdf of this article.We voluntarily provide details of our lives and our relationships to the Cloud. In return we receive helpful suggestions about when and where to travel, where to eat, and what to see along the way. We are simultaneously “augmentors” and “augmentees.” For many this is a fair exchange.

I don’t always use the term “augmented reality” to describe what we get in return since I’m no longer sure what isn’t reality in our modern age.

I’m not just playing word games. Philosophically, everything we sense in our daily lives makes up the “reality” we face, regardless of whether this comes from direct contact or through an electronic medium of some kind.

Whatever comes in through our eyes or ears or sense of touch is part of a greater reality we must interact with. Sounds generated by the banging of a drum next door or a loudspeaker broadcasting a drum beat from 1943 may have little consequential difference. Their vibrations both travel through the air to our eardrums, we experience them, and we respond.

These are examples of the realities we experience every day. That we as humans can manage sensory input from so many sources is a significant evolutionary accomplishment. How else would we drive a car, ride a bicycle, or play guitar in zero gravity?

One of the things we learn is to pick and choose what we pay attention to:

As infants we pick out mother’s face from a sea of faces and reach out.
As children we learn not to stare directly at the sun.
As teenagers we learn to manipulate the complex controls of multi-ton vehicles while listening to the radio and chatting with friends.
As adults we learn how to navigate the complexities of home ownership, death, and taxes.

Along the way now we have technologies to help us think, decide, even remember. Increasingly we see technology attempting to help us in advance of need — planning a trip, selecting a restaurant, selecting a tune to play. The complex algorithms that evaluate our creditworthiness and track out of the ordinary credit card purchases are no longer esoteric but are coming to a phone or a tablet computer near you to help you survive — and hopefully enjoy — your daily grind.

One thing that’s happening is that sophisticated technology is not being limited to highly specialized vertical niches but is now being brought to “the masses.” An example is Apple’s Siri. That Apple had the guts to bring such an advanced technology to support the humdrum day-to-day transactions of millions of ordinary consumers was nothing short of audacious. Other advanced technologies continue to find their ways into the hands of ordinary people such as Google Glass.

All these technologies expand the scope of our work, our decision-making, and our relationships as more options and information are placed before our eyeballs or into our ears.

How do we as individuals manage these changes — these augmentations — of our respective realities? Are we evolving into two classes, haves and have-nots, with only the haves really possessing the wherewithal to take advantage of increasingly complex and feature-rich realities?

I like to believe that I can be in control, that I can manage the constant flow of data. I like to believe that I can influence the frequency with which I receive notices from my bank as well as how often Google Now tells me the details of the trip I’m about to take (or so it thinks).

I also know that, if something really important happens, I want to know about it now. But to be able to do that the system really needs to know how I define “important.” Yet, I’m not sure that I feel comfortable about sharing the intimate details of my preferences, my hopes, and my fears with the machine — especially if that machine might mistakenly reveal my private details to others or to some government agency “… just trying to catch crooks.”

As technology oriented as I am, I am beginning to have some doubts about where the technology is headed. Just as I thought in the early days of social media that the relationship categories of systems such as Facebook and LinkedIn were remarkably primitive, so I now feel that systems like Google Glass, Google Now, and Apple Siri are also primitive and prone to error.

On balance such systems provide useful information. They also make mistakes both of commission and omission. As we become more dependent on the assistance of such systems for our daily lives, we need to keep in mind the disclaimers displayed online with online maps and driving directions, that conditions may have changed from the time the map was generated.

How many people actually take this heartfelt recommendation by mapping system attorneys? I don’t know. But it also makes sense (even more sense, in my view) to be cautious about taking the advice of Google Now (or Apple Siri). Things change constantly. The traffic accident that just occurred might take a lot more time to make its way into crowdsourced warning systems and heads up route displays.

An important question is, of course, are we better off with these reality augmentation systems then without them? Right now I certainly believe we are. I also think skepticism and caution are warranted. Living in the reality of the world is a remarkably complex undertaking. How we behave, survive, and prosper are influenced both by major events — and by the beating of the wings of a single butterfly.

There’s no doubt in my mind the cloud-based services can help us deal with the major events, but I think we might have to wait a bit longer for the butterfly wings.

Copyright (c) 2013 by Dennis D. McDonald, Ph.D. Dennis is a Washington DC area consultant specializing in digital strategy, collaborative project management, and new technology adoption. His clients have included the US Department of Veterans Affairs, the US Environmental Protection Agency, Jive Software, the National Library of Medicine, the National Academy of Engineering, Social Media Today and Oracle, and the World Bank Group. His experience includes the management of projects involving the conversion or migration of financial and transaction data associated with large and small systems. Contact Dennis via email at ddmcd@yahoo.com or by phone at 703-402-7382.

Transparency Is Not An End In Itself

2013-05-13T19:08:13Z

By Dennis D. McDonald, Ph.D.

Click or tap image to download a .pdf of this article.Much is being made of opportunities that might be opened up by the

President’s recent executive order making open and machine readable the new default for government information. It’s not all about policy goals like transparency and public participation, it’s also about innovation and jobs. For example, on a recent trip President Obama said,

“So over at the Capital Factory, I met with folks behind the start-up called StormPulse, which uses government data on weather to help businesses anticipate disruptions in service. And then you’ve got a Virginia company called OPower that’s used government data on trends in energy use to save its customers $200 million on their energy bills. There’s an app called iTriage, founded by a pair of ER doctors that uses data from the Department of Health and Human Services to help users understand medical symptoms and find local doctors and health care providers. And today I’m announcing that we’re making even more government data available, and we’re making it easier for people to find and to use. And that’s going to help launch more start-ups. It’s going to help launch more businesses.”

Some cautionary notes have been raised by sources such as Ars Technica where Sean Gallagher discussed the implications of the new executive order:

Just how effective this order will be in the face of the government’s ongoing budget crisis is unclear. With sequestration cutting back many programs, there’s little maneuvering room for agencies to make significant changes to the systems that this order would affect.

