You can tell a lot about people by what they collect. For instance, when I was a teen, one of the ways that I would learn about the party host was to rummage through their stack of LPs. It said something about the guy’s personality if he had B.B.King and Hendrix albums on the top of the pile, vs. Donovan and K.C. and the Sunshine Band.

As I got older, I would look through the books on the shelf. Dozens of heavily thumbed sci-fi pocket-books paints a different picture of personality than does 1000-page romantic epics (like The Thornbirds) stacked like bricks next to the bed.

Even in today’s electronic world, books remain an interesting indicator of personality. Business books are among the standard fixtures on the credenza of many of the business executives I know. The giant lettering screaming at you from the glossy dust-covers seem to be the sine qua non of the mahogany set. Often, my executive colleagues are sporting the latest just-off-the-press hardcover by the guru of the moment. Smiling at us from the back-page vanity photo, these authors extol us that our mission is in REENGINEERING THE CORPORATION, but we have to take on the SEVEN HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PEOPLE as go IN SEARCH OF EXCELLENCE but to be careful about CROSSING THE CHASM or else we may reach the TIPPING POINT.

The Cream of the Business Press?

I read many of these kinds of popular business press books while I was studying for my MBA. As my studies were part-time and took 5-years to complete, I saw more than a few ideas come and go. New theories would contradict (or at least displace) the old ones. Firms that were highlighted for their ‘excellence’ were a few years later bankrupt and out of business. Authors which were lauded on talk shows for their brilliant insight were soon in the shadows of obscurity. Few of the ideas stood the test of time. I am not saying that their is nothing to learn from those that study the nature of economics and commerce. But the track-record of the popular business press is poor.

Some Non-Business Books on Business

I am a technology executive and I too do a lot of reading about business. However, I rarely read business books. In fact, I believe some of the best ideas on the subject is in the realm of evolutionary science, psychology and in human history. In my reading of evolution (through such brilliant authors as Richard Dawkins, Robert Wright and Jonathan Weiner) I have learned about game theory, competition/collaboration, the interplay of genotype/phenotype, envorionmental fit, adaptation and human psychology. Douglas Hofstadter, Roger Penrose and Steven Pinker have taught me about the fundamental building blocks of the mind and how they form culture, morals, behaviours and norms. Through my study of conflict and military history (by such authors as John Keegan, Sun Tzu, Anthony Beavor) and the history of innovation/trade/economics (by Daniel Boorstin, Mark Kurlansky, Pierre Burton) reveal the manifestation of our evolutionary and psychological makeup in the interplay of leadership, technology, passion, risk taking and the pursuit of security, status and wealth.

The ideas in these books speak to the fundamental nature of who we are, how we interact with one another and the ways we can make our living in the world. Isn’t that what business is all about?

I am ‘tech support’ for my parents and in-laws. Whenever I travel to Winnipeg to visit them, I spend hours installing drivers, purging spam, defragmenting disks, installing printers and memory, etc. etc. 

During my last visit, my mother-in-law was telling me something about her ‘computer’. It took me a moment but then I realized she was actually talking about her CRT monitor. To her,  the monitor was the computer. That is because that is the part that she looks at. The glowing screen is where she receives feedback on her keyboard and mouse inputs and see the resulting outputs. She doesn’t interact with the grey box full of boards, wires and spinning disks — it is irrelevant to what she is trying to accomplish. To her (as to many people) the input/output transducers are the computer.

My mother-in-law’s cognitive model of computing brought to mind a time in the 90’s where I worked with a group of user-interface geniuses at the University of Toronto.  I was a research manager funding and promoting the work of professors, students and staff working on multi-disciplinary projects within the departments of computer science, engineering, sociology and psychology.  These folks were creating the intellectual framework for many of the user interfaces that we use today.

Hiroshi Ishii working the Active Desk at the Ontario Telepresence Project

I worked closely with a team that was on the forefront of what was then called Computer Supported Collaborative Work.  The Ontario Telepresence Project  built and experimented with numerous computing, audio and video systems to enable collaboration at a distance. It was there, years before the Internet became part of our society’s fabric, that I learned about distance collaboration through videoconferencing and computing systems.

