Don McCubbrey's Blog

Boarding Pass Innovation

In the what will they think of next category:

Here's the headline:

Cellphones ring up a quick way for fliers to check in

Travelers receive a special bar code that acts as a boarding pass

Here's the link to the article.  I don't think this is all that new.  I seem to remember running across it awhile ago.  Anyway, here it is, and it's interesting:

http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_11649484

My New Year's Resolution

Well, at least one of them.

Maria Bartiromo interviewed US Congressman Barney Frank in the December 10 issue of Business Week.  See Barney Frank on Detroit, Housing, and Executive Pay .  One of their exchanges was this one:

Maria's question:  "Who would be on your short list for czar"?

And Barney's answer:  I don't have a list because nobody's asking me to appoint a czar, and I have this rule: I don't think about things where nobody cares what I think.

"I don't think about things where nobody cares what I think".  I like it, but I'm going to modify it a bit for me:

"I don't express my opinion about things where nobody cares what I think".

This should make for a happier New Year.

Some People Never Learn

The check-in kiosks of US Airways failed at several airports over the weekend.  As of this writing they're still down, resulting in long lines at several airports, including Charlotte, Philadelphia, Boston and Las Vegas, as reported in this story from CNN.Com.  According to airline spokeswoman, Elise Eberwein, the system is a consolidation of the reservation systems of US Airways and America West Airlines, which combined in 2005. "In a conversion of this type, there are so many different platforms, and systems that talk to others systems that talk to other systems," Eberwein said.

It would also help to test a conversion of this type thoroughly before going live with it.  That would have avoided the long lines at the check-in counters and the inconvenience experienced by thousnads of passengers.

Voting Machines

If you join Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) you get a free tee shirt with "Question Technology" on it.  If you have one, this would be a good time to wear it.  I wish more people would seriously question technology instead of just exhibiting blind faith in it.  The  latest example is the fiasco we've had in Colorado over voting machines...whether or not they are reliable and whether or not they can be hacked.   The September 23 Rocky Mountain News has an article on it written by Ann Imse.  Plaintiffs filed a lawsuit urging that voting machines not be used in the November election.  The judge ruled that the "secretary of state did an abysmal job of security testing on new computerized voting machines but it's too late to bar them from the Nov. 7 election".  This morning's paper had couple of stories.  One noted that counties are encouraging voters to vote by absentee ballot.  The other noted that some voting machines in Denver County would be mothballed for the November election.  It said "50 card activators (for voting machines) slated to be decommissioned - at least for the November election - came from Chicago, which sold them at a discount to Denver after a problem- plagued election there in March".  A problem-plagued election in Chicago?  As for Colorado, when are we gonna learn?  It's getting embaressing.  And as for me, I'm voting by absentee ballot!

Another Way to Cut Staff

In a previous post (2/16/06), I reported the way a large corporation told employees they were being downsized.   They were sent a letter that said "You've been invited to participate in the Workforce Management Program."   Today's Wall Street Journal tells how the geniuses at RadioShack handled their staff cutbacks.  According to the article, about 400 "employees at the Fort Worth headquarters received an email Tuesday morning telling them they were being dismissed immediately."  "The work force reduction notification process is currently in process" the notice stated.  "Unfortunately your position is one that has been eliminated." 

Derrick D'Souza, a management professor at the University of North Texas was quoted on Radio Shack's choice of method.  He called it "dehumanizing", and went on to say "If I put myself in (the employee's) shoes, I'd say "Didn't they have a few minutes to tell me (face to face)?  The article concluded with a comment that one of the first actions that the new CEO, Julian Day, took after he joined Radio Shack last month was to "cancel conference calls with analysts to review RadioShack's financial results, an unusual step for public companies." Maybe he'll send out a blast email with whatever it is he would like the analysts to get.