I come down more on the cautionary side. While I have a fundamental belief in making government data more accessible to the public — I’m a citizen too and want to know how my tax dollars are being spent — I’m also thinking beyond accessibility and transparency to consider whether and how “open data” will actually make government programs more effective. As I suggested in A Framework for Transparency Program Planning and Assessment,

While data generated by a government program should be readily available and shareable among its target constituencies and members of the public, I also believe that resources devoted to improving the transparency of a government program should also promote the accomplishment of that program’s goals.

We need to understand the resources involved in making government programs transparent, especially when we consider “big data” and the new and innovative uses to be made of data generated by government programs. As I’ve noted elsewhere, transparency isn’t free. Someone has to pay for setting up and maintaining the web pages, databases, and services that are needed to make government program data accessible and usable. “Big” or not, the data have to exist before they can be sliced, diced, mashed up, analyzed, shared, and/or resold. For example, if program spending data need to be standardized before they can be sliced and diced analytically, someone needs to take responsibility for standardization efforts and for the resources necessary for storing, managing, updating, and analyzing the data.

Hopefully the policies and programs to make data accessible that are currently under development will not just be focused on making data accessible but will also seriously focus on how making the data accessible will promote program goals.

While we’re at it, I also think we need to make the process by which we make data more transparent, well, more transparent. How decisions are made about which data to publish and in what format should also be subjected to scrutiny, otherwise we might find that technical features are driving accessibility and availability rather than value or utility. That might seem counterintuitive, but in times of budget issues decisions might get made based on the availability of “low hanging fruit” rather than what is actually useful.

If this sounds like I’m recommending that data access design issues be at least partly driven by user requirements, that is the case. I’m not saying that we can anticipate every possible use of the data associated with a government program; there are too many arguments counter to that. I am saying that a basic principle of system design is to take user requirements into account. The user requirements I’m talking about are the intended beneficiaries of the government program. And, if a major requirement is that “open data” stimulate innovation and job creation, we need to be able to measure the success of that as well.

Related reading:

Graphic Display of Terms in Obama's Executive Order Making Open and Machine Readable the New Default for Government Information

2013-05-09T16:50:00Z

By Dennis D. McDonald

In a vain attempt to locate information on the role .pdf files will be playing in this I performed a quick and dirty Wordle analysis:

Nope, no mention of “.pdf.” Yes, I know that many tools exist for scraping and extracting structure from .pdf documents, but that adds another and potentially costly step. While the .pdf source — or the document it is based on — could be treated as the “golden” original, it also means that there might always be a question of the agreement between the source data and the extracted data.

Such data conversion issues have always been with us, of course, and there will be those who look at this new Executive Order as opening up opportunities for outside groups to “add value” to data being made by the Government.

I’m all for that, and I applaud the language of the order for requiring accessibility. But the devil is in the details and, given the precarious state of Government finances, we’re bound to see some confusion in the coming months. On balance, though, making accessibility the default condition has to be considered a good thing; “Better light than darkness,” as they say.

Related reading:

Has Google Lost Control of Glass?

2013-05-07T18:07:00Z

By Dennis D. McDonald

Click or tap above image for more “mobile tech” articles.What drives me crazy about the debates around Google Glass is the groups of people who keep on saying, “Society will adjust. People will get used to it. It’s no different than what we have now with omnipresent security cameras and smartphones in every pocket.”

So the people who raise legitimate questions are accused of being anti-progress Luddites who don’t remember the Apple 2 or the early days of cellphones?

Nonsense. Debate is good. If someone makes a ridiculous statement based on falsehoods or half-truths, call that person out and debate on facts. But don’t tell people who don’t like their pictures to be taken to just “get used to this new order.” Respond to their concerns. And don’t pillory the people who ask “how does it benefit me?” with “step aside - you just don’t understand.”

It’s a new technology. People need to debate it. Evangelists like Scoble might actually be muddying the water where other quieter folks are actually working on clever or original applications that will actually benefit people.

This “us vs. them” horse-race so early in the game is not necessarily productive. I am beginning to wonder if this is evidence that Google really doesn’t know how to manage this process — and might have actually lost control.

Related reading:

Utilities and Cable Companies: What's a Monopoly To Do?

2013-05-06T19:20:31Z

By Dennis D. McDonald

Click or tap the above image to download a .pdf of this article.

Reading Martin Lamonica’s Will Utilities Embrace Distributed Energy? from MIT Technology Review brought a wry smile to my lips. In it the author discusses how some energy companies in the US might be feeling threatened by the nascent “personal energy production” movement.

The article describes increasing availability of low-cost solar energy systems, wind power, and natural gas driven energy production. Whereas in the past some energy utilities promoted home-based electricity generation with excess sold back to “the grid,” now there’s a dawning recognition by energy companies that, if this movement actually takes off, their revenues might be threatened. If that happens, logic suggests that money for updating or expanding outdated infrastructure will be reduced as regulatory agencies look increasingly askance at allowing rates to increase.

What should utilities do about this “disruption?” The article doesn’t discuss what the possible solutions might be. Nevertheless, anyone familiar with how regulated monopolies behave might guess one solution: increase regulation, or reduce incentives for local energy production, perhaps even make local energy production illegal or more highly taxed.

I’m not a student of the theory of regulated monopolies but with this article did make me think about my recent experience with another “regulated” monopoly, Comcast, which I wrote about recently in Comcast Must Die.

Comcast is what you got when true competitors don’t exist in a market: poor customer service, constantly rising prices, lack of desirable product unbundling, and deceptive and occasionally misleading sales techniques.

Perhaps energy companies and cable/internet utilities will find themselves in similar situations when faced by technology enabled disruption. Longstanding legal, regulatory, and financial interrelationships will be difficult to overcome. One effect might be that the monopoly will find it difficult to respond quickly to disruptive competition. Built up over many years, these old interrelationships form an almost-insoluble Gordian Knot that resists the rapid changes that new technology and new business models enable (or demand).

My hope is that, eventually, an “adapt or die” mentality will prevail, even among the protected monopolies that increasingly see new businesses nibbling around their edges. Take home power generation, for example. There are some regions in the Northeastern United States, for example, where failure to have backup power generators installed in expensive upscale single family houses is seen is bad for resale value, given the long periods in recent years that power has gone out due to down power lines. Do you seriously believe that such homeowners, faced with a $10,000+ bill for initiating home power generation, are going to look kindly at local power companies hassling them for generating their own power? I certainly hope not.