Another one of my favourite groups were the Neural Networks guys.  This eclectic bunch were exploring how to create dynamic, adaptive computing systems which simulated how our brains learn.  Their research accomplishments were many, but among the most evocative for me was student Sidney Fels’ Glove Talk II.

Listen to the Hand (click for 30-second movie)

In Sidney’s own words:

GloveTalkII is a system that translates hand gestures to speech through an adaptive interface. Hand gestures are mapped continuously to ten control parameters of a parallel formant speech synthesizer. The mapping allows the hand to act as an artificial vocal tract that produces speech in real time. This gives an unlimited vocabulary in addition to direct control of fundamental frequency and volume. Currently, the best version of Glove-TalkII uses several input devices (including a Cyberglove, a ContactGlove, a three space tracker, and a foot pedal), a parallel formant speech synthesizer, and three neural networks. One subject has trained to speak intelligibly with Glove-TalkII. He speaks slowly but with far more natural sounding pitch variations than a text-to-speech syntesizer. 

It is incredible to think that this ground-breaking work was done 15-years ago and only now are gesture-based inputs finding their way into the marketplace.  Apple’s iPod with it’s gesture control is only the most famous example of many new products in this field.

I believe that increased processor speeds, miniturization and mobilitiy are important factors in bringing the benefits of information technology to our society.  But we will also need innovative, adaptive, intuitive user-interfaces which fit the way we work and interact.

Over the years I have notice an interesting pattern in the way that innovations enter the marketplace. A technology that is intended for one purpose often finds greater utility and appeal in a completely different context.  The examples are many (the telephone, TNT, the gramophone, Teflon, and so on) and there is even a body of research on the subject.

Sometimes an innovative idea finds re-application in a market with diametrically opposed purposes to the one in which it was conceived. This week, I came upon an eye-brow arching example of this while I was researching telehealth solutions.

Dr. Mark Ombrellaro got impatient while awaiting FDA approval for a telehealth haptic system that enables a physician to remotely perform a physical examination of a patient.  This vascular surgeon developed a telehealth-enabled vest. A clinician using specially instrumented gloves moved their hands to teleoperate the remote vest. Through hand-gestures, the specialist would trigger the inflation or deflation of pneumatic cells on the vest to simulate a hands-on-body examination. So far, so good.

Irony: incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result.

– Merriam-Webster Dictionary

However, getting a healthcare product into the market requires enormous time and effort. Not content to fritter away the months and years while his patent for the telemedicine system worked it’s way through the health care bureaucracy, he turned to his brother who worked at a VP of Sales & Marketing at a gaming company. Together, they re-implemented the idea (with some interesting modifications) as a force-feedback device for first-person shooter games.

Click above to watch a geek get capped

The telehealth vest was altered so that it works with popular PC-based video games of the shooting, driving, monster-killing variety.  The user puts the vest on together with an optional helmet and jacks into the control unit. The control unit connects to the PC. Then, when your character in an on-line game gets jostled, bumped or shot, you get a “pneumatic thump” to the appropriate area on your torso or head.

Bang, bang, thump, thump, you’re dead. 

What is interesting here is that a device that was originally intended to help care for people, has been subverted to one which simulates hurting people. The market is bigger and the commercial returns are likely better than the original idea.

The irony is delicious.

With only the odd break, I have been a jogger for over 25 years.  I don’t go far and I don’t go fast but I am regular. Four to five times a week I slip on my running shoes and hit the street (or basement treadmill in the winter).  Some of the many things I like about jogging is that it takes little in fancy equipment, you can do it any time, you don’t have to go somewhere or book something to do it, it’s simple, and you don’t have to be seen wearing some mega corporation logo (which I hate to do).  So, I  surprised myself earlier this week when I let myself get sucked into buying a matching electronic pedometer when I purchased a new pair of sneakers. Not just any pedometer, but one from the marketing monsters Nike and Apple.

Peek-a-Boo, I see You

Having bought the gizmo spontaneously without my usual compulsive pre-purchase research on the internet, I spent some time shortly after my first workout to see what’s what with the product.  Cutting through the marketing clutter, I came across a real eye-opener.  Shortly after it’s launch, some enterprising young engineers from the University of Washington figured out that the device had some serious security flaws. They figured out that the transmitter did not establish an encrypted channel to the receiver, that the transmitter would send signals even though the receiver was not in range and that multiple transmitters could be detected by a single receiver.  Using low-cost electronics equipment, they hacked the receiver so that could pick up any transmitter in range and display the transmitter’s unique ID on a computer.