Insights from Alvin Toffler

The FT had an interesting article on Alvin Toffler's "big notion of the moment".  It's in the August 19/20 edition, by Nathan Gardels, and bears the title "He has seen the future".  Of course, we all know that Alvin Toffler and his wife Heidi saw the future quite clearly some 36 years ago when they published Future Shock, followed a few years later by The Third Wave.  The thing that struck me about the FT piece was Toffler's comment that "new technologies are enabling the radical fusion of the producer and consumer into the "prosumer".  And that, of course, is what the Global Text project is all about.  The consumers of texts are the ones who are creating and maintaining them.  Toffler goes on to say that "Even in the US, institutions out of synch with each other are caught in a "clash of speeds" between the old system and the new.  Standardized education is among the slowest institutions to adapt.  If you were a cop monitoring the speed of cars going by, you would clock the car of business, which changes rapidly under competitive pressures, at 100mph.  But the car of education, which is supposedly preparing the young for the future, is only going at 10mph".   Global Text  will help get education up to speed by enabling prosumers to keep text content current.  (One can only wonder if traditional businesses serving the education community will adapt.)  By way of illustration, my colleague, Rick Watson, noted that "Wikipedia’s opening two sentences for Pluto when accessed on August 25, 2006 reads: Pluto is a dwarf planet in the solar system.  It was classified as a planet until it was determined on August 24, 2006 that it is not a true planet".  Now that's going 100mph!

 

Software Creates "Executive Summaries"

You probably do this too.  A lot of busy people do.  Whenever I can, I'll opt out of non-essential meetings and ask a colleague to give me an executive summary.  It works.  I'm kept up to date and I usually haven't missed much.

Now comes software that will prepare an executive summary of e-documents.  Four packages are described in Paul Taylor's article "Automatic summaries within seconds" in the June 23 issue of the Financial Times.  The four packages he discusses are:  Copernic Summarizer, Summarize!, Pertinence Summarizer, and Sinope Summarizer.  Just to give you an idea of how one of them works, and they all seem to work, I'll quote from the article:

"Copernic Summarizer, which costs $60 to download, works with any Microsoft Word document, Adobe PDF file, e-mail message, or with text from the "cut and paste" clipboard to create a summary of any length.  It uses a combination of advanced statistical and linguistic algorithms to pinpoint the key concepts of a text and extracts the most relevant sentences to produce a condensed version."  Paul Taylor gave Summarizer a test drive and was impressed with the results.  I think I'll give one of them a try too.  Could save lots of time.

So Why Don't They Listen?

It amazes me how executives ignore news they don't want to hear.  We saw this with the Colorado Benefits Management System (see earlier posts) where executives with project oversight responsibility did not act on the written warnings of Maximus, the Independent  Verification and Validation contractor, that the project was headed for the ditch.  Now we read that US Veterans Administration officials ignored repeated warnings from cybersecurity experts that their security procedures were inadequate.  As I'm sure you've read, a VA employee took a laptop home which contained personal information on some 26.5 million veterans and their spouses.   The laptop was stolen.  Veterans were not notified that they could become victims of identity theft for six weeks!  According to an article in the June 14 issue of Computerworld, "The GAO has issued multiple reports about VA cybersecurity problems since 2000, and the VA has received a failing grade in four of the past five years on an annual cybersecurity review by the House Government Reform Committee." 

Sorry, I just don't get it.

   

New Media

The Economist had another one of their great surveys in the April 22nd issue, "A survey of new media."
By now you know how to find it online.   Much of the message was how Internet communities are cooperating to create new forms of online media.  Examples discussed are podcasts, wikis. blogs, and the like.  They do a nice job of contrasting wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica.  I guess the reason I liked it is that it reinforced some of the foundational thinking behind the Globaltext project discussed in the previous post..........that, in essence, we can create better textbooks because "no one is as smart as everyone."  One of the quotes in the survey I particularly liked was this one from Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine and author of "The Long Tail" (required reading!).  He said "We are entering an age of cultural richness and abundant choice that we've never seen before in history.  Peer production is the most important industrial force of our time."

Podcasting for the Classroom. Dangerous Blogs

The current issue of Diverse Issues in Higher Education  contains a well-written article by Lydia Lum on what is going on with podcasts in the classroom.  In this case, it's focused on how podcasts can enhance students' classroom experiences on issues related to diversity and globalization.  It has a few quotes on some of the techniques I've played around with in my classes in the Daniels College of Business at DU.  Please see "The Power of Podcasting.  The same issue of the magazine has an article on Meg Spohn's unfortunate experience with DeVry University in suburban Denver.  She was fired for some innocuous postings on her blog which someone in DeVry's administration was not pleased with.  A couple of colleagues and I met with Meg and neither she nor we are aware of what caused the displeasure.  The author of "Blogging Rights" is not aware of the problem post either, since DeVry officials "did not return calls seeking comment".