I know, they are many factors to be considered in such cases — universal access, subsidies, multiyear license agreements. These seemingly intractable problems are also the very reasons why the whole concept of “disruption” makes so much sense. Aereo understands this as it slogs its way in the courts to build on its tiny rentable antennas as the basis for its Internet based distribution of local over-the-air TV signals. So does Netflix and its move to produce and distribute such quality programming as House of Cards.

For me the bottom line is simple: government regulation, initially implemented to protect public interest, is now viewed by many as protecting special interests instead. This needs to change.

All of which is one reason I haven’t yet responded to “ComcastMark” from Comcast National Customer Operations. My real belief is that the only solution is to bring more competition to Alexandria Virginia from sources such as Aereo or Google Fiber. Somehow, though, I don’t think Comcast Mark is going to help with either of these solutions!

Related reading:

Copyright (c) 2013 by Dennis D. McDonald, Ph.D. Dennis is a Washington DC area consultant specializing in digital strategy, collaborative project management, and new technology adoption. His clients have included the US Department of Veterans Affairs, the US Environmental Protection Agency, Jive Software, the National Library of Medicine, the National Academy of Engineering, Social Media Today and Oracle, and the World Bank Group. His experience includes the management of projects involving the conversion or migration of financial and transaction data associated with large and small systems. Contact Dennis via email at ddmcd@yahoo.com or by phone at 703-402-7382.

How Our Increasing Digital Connectedness Improves Government Program Evaluation

2013-05-01T07:38:31Z

By Dennis D. McDonald

Click or tap image to download a .pdf of this article.

Introduction

Will the way the Federal government measures the performance of government programs have to change due to increasing use, by government employees, of smart phones, tablets, social networks, and file sharing services?

I wondered about this while attending the monthly Government Performance Coalition meeting on April 23rd at George Washington University in Washington DC. There, Dustin Brown and Kathy Stack from the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) discussed the Administration’s 2014 Budget. Brown & Stack focused on the CREATING A 21ST CENTURY GOVERNMENT chapter with special attention to these sections:

Using evidence to get better research, pages 52 to 54
Strengthening evaluation and sharing what works, pages 54 to 55
Managing for results, pages 55 to 56

They described behind-the-scenes efforts, as orchestrated by OMB, to increase the use of performance measures and “evidence-based” decision-making in how government programs are planned, managed, and evaluated. In the process they made it clear that improving how performance data and other measurement approaches are used in government bureaucracies isn’t something that can happen overnight, nor is it something that is very visible outside the government.

Using data to support management and planning isn’t new

Using data to support the planning, management, and evaluation of government programs certainly isn’t something that is particularly new. Nevertheless, the Obama administration has made transparency and management efficiency major themes in changing how the Federal government is run. OMB’s efforts to incorporate both performance data and performance against defined goals and objectives, as described by Brown & Stack and incorporated into the above-linked budget document, is a step forward, even if it doesn’t garner the publicity of other, more public-facing programs.

Mobile technologies and program planning

Still, it’s not yet clear to me, as an independent consultant and government “outsider,” whether efforts to improve performance measurement and accountability are taking full advantage of the increasing access to and use of mobile technologies such as smart phones, tablet computers, and the networking services they connect to.

Innovation versus tradition

True, significant progress has already been made in making government agency web sites more mobile friendly. Individual agency web sites as well as Data.gov and Performance.gov are making data about government operations more accessible. Yet, I was struck by Brown & Stack’s description of the fundamentally traditional communication and collaboration processes by which performance measurement and program accountability are being pursued via working groups operating through internal government channels.

The traditional nature of the processes is not necessarily a bad thing. Government agencies are, after all, organizations with traditional values and structures. As with any bureaucracy, to some extent you have to “play by their rules” even when you are trying to change how they behave.

How are we using the tools?

I wonder if, in our drive to improve how government operates through better performance and evaluation measures, are we really taking advantage of the tools now available to both government employees and the public via increasingly powerful social networks, smart phones, and tablets?

As I’ve suggested elsewhere, it’s probably a mistake to view smart phones and tablet computers simply as little portable computers that have effective email, messaging, network, and Internet access. They have the potential for being much more than that. The owners of personal smart phones and tablets, sometimes without direct authorization of their employers, are already using them to share work related information and to collaborate. How many times, for example, do government employees “vote with their feet” and bypass “official” internal intranets and files haring networks by using public services such as Google Drive, DropBox, or even Skype to share files? How often are such services being used to bypass traditional email and file attachment clutter?

Quite often, I’ll guess. I’d therefore be very surprised if the planning efforts described by Brown & Stack haven’t already benefited substantially from the use of such devices and the services they can connect government employees to.

How does technology-enabled collaboration impact how people work?

It’s reasonable to ask whether such technology-enabled collaboration and sharing actually speeds up or enhances how collaborative work is performed. As a proponent of technology enabled collaboration, I’ve come to realize that the best collaborative networking tool is not necessarily the most secure one, nor is it the most elegantly designed one, nor is it the one that is most cleverly or seamlessly integrated with a proprietary content management system.

No, the best collaborative networking tool is the one that people actually use to get their work done.

I’m guessing that a lot of government employees are using their own devices and networking resources to do their jobs. So, does this use of personal devices make it any easier to plan programs that incorporate performance and evaluation measures, such as the ones we talked about at the April 23 meeting?

That’s hard to tell. The measurement and performance efforts described by Brown & Stack could probably be viewed as organizational innovations that, by definition, require communication and collaboration to take place across existing organizational boundaries during the planning process. The beauty of personal devices such as smart phone and tablet computers — and the social networks they connect to — is that they are personal devices. People are comfortable using them. As someone who has been involved in the development or adoption of various networked corporate information services, anything you can do to improve not only ease-of-use but perceived value to the task at hand should be a good thing.

This is one of the major reasons I think it’s important to figure out how to integrate work systems with personal systems, especially when there is a lot of give-and-take and back-and-forth — as is the case when introducing and formalizing evaluation and measurement components into government programs.