$200 Distributed Surveillance System

Not content with a single short-range detector, then hooked up some cheap electronics to a linux board and added a WiFi wireless antenna (total cost < $200) so that they could show how a bad-guy could deploy lots of these things around a campus and detect nike+iPod transmitters as they came in range.  Finally, to add salt to the wound, they constructed a website that displays the whereabouts of all the nike+iPod transmitters detected by their grid of WiFi devices onto a Google Map. The result of this exploit is a poor-man’s surveillance system that can track and trend where you are and where you have been.

A lot of attention has been paid to the privacy issues associated with unsecured 802.11 networks, RFID tags and open Bluetooth networks.  These clever kids from Seattle have demonstrated that even proprietary consumer wireless devices can present a security nightmare in the wrong hands. This cautionary tale should give us folks in the telehealth business pause. We have to think about the security posture of the many wireless telehomecare bio-telemetry devices that will be pouring into the market in the coming years. What do we need to do to insure that the data from these devices never finds their way onto a Google Map?

For more information on the hack, see: http://tinyurl.com/ufq5c .

“Please be Patient As the monitors take a few moments to respond” said the stewardess with the French Canadian accent.

The instruction was buried in the usual bi-lingual set of pre-flight instructions as I sat on the tarmac in Toronto. I, like most passengers, was only semi-listening to the tiresome drill on airplane safety and etiquette. I would guess that few (if any) people really pay attention to the prattle, each of us anxious to get going. It was the new seat-back entertainment system she was talking about. The touch sensitive flat-screen, thin-client monitors that are to keep you mesmerized and passive for hours.

Technotards

My fellow passenger’s impatience with his personal entertainment system must not have been unique as the air line took the decision to include the operating advice into every flight attendant’s pre-flight soliloquy. Now that is interesting. I started speculating on the series of events that must have happened to compel them to do this.

Galling Inconvenience

My day-dream concludes with Management reluctantly having to accept the user-interface problem as unsolvable technically. They resort to having to deal with it by changing pre-flight processes to include the advice to passengers. Now, advice to be patient with the lethargic entertainment system must be repeated hundreds of times a day across Canada. Thousands of times a month. Tens of thousands of times a year. The inconvenience of this must be galling to the airlines Customer Service team.

The lesson? While this problem falls under the ‘nuisance’ category, it is indicative of problems that I have seen again and again. Technology without usability is crippled. There is no substitute for testing and evaluation of a system by the actual end-users to uncover faults. So, for the foreseeable future, passengers across Canadian airspace will be busy boinking and being boinked.

One of a handful of memorable ideas that I picked up through my MBA is that consumers are driven by two key motivators: fear and greed. While a bit pessimistic about the human condition, I have found that this simple model explains a large percentage of the economic behavior of consumers in the western world.

Click on image above for campy video clip

The latest example of the application of the fear/greed model came early this week, when I and a small number of folks from OTN had a half-day visit to firm that specialized in the emergency response for the elderly. Learning how to grow and professionalize OTN’s technical services is a priority for me and my managers. In the interest of learning how others have made this transition, this visit was organized by our Director of HR who use to work for this firm. I won’t mention the name of the firm (let’s call them CantGetUp), but the Canadian headquarters is located only a couple of kilometers from OTN’s shiny new Toronto office. It was an educational and thought-provoking meeting/tour and I left with my head spinning with ideas.

Personal Help Button

Some background… CantGetUp was originally a North American firm but it was recently bought by a European healthcare giant. Their business model is refreshingly simple. CantGetUp provides subscribers (typically seniors living at home or in retirement residences) an easy-to-use personal response service that lets them summon help any time of the day or night. There are a number of devices they deploy in the home, but the showcase one is a call-button designed to look like a piece of jewelry. The “Personal Help Button” is worn on a wristband or pendant. When pressed, the call button communicates wirelessly to a base-station that is connected to the subscriber’s home phone. A message goes out the phone-lines to one of two Response Centres (Toronto and Montreal). The answering agent then responds in a number of ways including calling the subscriber, calling a neighbor/relative or even dispatching an ambulance.The US organization has over half a million subscribers and the Canadian one about 10% of that number. CantGetUp has 200 employees across Canada with about 90 of them working for the Response Centre.The value proposition to the consumer is stunningly simple and the service model straightforward enough to have earned CantGetUp something like 80% of the market for this service. As for profitability, the global healthcare giant doesn’t publish the details, but the 2005 SEC filing of the US branch of the company (prior to acquisition) reported $150M in revenue and $18M in annual profit.

