"We have armies of people whose only job is to handle exceptions..."

Collaboration Consultant [Mike Jones, London] writes:

"I remember a colleague in and consultancy group that I used to work for telling me some enormous percentage of calls to call centres (or is the correct phrase “contact centres” now) are because something has gone wrong. However, they rarely are logged as “complaints” they are just handled. We have armies of people whose only job is to deal with exceptions that if they were captured in a coherent manner could probably be dealt with to stop everyone else suffering the same fate. Of course if you product or company is so dire that it can’t change in response to issues you might as well just give up now!"

Ouch!

Of course this explains why the service desk is no good at providing useful data about the exceptions they encounter - if we were able to identify and fix the exceptions, they would not have anything to do, so we'd pay them less $$$. Yet another reason why outsourcing your support organization can be a non-optimized solution.

Forthcoming: more value creation exercises - (practical thingamy example #2)

Value here - just like the last example - should be an approximate combination of:
- Technology knowledge.
- Client knowledge.
- Constraints knowledge (culture, laws, regulations).
- Practical solutions knowledge.
- Easy matching of the above.
- Seamless execution."

Yeah.

My Guitar Hero 2 wishlist

So the first songs for Guitar Hero 2 are starting to be announced. Here's my wishlist for others:

Stone in Love - Journey
Always With Me, Always With You - Joe Satriani
Back in Black - AC/DC
Owner of a Lonely Heart - Yes
Play Guitar - John Mellencamp
Are You Gonna Go My Way - Lenny Kravitz
Every Day is a Winding Road - Sheryl Crow
Free Fallin' - Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers
Healing Bones - Jules Shear
Walk on the Wild Side - Lou Reed (the bassline, of course)
Where the Streets Have No Name - U2
Gun - Uncle Tupelo

As a bonus, here's the lyrics to Play Guitar.

Z Rocket 4

The Z rocket 4 has twice as much power as the Z rocket 3, the Z rocket 2, and the the Z rocket 1 has. It can do all the things those Z rockets do but it is the fastest Z rocket ever designed by Zebediah Scott Becker aged four and a half.

Z Rocket 3

Another guest post dictated by Zeb:

It has 42 million thousand million bazillion trillion million billion trillion billion million trillian million trillian hundred I mean hundred hundred forty-two twenty and twenty-four more times than Z Rocket 2 does and Z Rocket 1 does (both together). And it has all the stuff that Z Rocket 1 and Z Rocket 2 does but it has more power than any of the rockets ever designed by Zebediah Scott Becker age four and a half.

Z-Rocket, Mark II

More guest blogging from Zeb:

This is liike a regular z rocket but it has a few changes.

it has 6600, million thousand more times power than the regular z rocket does. and it also has windshield wipers. And it has a kind of material ceramic engine booster rockets that won't get affected forever when that type of z rocket wins a race against teh z rocket because um that z rocket has twice that much power. The other type of z rocket against the z rocket. That sure is a lot of power, papa!

Designed by Zebediah Scott Becker, 4 1/2 years old.

(He dictated the whole thing, including the sign-off line.)

Cloud Cult

I was just listening to "6 Days". Yummy! (Several tracks, including that one, are available for free download on their website.)

Zeb's Z-Rocket idea for exploring the universe

Guest blog entry on rocket design for space exploration, as dictated by Zeb:

There are 4062 engines that are this big (spreads hands wide) and there are big glass tubes where you go to sleep until the journey's over and you also get freezed. And you're going to go into hypersleep until the journey's over. And since it's so powerful it can explore other universes and it looks like a yellow base and a red middle and a nasa sign and a Z on the other side and a yellow top. And there's a a cannon in case the aliens are mean and its also magnetic [the cannon] and it can sort of clip onto the gravity. [q: what do you do when you clip onto gravity?] then it pulls you through onto land and the astronauts can explore the planet. This rocket's so fast it can get to a different solar system. It can shoot past Pluto in just sixty minutes and one second.

And now say "By the person Zeb aged 4 almost 4 and a half"

And now I'm ready for you to put my idea on the Internet and send a copy to NASA.

Ok?

Ok.

Bringing "Web 2.0" Concepts to the "Enterprise"

Good stuff here. Why is it easier for me to blog personally to the whole internet than to have a blog about my job to share with the people I work with?

Jeremy Smith's blog: What I Read Over the Weekend: Bringing "Web 2.0" Concepts to the "Enterprise"

Well, the Internet was a-buzzin' with articles, comments, and opinions on bringing 'Web 2.0' concepts 'inside the firewall' i.e. using them in the 'Enterprise' with emphasis on how it all relates to Knowledge Management Tools/Systems.

HandBrake and ffmpegX are essential Mac OS X DVD & video file tools

HandBrake is all you need to take a movie on DVD and rip it to your OS X Mac, just like you use iTunes to rip a music CD.

I repeat, HandBrake is all you need to take a movie that's on DVD and rip it to your OS X Mac, just like you use iTunes to rip a music CD.

If and only if you need to convert some other random video format (Xvid or some random .avi files for instance) to something your Mac can play, then ffmpegX is what you need. Rather geeky interface but if you just select from the presets menu, things will be easy as 1-2-3.

The ffmpegX installation is a 3-parter, you have to download - from provided URLs - some zip files (open-source conversion source libraries) and then point the installer to the files you downloaded. Just read the install screen and you'll be fine.

You can also trivially use these applications to get your video, whether downloaded or ripped from DVD, into a format suitable for use with a Sony PSP (my portable entertainment center of choice at the moment) or a video-capable iPod, or the like. The documentation/howto links on their respective sites do a good job explaining what to do. And it is easy, really.

Documentation links:
The quickest handbrake walkthrough you could want.

Other HandBrake documentation for more specific topics.

Extensive collection of ffmpegX howtos - anything you want to do with ffmpegX, there's a howto document for it.

Enjoy...