The work of an agency such as OMB by definition has to traverse multiple organizational and network boundaries in order to corral participants into following a planning and reporting structure such as the one described in OMB’s CIRCULAR NO. A–11, PART 6: PREPARATION AND SUBMISSION OF STRATEGIC PLANS, ANNUAL PERFORMANCE PLANS, AND ANNUAL PROGRAM PERFORMANCE REPORTS. Why not use the tools people are comfortable using, assuming we can solve the problems of security and system compatibility?

Mobile technologies and operational performance measurement

So far I’ve been writing about using mobile technologies in the context of planning and developing programs that incorporate measurement and evaluation. What about the services these programs deliver? Aren’t communication with service delivery partners and with the public just as receptive to advantageous use of mobile technologies?

Mobile devices and measurement and evaluation of service delivery

Keeping in mind that we are focusing on measurement and evaluation, what impacts will mobile technologies have on service delivery?

One consideration is that, if the mobile devices are themselves used in the delivery of services, they provide an immediate opportunity for obtaining evaluative feedback on, at minimum, whether the service is actually delivered via the monitoring of transactions such as downloads, querying, or other interactivity. This could include direct measurement of the delivery of information based products, answers to queries, and even in some cases the usage of, say, financial assets or payments delivered through increasingly prevalent mobile “wallets” or other device based payment mechanisms.

We already have “pop up” surveys tied to use of specific web page assets. Now we can have immediate feedback when money is transferred via an authorized transaction conducted via a recipient’s mobile device. Why wait to evaluate the service 3 months from now if we can gather statistics immediately?

Impact measurement

Obviously it’s more complex than that, but keeping in mind we are concerned here with evaluation and performance measurement, the simple fact is that, the closer we can get to the point of service delivery and use to obtain accurate data, the better positioned we are to gather accurate data about the transaction and its impact from the actual recipient of the service.

Services such as Google Now already tie together delivery of information based on both past behavior and current device location; can’t we also begin to implement measurement and tracking services to generate better data on whether or not government services are actually getting to those they are intended to help? Clearly there are privacy, jurisdictional, and system integration issues that need to be addressed. Also, gathering data about a service instead of relying on a sample survey for evaluative purposes has potential storage, bandwidth, and other data management issues associated with it. But as personal devices become more powerful, and as they become more and more integrated both with communicating about and with consuming government services, the opportunity to combine delivery with government program effectiveness measurement is obvious.

From an accuracy perspective this is key as, the closer you are to the actual point of delivery, the more valid can be the data you gather on its use and on its impact. Commercial developers of smartphone and tablet apps that provide in-app purchasing and other interactivity already use such data as a normal part of business; extending this functionality to the measurement and evaluation of the delivery of government services is not that much of a stretch. Older methods where data collection about usage are separated from service consumption could become obsolete if they have not already become so.

Internet of things

So far this discussion has focused on data about programs that deliver services to people, i.e., can smart phones and tablet users be used to help determine if target recipients receive and use government services, and to what effect. Also to be considered is the viability of incorporating the “internet of things” into the mix of data sources associated with the delivery and consumption of government services.

As more devices come “online” and become addressable as potentially accessible sources of data, the possibility arises that events and conditions associated with the delivery of government services to individuals can be monitored in order to provide contextual information against which government program performance can be measured. Examples include traffic data, temperature and weather, energy consumption, environmental conditions, air quality, and other remotely-sensible conditions that can be associated with how individual programs are used at the local level. Even local food prices can be tracked as published by local markets on public web sites, as was done in a recent World Bank program examining the feasibility of using “big data” analytics to anticipate international market price trends. As such varied data sources become more available in real time, the implications for making corrections to government program operations rapidly and decisively also increase; why wait for a “quarterly report” to make adjustments?

Conclusion

There will always be a need to conduct formal evaluations of how well government programs perform. Such evaluations must take into account the complexity of programs and the need to distinguish among short term and long term impacts and the intervening conditions that also impact program effectiveness.

Evaluation methodologies will need to take all this into consideration, all of which requires careful planning and appropriate resources. Improving connectivity of government employees and members of the public also offers the potential for making such evaluations more timely and direct. With careful planning, this improved connectivity also offers improvements in how programs are managed.

Related reading:

Copyright (c) 2013 by Dennis D. McDonald, Ph.D. Dennis is a Washington DC area consultant specializing in digital strategy, collaborative project management, and new technology adoption. His clients have included the US Department of Veterans Affairs, the US Environmental Protection Agency, Jive Software, the National Library of Medicine, the National Academy of Engineering, Social Media Today and Oracle, and the World Bank Group. His experience includes the management of projects involving the conversion or migration of financial and transaction data associated with large and small systems. Contact Dennis via email at ddmcd@yahoo.com or by phone at 703-402-7382.

More Data, Please - and Don’t Hold the Pickle

2013-04-29T19:39:21Z

By Dennis D. McDonald

Click or tap the above image to download a .pdf of this article.Robert Scoble’s explanation of why his employer is paying him to fly around promoting Google Glass makes perfect sense, especially this point:

Google Glass is going to need a new kind of cloud computing and Google won’t be able to satisfy all the demand. If Google Glass is as big a deal as I think it will be, humans will generate much more data than they do today. Either because of sensor tracking to do things like play location-based games, or do health tracking, or more. Think about Waze, a traffic app, on Google Glass. The new developers will need new cloud computing, more on that later. Plus, I see Glass as part of a contextual system, one that uses an Internet of Things, but also brings data from your own businesses in along with big data computation that will find new patterns to display on our glass.

So, Glass and other mobile sensor technologies are going to generate so much data that needs to be managed that companies like Scoble’s Rackspace will be in serious commercial danger were they to ignore the commercial opportunities associated with the coming data deluge.

Not only will there be so much data floating around that even Google can’t handle it — thereby opening up market opportunities for companies like Rackspace — but the need will arise for new data management technologies that go beyond the traditional database management architectures at the root of successful companies like Oracle.

Having dealt with many different types of data during my career, my perspective on this might be viewed as quaint by those who envision a world built on “all data all the time” access concepts. As much as I love data and working with data, though, I have some serious questions about the coming “new data order”:

Will all the data we generate as we go about our daily lives really be worth saving?
What kinds of data management skills will be needed in order to avoid further disparities between the “data haves” and “data have-nots”?
How much is all this going to cost, and who’s going to pay? (Broadband data caps, anyone?)