Millions of Alarms

One of the eye-openers was how they staffed, organized and operate their 7/24 Response Centre. These 90 folks handle 1.4 million alarms a year (!). Many day-time alarms are not emergencies (low battery, lost pendant, etc.). However, most night-time alarms are indeed emergencies. Unlike OTN’s high staff retention for technical staff, CantGetUp has something like a 40% turnover rate of Response Centre agents. Thus, they had to develop systems where all their technical and service knowledge is codified and written in formal procedures and is delivered to their agents via a comprehensive training program. They have a dedicated trainers and training centres at each facility where agents systematically go through a program of learning and mentorship to ensure they have the skills necessary for various roles. Over time, agents advance from qualification to qualification and are thus able to take on different skills-based roles.

Service Optimization

Another notable operational structure they have put in place is a Service Optimization department. This group of about 10 people focuses on process design, implementation, monitoring and mentoring. Motivated by six-sigma approaches to quality, their holistic approach to service optimization was inspirational.

Since OTN’s service offering is far more complex (technically and operationally) than that of CantGetUp, our service design will necessarily be different than theirs. However, there are many similarities between our firms where their approaches could help us. Setting aside base motivations such as fear and greed, I was glad to have an opportunity to study a firm that has made the transition from small to big and to have done it so well. This visit underlined the importance of taking the time to learn from the experiences of others as OTN grows.

One of my guilty pleasures is the leisurely breakfast. The best ones include fresh ground coffee (grinding the beans just before you brew), a breakfast pastry and a fat stack of daily newspapers to read. The newspaper part is key. We are voracious readers, my wife and I. We subscribe to two daily newspapers and get a few weeklies as well. Saturdays’ are the best – there is no rush to get out the door and the papers are especially thick, testing the breaking strength of the elastic bands that keep them from exploding on my front porch.

With this morning’s stack of papers at my elbow, and a steaming java in my fist, my eyes drifted from article to article forgetting the fluffy stuff seconds after reading them. I was leafing through the careers section of the Globe when my eye fell on a small ad on the bottom of one of the back pages. It was an ad for a firm looking for COBOL programmers.

COBOL?

Now for those readers who are too young to know, COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language) was developed in 1959 and is one of the earliest high-level programming languages. Wikipedia says that it was designed to run administrative and business applications and the key developers were the US government and big military contractors. Ironically, it was originally proposed by a group that called itself The Short Range Committee which was formed to recommend a quick approach to a common business language.

Even when I was in university in the 80’s, COBOL was the butt of jokes and much derision. COBOL programming was a domain of the aged, linear-thinking programmers who typically came to their profession from the faculties of Math, Physics, etc. — without the benefit of modern computer science education. It was a programming back-water, using ancient technology and methodologies, always presenting barriers to integration.

Core Dump

The ad made me think. Here we are nearly 50-years later and the marketplace is still looking for people that have the ability to “analyze computer core dumps” and are “proficient in JCL” (Job Control Language). This must be a very small, expensive and dwindling pool of people that the recruiter is trying to attract. It reads more like a desperate plea than a job ad.

Reflecting on this with leasure that only Saturday morning can bring, I thought of the systems we are building at OTN (both software and hardware). What will our systems be like to support in 10-years — never mind 50? While true that technology can have a very short life-cycle, the opposite is also often true. Are we building systems that are supportable in the long-run or, encouraged to “just get ‘er done”, are we pushing a major headache to the next generation of computer professional? There is no question that we must be quick to satisfy the clinical and operational need of our customers (internal and external). Responsiveness and innovation are highly valued. But in the light of this advertisement for computer professionals knowledgeable in technology developed by a Short Range Committee, I think we must also look to the long-term. The solutions we develop today will be the legacy systems of tomorrow. For everyone’s sake, we have to be sure to create solutions which will stand the test of time.
More information at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobol