Kathryn Howard

Check out the video of the ITSMF Australia NSW Q2 2011 seminar.

We had FUN!

Today I was reminded by a smile and well-wishing for my evening, to document the "concierge who cares".

One of the concierge staff in my office building goes above and beyond the requirement of his job description.

Firstly, he's a lovely man who joyously greets the building workers at the beginning and end of every day. There was a gap of 6 months between my assignments in this building and he even remembered me as if I'd never left!

Apart from helping my vanity, how is he above and beyond?

The office building is directly next door to a major tourist attraction. There was, until recently, a considerable building construction zone. Identifying the tourist entry was difficult. I have observed him on several occasions directing tourists to the appropriate entry.

The other redirection he offers is more surprising. Prior the refurb of the building (2 years) a major public service department was housed here. Occasionally people wander in looking for the previous department. Our ever-friendly concierge has city maps, a highlighter pen, and redirects people to where they need to go to the relocated department.

The latter behaviour I've observed at least twice while waiting for a friend in the foyer.

I should also add, that this is in Australia - the concierge receives no tip for doing what he does.

An excellent display of great customer service!

I've complained about Australia Post before about failing to deliver parcels to my apartment. They've just lowered the bar.

I've a typical apartment letterbox which is too small for the postie to insert any parcel. A fact of inner city living.

I'm often working at home and my previous annoyance has been that said postie never attempts to buzz the apartment. Usually, they put a notice in the letterbox and run away.

It's at this point I often recall as a preschooler bounding to the garden gate to welcome our twice daily visiting, friendly, bicycle riding postman for a chat. That was in the days when the delivering postman would accept any letters you needed to post also. He was a very nice man. A few years later when he passed my school he would always give me a wave. Is it only me that remembers those halcyon days when people took pride in their work?

My most recent australia post parcel experience was worse than the usual cut and run. No notice was left. I had no idea there was a parcel to be delivered until I was sent a final notice for collection. The rather gruff notice gave me 7 days to pick up the item from the post office or it would be returned to sender.

Luckily I could get to the post office within the time permitted to retrieve my parcel.

This is indeed very poor service and hard to imagine how much worse it can get. No wait, yes I can. The final notice card would be sent after they've returned the parcel to the sender!

There's no point in complaining to Australia Post. Once upon a time I did that - nothing changed - and my complaint wasn't even acknowledged. My former postie in his great heavenly GPO would be saddened.

So now I just tell friends and acquaintances about my poor service, and we console each other with similar tales.

Thanks for listening.

The "Service Catalogue" has been around a long time. Which Ronnie is your organisation?

Most would probably agree that the new Westfield complex on Pitt St mall Sydney is bright, shiny, and very stylish. It's choc-a-block with designer label stores - small on stock and very large on price.

I'm not quite sure who's shopping there. Most of it would be a bit rich for your average Sydney office worker. Perhaps it's the tourists.

But regardless of whether you're actually buying, you probably want to navigate to stores of interest rather than aimlessly wandering and being blinded by the floor tiles.

So what do you do? You proceed to the nearest directory. Not wanting premature blindness, that's what I did.

I was expecting a large board with a colour-coded, numbered store list to be cross referenced on a map sporting a "You are here" sticker.

This traditional form of directory has been supplanted with a touch screen. You select your store or category after which a graphic figure shows the directions to walk through the virtual shopping centre.

It was all very swish but there is a definite downside. Only one person can use this electronic directory at any one time. The traditional directory can accommodate as many people as can stand in front of it simultaneously.

Do people really sit around thinking up new technology just to replace manual systems without identifying extra value or the benefit to be had? Do they say to themselves "that's nice but if I applied technology it would be cool". The sad thing is, apparently so.

Technology is supposed to be an enabler - making things more accessible, not less! If you want to be both cool and accessible, perhaps an iphone app to supplement a traditional directory would be a better idea.

Whoever that geek was - why did Westfield listen to them?

I just got around to posting the youtube video of the itsmfa conference this year. It was informative and fun. Next year's is in Perth.

I've decided to start a project to critique and potentially rework most of the ITIL diagrams.

Unfortunately many of them, although well meaning and necessary, tend to have been written by practitioners not schooled in graphicacy and break a lot of the gestalt laws - making them hard to interpret.

The purpose of diagrams is to aid human communication. Sometimes diagrams are just not necessary - text may be a perfectly appropriate medium to communicate the idea/s in question.

I've decided to work though the a lifecycle books beginning with the Service Strategy book. The target items will include "tables" because these are also graphical representations.

I will choose my first rework subject this weekend.

If anyone has a specifically hated ITIL diagram/table they wish to offer for review or has a revised version please respond to the blog and we can publish and discuss it.

I look forward to the challenge.

I regularly watch the ABC1 7pm news broadcast and usually pay attention to the weather bulletin to, either confirm my belief of today's weather, or to prepare for weather conditions of the morrow.

Much to my surprise last Sunday when I viewed the national weather chart of capital cities, Sydney was missing. However Lord Howe Is. was present to represent the state of NSW.

Did the majority of 4.5m of Sydney residencies suddenly get the idea to go native and relocate? The few hundred inhabitants of Lord Howe Is, whose size is 10 x 2 km, would be feeling rather overwhelmed I expect. Indeed the island would probably sink!