I don’t know what the answers are to these questions. For me, matching data to the needs of the anticipated user has always been a normal part of most systems development life cycles. That’s a design principle based on simple economics and efficiency, i.e., “Spend money only on the data that people will need to use.” Is that changing as we move into a world of “big data”?

Yes, things have changed. Data are now generated as a byproduct of many more types of activities by human as well as nonhuman (for example, industrial) “actors.” Corralling and making sense of these new data volumes is an emerging business that can justify the examination and use of new data management paradigms.

Still, one thing I have learned from a career involved with data is that usually makes sense not only to anticipate how people will use the data from the system but also what they need to know in order to use the data.

As we move into a new age of always-on and always-connected citizens, will people know what to do with all the data they can now access? Some very smart people I know, for example, still have a hard time dealing with the basic concepts like file naming and nested folders on a computer. Will the systems (and apps) that emerge in our new age of data be usable, but only for a small number of “elites” who are comfortable with how to navigate masses of data?

I can imagine new roles emerging with names like “data wrangler,” “data steward,” “data guides,” “data agents,” and the like. These will be professionals who, for a price, will cut through the clutter of vast amounts of competing and contradictory data sources to locate, organize, and deliver services ranging from answers to specific questions to ongoing advice, handholding, or even decision-making.

Science fiction writers such as Neal Stephenson have written about such roles and schools are offering courses devoted to “data science.” People who are able to do all of this by themselves will be at the top of the heap and, because of their skills and agility, will benefit entrepreneurially from their skills.

There will also be those who must rely on others with such skills. In some cases services will be performed as commercial transactions, some will be provided as subsidized public services (for example by public libraries), and for another category of user — the “data poor” — no such services will be available.

Also, of course, a market will develop for illegal uses of big data; the people who are really good at this will make a lot of money!

Related reading:

Copyright (c) 2013 by Dennis D. McDonald, Ph.D. Dennis is a Washington DC area consultant specializing in digital strategy, collaborative project management, and new technology adoption. His clients have included the US Department of Veterans Affairs, the US Environmental Protection Agency, Jive Software, the National Library of Medicine, the National Academy of Engineering, Social Media Today and Oracle, and the World Bank Group. His experience includes the management of projects involving the conversion or migration of financial and transaction data associated with large and small systems. Contact Dennis via email at ddmcd@yahoo.com or by phone at 703-402-7382.

Just Measuring Government Performance Is Not Enough

2013-04-19T17:51:18Z

By Dennis D. McDonald

Click or tap the above image to download a .pdf of this article.The Washington Post article this past week Why not measure how well government works? asks the reasonable question, “Why aren’t more government programs evaluated?” Also asked, is “Why aren’t government programs that are evaluated and found wanting just canceled?”

These are good questions. The Post article, by Jim Tankersley and Dylan Matthews, touches on some significant and problematic issues:

Complex programs are inherently hard to evaluate.
Performance measures are difficult to develop.
Politics.
Bureaucracy.
Resistance to change.
Entrenched interest groups.
Who likes to be evaluated?
Who should be responsible?

All of these things are true to different degrees. But they are not reasons for despair. In fact, I think we are in a better position now than ever before to hold government programs accountable based on this Administration’s actions in making government operations more transparent.

Let’s start with the fundamental question, “How do you measure whether or not a government program is a success?”

There’s no simple answer to this question, even when you focus on outcome and benefit measures and not just on intermediate measures such as transaction volume or cost. There’s no getting around the fact that measuring performance takes time, money, and planning, especially if you are trying to do so in a logical and consistent fashion.

Just because measuring performance is difficult is no reason not to try. If you’ve been paying attention to the admirable efforts at OMB and Performance.gov you’ll see what I mean. Creating and sustaining measures for within-agency and across-agency reporting takes time and there is no guarantee that outcome measures can be traced back to the original legislative or reauthorization language. The foundation is being laid by such programs to making government performance more accessible — if they are continued and supported, as I discussed in Developing Digital Strategies for Web-based Public Access to Government Performance Data.

Also, blaming legislators for not incorporating specific outcome measures as legal requirements is too simple a criticism. Evaluation and performance measures should be in ingrained and automatic components of all government programs whether specific measures are defined legislatively or not.

That gets us back to looking again at the bullet list displayed above. Given the difficulties associated with measuring the performance of government programs, should we throw up our hands, give up, and just let things play out messy realm of public debate?

Obviously not. Even though I’m a firm believer in measurement, though, I do think we need to supplement whatever we do about performance measurement with continued improvements in making government programs more accessible and transparent.

As I suggested in A Framework for Transparency Program Planning and Assessment, this means making the data associated with both the internal and external aspects of government programs more available to the public. Government programs need to make public, all along the way from their point of origin, data describing all aspects of program goals, costs, operations, staffing, participation, and usage. Such data need to be available and accessible without artificially imposed access restrictions or fees that might effectively discriminate against members of the public possessing modest resources. You shouldn’t need a Ph.D. in statistics to interpret the data about the government services you’re receiving.

I’m aware that “the devil is in the details” when it comes to defining terms like “open” and “accessible.” This is why I believe that any government program that publishes data about its operations or effectiveness online should also make available the names and contact information of staff that are knowledgeable and can meaningfully answer questions about that operation. (See Better Org Charts Will Improve Government Agency Transparency and Accountability.)

Whether you consider this suggestion to be part of government becoming more “social” in how it interacts with the public is up to you. I just think that making government program staff identities public is common sense, for several reasons:

Most public companies provide multiple channels for interacting with them. Why shouldn’t government?
Providing public access to a “live” government official would make real-time responses possible. This would be helpful when changes in operations occur more often than, say, the quarterly reporting that a departmental website might provide.
Improved public access to knowledgeable and empowered public officials would also provide members of the public with improved access to the officials’ own professional networks and their shared expertise.
Improved access to these “inner circles” and their expertise could significantly improve citizen understanding of and appreciation for the real world benefits provided day in and day out by government services

Given the high level of mistrust that currently exist among the electorate for government in general, the value of such potential improvements should not be underestimated.

In summary, we need to look at three things if we want to respond to effectively respond to the real world difficulties associated with measuring government program effectiveness:

We need to continue pressing government to pay more attention to measuring and assessing — in public — the performance of government programs. “It’s too hard” or “It’s too expensive” are not valid excuses. Efforts to develop and evaluate performance should be open to discussion and interpretation by all.
We need continued improvements to online access to data about government programs, how much they cost, and how they operate and perform. One way of looking at this is that, even if we can’t agree on concrete measures of effectiveness, we should be making data available to the public so that they can develop and publicize their own measures.
We need better citizen-government communications that can not only provide better and more up to date information about how programs are operating. This will not only inform the public about what government does, it will also also help dispel the “faceless government bureaucracy” impression that does nothing to improve public confidence in government services.

Related reading:

Copyright (c) 2013 by Dennis D. McDonald, Ph.D. Dennis is a Washington DC area consultant specializing in digital strategy, collaborative project management, and new technology adoption. His clients have included the US Department of Veterans Affairs, the US Environmental Protection Agency, Jive Software, the National Library of Medicine, the National Academy of Engineering, Social Media Today and Oracle, and the World Bank Group. His experience includes the management of projects involving the conversion or migration of financial and transaction data associated with large and small systems. Contact Dennis via email at ddmcd@yahoo.com or by phone at 703-402-7382.

Should Local Governments Rely on Facebook for Public Communications?

2013-04-17T18:32:17Z

By Dennis D. McDonald

Back when social media were just getting popular I was a strong supporter for government use especially in times of crisis or emergency.

Going “where the people” are seemed a simple justification for why a government agency might want to use Facebook. Facebook is relatively cheap to get started, it provides a standardized platform, it enables discussions, its use is not limited to young people, and — most importantly — it can hook into a large population of potential users that might not otherwise be directly reachable.

Now I’m not so sure. I gave up using Facebook. I found it annoying and didn’t trust how it was using and selling information about me and my online interactions.

I’m no privacy nut but I decided that Facebook just isn’t trustworthy. Yet its popularity is clear. In many cases it is also being used as a default identity management system. You can see this when you go to a website that lets you log in using your Facebook credentials. Who am I to argue with success?

While researching local government program transparency I ran across my home town’s “social media” page. It lists, for the Alexandria, Virginia city government, the social media badges for various programs and departments. Of the 14 programs and departments listed,

1 mentions using Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube
3 mention using Facebook and Twitter
9 mention using Facebook only
1 mentions using Twitter only

I agree 100% with the value of city governments using social media to communicate with citizens. At the same time, I have serious reservations about Facebook’s reliability in terms of privacy protection and monetization of personal information. Given such concerns, is it appropriate for city governments to rely on Facebook for communicating with the public?

On the one hand, many citizens use Facebook so it makes sense to “go where the people are.”
On the other hand, using a tool that has some of the features of a “walled internet garden” and a history of issues with protecting personal information seems problematic to me.

Am I being overly sensitive since I gave up using Facebook myself and don’t recommend it to others? Or should the fact that so many people use Facebook be the real deciding factor?

I would welcome a discussion of these questions either here or on Google+ where I originally published this list.

Copyright (c) 2013 by Dennis D. McDonald, Ph.D. Dennis is a Washington DC area consultant specializing in digital strategy, collaborative project management, and new technology adoption. His clients have included the US Department of Veterans Affairs, the US Environmental Protection Agency, Jive Software, the National Library of Medicine, the National Academy of Engineering, Social Media Today and Oracle, and the World Bank Group. His experience includes the management of projects involving the conversion or migration of financial and transaction data associated with large and small systems. Contact Dennis via email at ddmcd@yahoo.com or by phone at 703-402-7382.

Keep Your Eyeballs to Yourself, Chathead

2013-04-16T17:02:43Z

By Dennis D. McDonald

Click or tap the above image to download a .pdf of this article.Remember the scene in the movie Minority Report where fugitive policeman Tom Cruise is walking through a shopping mall? Retina scanned as he enters he’s offered — by name — annoying but pretty ads repeatedly as he passes by display projectors.

It’s an iconic scene of the future that many people still find a bit creepy despite its quaint technology.

Never mind that today every step of the way we’re being monitored as we traverse the Internet so that Google can offer us personalized ads reflective of our behavior. It’s really just as “creepy” as Minority Report, but we’re used to it by now, partly since Google, unlike many other advertising companies, has figured out how to balance relevance, personalization, and subtlety.

I thought about all this while watching Mark Zuckerberg present Facebook Home. Home is a technological tour de force that blends elegance in user interface design with the power and flexibility of Android in a way that takes advantage of Facebook-based personal and social data.

Admittedly I’m not in the target demographic for Home. I stopped using Facebook some time ago. I see nothing in Home that would make me want to go back. In fact, it looks like Home would probably make Facebook even more annoying is it pushes “relevant” news, personal updates, messages, and (eventually) ads to the always-on top level of the smartphone.

Conceptually, Home reminds me of Tom Cruise experiencing those shopping mall ads whenever he looks at his phone.

Oh, I know that the Facebook experience is supposed to be built on “relationships” and “likes” in a way that reflects personal preferences. In the real world of “push,” though, as often as not what gets “pushed” is more dependent on the needs of the “pusher” than the “pushee.” This has been, for me, one of the disappointments of widespread adoption of social media since there are so many people in business who view social media not as a sharing environment but as an efficiently targetable advertising channel.

Oh, I know you are supposed to be able to fine-tune all the all this via Facebook settings. But I have more important things to do than to constantly rejigger confusing Facebook notification and privacy settings. For me my smartphone (currently an iPhone) is an incredibly useful tool that I control. I’m not ready yet to turn it over to someone else’s definitions around relationships and monetization.

That doesn’t mean that I’m opposed to what Home represents. Far from it. I may be anti-Facebook based on past experience, but the idea of offering a different user experience in addition to a well designed generic user interface makes a lot of sense. As a very simple example, I have on my iPhone my apps spread across three screens — top level individual apps frequently used, mid-level apps stored in folders, and (very) infrequently used apps. This arrangement seems to work well for me, but I can see the benefit of being able to easily rearrange the top level apps based on what type of task or operation I am performing. In other words, the “social” aspect as a way to filter messaging and access operations is much less important than what I’m doing.