So let's assume Sydney is still the most populous city in NSW. It certainly looked that way to me on my journeys to work over the last week.

The obvious assumption is somone has missed with the mouse and "Auntie" has stuffed up in attention to detail yet again. The really poor thing however is that LH Is. first appeared last Sunday night and tonight, Saturday - 6 days later, LH Is. is still the capital of NSW!

I emailed "media watch" on Thursday because I thought this couldn't pass unnoticed.

I await the Sunday news bulletin - will they have picked up the gaff? Probably not. It's a weekend after all and I expect it will take an executive of the ABC to watch "media watch" to discover the error.

What has this to do with service management you ask. Everything. The service to be provided was an accurate weather report and it failed. The SLA with the public failed to be met because of poor attention to detail. Service management 101 tells us this.

The quality of production values for the ABC1 news bulletins is in decline. There are often issues with video or audio links, or the failure of cue cards, plus there's the corny scriptwriter that needs to be shot.

Let us see if Lord Howe Is. continues to the capital of NSW into it's 2nd week and how long this error will be perpetrated.

From the misfortunes of a colleague, I was recently introduced to a new error that beats the good old PC "blue screen of death" hands down.

There has been much complaint about Microsoft's Vista - indeed ever since it appeared in beta. Mostly the arguments have been around lack of compatibility and drivers. I will now add stability/reliability to the list.

The trigger for a fatal crash displaying "catastrophic failure" was plugging in an external USB drive. Ironically this was for the purpose of backup.

There was no ability to restore service from this crash. The only options available were to run diagnostics and review the setup. It wouldn't even boot off a CD! After consulting with IT support it was also determined not to be hardware related.

How can a non-hardware related crash be so bad that the only recovery was to reformat?

I wouldn't have believed this except I saw it.

Information Technology has been around for several decades now, why is the quality of product so low? Why, in the race to market, are such high levels of bugginess acceptable.

Perhaps it's because the technology manufacturers can get away with it. Customers seem to accept it as the norm. But then maybe this is only because there's not really any choice - yes Mac's and Apple have their issues too.

Will there be a tipping point when the people revolt and throw their technology in the bin and revert to pen and paper?

As each year (no, each day) passes we become more tied to our technology in so many ways. So consensual rejection of technology is not likely to happen, but I do wonder that there is no end. Technology is organically evolving and continuing to look more and more like star trek - the ipad first appeared in Deep Space 9, didn't it.

The vision of a remote island (or even the garden shed) with no computer, phones and certainly no ipod, is a delight reserved only for the very few and then very briefly on a holiday - unless you plan of becoming a Tibetan monk.

So in the pursuit of survival and happiness we work with what we have.

Sensibly the said colleague reformatted and installed Windows 7 much to the relief of all those attempting to provide support. Not that windows 7 is by any means perfect, but it does have drivers for most mainstream devices and I'm hoping some of the bad lessons of vista have been learnt and applied to this OS.

What can I say, "change is inevitable - except from a vending machine" Robert C. Gallagher

Are you constantly forgetting to buy that bottle of milk on the way home or make that birthday call to aunt Sarah? Or have you committed the unforgivable of missing an anniversary?

Postit notes have served us well for many years as that short-term memory jogger. Any office, home or corporate, is a silent testament to their use with most people's PC screens adorned with at least one sticky note.

The sticky notes applet appeared some years ago and I recall being not that much impressed by it and promptly forgot it. It's now part of windows 7 and "techrepublic" brought it back to my attention.

With the ever increasing busyness of our lives and the constant demands diverting our immediate attention, yellow stickies have become an institution and an important enabler to getting on with our lives. But they do have a risk factor: "write once, lose many times".

As I reflect on my engagement with the written word in the last 2 years I observe a major evolution in my practices. I read books, yes, but unless it's a major text, I do a lot of my reading on electronic devices. I have noted that my handwriting has gone to pot because I rarely write any more. I type into an electronic device - usually my laptop, which has become my most important business-critical possession. I don't even write a shopping list, I type it.

So it's time to embrace electronic "sticky notes". I know I've decided to.

Follow the link in the title to techrepublic's article in tips on how to use and customise it.

• there is a total disconnect between the front-line customer staff and the back-office technical support staff resulting in the guys on the floor left to fend for themselves as best they can with angry, disillusioned and disempowered customers
  
• Totally unacceptable SLA's, e.g., 72+ hours to fix a sim porting number problem!


• Attempting to offer value add services when they can't even get the basics right

To be fair, Telstra isn't the only telco to blame for the extremely poor standard of service. I've had just as poor experiences in procuring Optus products over the years.

But Australia is in a telco duopoly who own 80% of the market between them. There are other telcos but the nearest only has 10% market share (no prizes for knowing who that is) and the rest vie for the remaining share. This bottom 20% have little or no infrastructure of their own and are forced to onsell Telstra and Optus products and services. Somewhere between a rock and a hard place you might say.

Boys and girls, we are prisoners of whatever the top 2 telco's deem to be service. All I can say is thank god I update my phone only every 3 years or so.

My broadband may need attention before then though - heavy sigh. Maybe I'll have some valium before I attempt that one.