I’m sure there’s a way to do all this thru Android widgets and custom launchers but I honestly don’t have the patience to continually tinker with my smartphone, which is one of the reasons, I suppose, that I find the iPhone so useful and easy to use.

Final note: for an intelligent discussion of the pros and cons of the Home architecture, listen to Gina Trapani and Ken Purdy’s recent “In Beta” podcast #44. You can almost see their heads nodding at the overall design as they discuss the pros and cons of Home. They understand the possibilities but, like me, they have some questions about whether Facebook Home is really going to be that useful to them.

Copyright (c) 2013 by Dennis D. McDonald, Ph.D. Dennis is a Washington DC area consultant specializing in digital strategy, collaborative project management, and new technology adoption. His clients have included the US Department of Veterans Affairs, the US Environmental Protection Agency, Jive Software, the National Library of Medicine, the National Academy of Engineering, Social Media Today and Oracle, and the World Bank Group. His experience includes the management of projects involving the conversion or migration of financial and transaction data associated with large and small systems. Contact Dennis via email at ddmcd@yahoo.com or by phone at 703-402-7382.

When Are "Open Data" and "Hiding in Plain Sight" Synonymous?

2013-04-11T02:54:15Z

By Dennis D. McDonald

Click or tap the above image to download a .pdf of this article.Alex Howard’s Beware openwashing. Question secrecy. Acknowledge ideology. is a welcome discussion of what “open” can mean when it comes to government services. Terms like “transparency,” “open data,” and “open government” tend to get thrown around a lot without critical discussions of their meanings. Howard discusses how “open” inevitably becomes intertwined with philosophy and politics.

This reminds me a bit of years ago when the term “web 2.0” was popular as a buzzword. It could mean just about anything you wanted it to mean; I even tried to define it for a National Academy of Engineering project before backing off the term.

Terms like “open data” and “open government” have a similar feel because of wide definition variety. For example, “data dumping” — making tons of discrete datasets readily accessible and available for easy downloading and manipulation — can have both good and bad connotations. It’s one thing to make geocoded transaction-based datasets about government operations and activities available for all to see. It’s quite another to make the data meaningful.

You have to ask yourself — and this is the type of question that Howard is getting at — to what lengths should the government go in making the data accessible, understandable, and usable to the public? Should that be the responsibility of citizens acting independently? Or should an independent third party — preferably one with no axe to grind — be trusted with interpreting the data on behalf of various constituencies?

These are questions related, in my opinion, to how accessible data actually are for potential end users. I tried to get into some of these issues surrounding what “accessibility” might mean, not entirely successfully, in my post Matching Technological Literacy with Delivery of Government Services. Building from that, here is how I responded to Howard’s post when he linked to it on Google+’s Open Government community:

I think a major distinguishing point in planning for “open data” is whether or not the systems and processes surrounding how the data are managed are — or aren’t — independent of the program that is associated with the creation of the data.

It takes resources — time and money — to create and manage access to data. If those resources aren’t directly associated with the program that is generating and consuming the data, how can we be sure the data will be used in a way that is responsive to the goals of the program?

I’m not saying that making files of data available via APIs or access systems are not potentially valuable, they obviously have potential, and the “open data” movement has made much of the potential utility of data generated by government programs when made available for creative or innovative uses.

Admittedly I’m interpreting this from the perspective of an information system developer. First and foremost when I’m designing a system to support a program or operation I want to make sure the data resources that are associated with that system are directly relevant and beneficial to that system and its users and managers. That doesn’t mean that I will be able to capture all the “value” that can be generated by the program’s data resources, but it does mean that I can’t just assume that making data available for access by third party APIs will automatically benefit my own constituents.

This is why I don’t believe that making data accessible is necessarily intrinsically useful or valuable. Doing so may be responsive to an ethical or legal requirement that government operations be “transparent,” but I still feel that the program that generates the data in the first place needs to be thinking about how making the data more accessible actually supports its own program goals and objectives.

If that means working closely with third party API developers, standards bodies, and republishers, so be it. But the cost of doing so should be taken into account when developing the program’s budget.

I address some of these concepts in more detail in “A Framework for Transparency Program Planning and Assessment” located here: http://www.ddmcd.com/outline.html .

Back to the title of this post, When Are “Open Data” and “Hiding in Plain Sight” Synonymous?

By “hiding in plain site” I mean that an aura of accessibility can surround government program data — if it can be located, downloaded, manipulated, and used. But used by whom? And for what purpose? And importantly, what are the data-generating government program’s responsibilities in this regard?

One concern is that quality and usability might suffer if data are made accessible without the appropriate tools and contextual information needed by potential users. As I discussed in Developing Digital Strategies for Web-based Public Access to Government Performance Data, the Performance.gov website operated by OMB doesn’t just provide data describing the operation of government programs, it also provides specially selected data describing program performance along with the contextual information that enables the user to select and interpret the provided data. When sustained, this type of operation takes time, money, and talent, as well as the full cooperation of the government agency that supports the provision of Performance.gov’s quarterly reporting.

Ideally, the within-agency and across-agency performance reporting provided by operations such as Performance.gov will eventually enable members of the public and their representatives to understand how well tax dollars are being spent. At issue is whether the public will have the tools, skills, wherewithal, and resources to locate, understand, and make use of the data. If not, the division between the “data haves” and “data have nots” will be exacerbated, no matter how many data files are offered for download.

If you found the above interesting, these related articles might interest you as well:

Copyright (c) 2013 by Dennis D. McDonald, Ph.D. Dennis is a Washington DC area consultant specializing in digital strategy, collaborative project management, and new technology adoption. His clients have included the US Department of Veterans Affairs, the US Environmental Protection Agency, Jive Software, the National Library of Medicine, the National Academy of Engineering, Social Media Today and Oracle, and the World Bank Group. His experience includes the management of projects involving the conversion or migration of financial and transaction data associated with large and small systems. Contact Dennis via email at ddmcd@yahoo.com or by phone at 703-402-7382.

Comcast Must Die

2013-04-09T13:46:30Z

By Dennis D. McDonald

Click or tap image to download a .pdf of this article.I feel sorry for Comcast customer support staff. I really do. I’ve worked with other customer support operations and IT staff members before and know what they must go through as, day-to-day, they deal with disgruntled or irate customers.

I’m sure that much of the stress experienced by Comcast customer support reps is not of their own doing but is based on their being Comcast’s first line of defense as it works to maintain and grow revenue in noncompetitive markets.

After much deliberation last year I had switched to Comcast Internet from Verizon DSL. For the price of Verizon’s DSL supplied Internet I was able to get much faster Comcast service which has revealed itself, most noticeably, in better streaming movies from Netflix and Amazon. The pricing was repeated by three separate Comcast phone sales reps.

For the most part I’ve been satisfied with the Internet service. Still, years of Comcast cable TV service had taught me the wisdom of keeping track of monthly bills. I had also learned from the cable TV side of Comcast that what the sales people tell you over the phone and what eventually shows up on your bill are sometimes two separate things. Add to that Comcast’s confusing and opaque cable TV pricing and its constantly changing and confusingly named channel packages, and you can understand why vigilance is necessary.

This was demonstrated to me recently when I opened up my latest Comcast bill:

I was now being charged for the two cable TV “digital transport adapters” that had been explicitly described to me as “free” when Comcast shifted from analog to digital transmission.
There was a mysterious item named “Streampix” listed for zero dollars on my bill, labeled as a “promotion.”
My monthly Internet service bill, labeled as “promotional,” had almost doubled.

So I called customer support and asked about the bill. I talked to a nice lady who was the soul of politeness. Yes, she said, pricing on the previously “free” adapters had changed recently. She made no attempt to hide that fact. She said there was nothing I could do about it but go to the website and write letters complaining to Comcast. She did admit that I may have been “misinformed” when I had been told that the first two adapters were free.

I then asked about the Streampix “promotional” item on the bill. She could not explain how it had showed up but noted that it covered a group of older TV shows and movies made available as streaming services through the Xfinity Internet service. I have occasionally experimented with streaming services via the awkward Xfinity iPhone app. Since most of the Streampix shows are junky cooking, reality, and redecorating shows, I asked her to remove it — especially after she explained that the price would rise to four dollars per month in September.

Then we discussed the increased Internet service charge. I explained the pricing had been given to me by three separate Comcast sales reps, that the price had never been identified by them as a temporary “promotional” price, and that my switch from Verizon DSL, e-mail, website hosting and storage had only been made after much deliberation.

Again, she admitted I had possibly been “misinformed” by Comcast sales staff. Again, she could do nothing and recommended I write a letter to Comcast.

After hanging up I called the Alexandria Virginia city governments cable TV office. I had talked with them before when we had switched to digital from analog TV service and all my TVs had suddenly needed the special TV adapters to get basic cable. He listened to my tale of woe, having heard it all before, and he said he would call Comcast on my behalf.

Which he did. A day later I received a call from Philadelphia from another and more official sounding Comcast customer service rep. I explained my situation.

She couldn’t change the digital adapter pricing but, by playing with how prices are recorded she could continue offering at least two of my four adapters for free for the next 12 months and give me a credit.

Regarding the Internet service pricing, she also agreed to continue the “promotional” price for another year. Again, she described how she would use some existing fields in the pricing matrix to continue offering me the original agreed-upon price. I pretended to understand. What it sounded like was that Comcast is using existing fields in its financial system to accommodate pricing relief while at the same time enabling original values to be reported, but that’s just a guess on my part.

I had to sigh at all of this, of course. I have to go through all of this again in another year. Verizon FIOS is never going to come to Alexandria, and Google fiber won’t be coming here anytime soon either. Maybe Aereo will be the solution, but who knows?

I took back two of my digital adapters to Comcast anyway. I don’t watch much TV anymore since I have Netflix, Amazon, and Vudu on various devices, and the guest bedroom and basement TVs are rarely used. (Side note: When I got home I found that one of my two remaining digital adapters had been mistakenly de-authorized when I took back the other two, so I had to go through another time consuming session with customer support to get the adapter “re-authorized.”)

In summary, my experience with Comcast over the years has left a bad taste in my mouth:

The Comcast phone sales department will tell you anything to get your business, including “misinforming” you about your bill. I don’t think this is an accident.
“Slamming” by adding unordered items to your bill is a normal business practice. (Streampix was not the first time this has happened to me.)
Requiring digital adapters to decrypt even “basic” cable TV channels has added another layer of DRM enforcement and equipment to go wrong.
Much of Comcast revenue requires customers to not pay close attention to what they are actually paying for.
Equipment rental prices are obscene especially since many of the rented items cannot be purchased. (How much do those crappy digital adapters cost, anyway? $5? $10? And they’re asking $1.99 per month to rent them.)
Salaried local government employees are supplementing Comcast customer support staff. Who is paying for that service?
The games being played to provide discounts and credits to accommodate irate customers makes me seriously question the accuracy and transparency of the monthly printed bill.
Your final pricing with Comcast is as dependent on your negotiating skills as it is on Comcast’s price lists. This leads me to question what Comcast’s actual pricing policies are.
Such shenanigans would not be possible if Comcast didn’t have government sanctioned monopolies throughout the U.S.

My goal eventually is to get rid of cable TV altogether through a combination of antenna and Internet access, but I have no doubt Comcast will continue to shift price increases over to the Internet side of the business to maintain its revenue stream as more people “cut the cord.”

Having to pay for and subsidize so many useless TV channels has long been a source of chagrin. Then having to subsidize layers of administrative and support costs on top of unneeded DRM, error-prone service, and deceptive sales practices is outrageous.

The icing on the cake is that, not only are many local TV channels available over the air for free in high definition, but as I found out recently while experimenting with a makeshift antenna on one of my newer digital TVs, the image quality significantly outshines what I’m getting via cable.

Ain’t monopolies wonderful?

Copyright (c) 2013 by Dennis D. McDonald, Ph.D. Dennis is a Washington DC area consultant specializing in digital strategy, collaborative project management, and new technology adoption. His clients have included the US Department of Veterans Affairs, the US Environmental Protection Agency, Jive Software, the National Library of Medicine, the National Academy of Engineering, Social Media Today and Oracle, and the World Bank Group. His experience includes the management of projects involving the conversion or migration of financial and transaction data associated with large and small systems. Contact Dennis via email atddmcd@yahoo.com or by phone at 703-402-7382.