Category: the information world

Posted on

Information as power zone in customer relations

We are reminded constantly of the power of interconnected tools to allow all of us to share information in real time, improving efficiency and enabling companies to connect with customers. In some ways this is undeniable but the ability to network also creates a new category of information, which when considered from a user’s perpsective, is partially useless, aggravating and even misleading.

UPS provide a great example of this at the moment. Currently struggling to move packages backlogged in Dallas (again) they provide numersous ways for customers to track and receive updates on the status of their items. Similarly, they usually allow sellers like Amazon to directly link into their tracking system so customers can access information at the point of purchase. So, no longer just waiting, shoppers can ostensibly track the progress of their packages acriss the country from source to destination. The trouble here is that UPS, once it has issued initial tracking info, does not actually update this information reliably and predictably, and makes it quite difficult to ask further questions.

Items backlogged this week are sitting in what UPS euphamistically term ‘exception’ status, and are tagged with the stock message that the anticipated delay is ‘one business day’. This day comes and goes and the update never changes. Some reports online indicated delays of more than 10 business days without this message ever being updated, and there is speculation that once in ‘exception’ status, your package is the lowest priority as the company tries to maintain its on-time record up with fresher shipments that have not yet hit a lag. UPS allows you to request updates but all this does (after asking for your email address again) is send you that same old message, nothing new. So yes, they provide online tracking but it is not real-time, not useful, and allows you little chance of estimating reliably when you may actually receive an item. One might consider this an information gap.

Of course, the beauty of the web is that one need not just accept this. The aptly named ‘pissed off consumer‘ contains numerous postings about the problems of UPS and their rather poor customer relations, including numbers to call. Some of the stories here are excrutiating. I tried contacting the company who sold me the item I am waiting for and they at least managed to get more info from UPS than I could. Most distressing for many online was that UPS knew days ago that anything entering the Dallas area was just going to pile up but they still accepted the orders, even with expedited shipping fees from late Xmas shoppers.This much one could determine with a little exploration online. Unfortunately, despite the supposed democratization of the web, too few sellers allow the buyer to choose preferred carriers, or else I suspect UPS would be in real difficulty in Texas and its serviced areas.

All this information power is potentially impressive for the companies perhaps but from a consumer side the black hole of holding patterns one ends up in quickly after the initial update is a guaranteed source of frustration. It may even be that the lack of tracking info from the start would be better than what is on offer here. Suddenly, the idea of network tracking seems less informative than it might be and the old power differential between informed and uninformed is magnified. Real world information and real world people seem mismatched. Unintended consequences of IT, again?

Posted on

ASIST really goes international

The first ASIST annual meeting under the new, non-national affiliation was held last week in beautiful Montreal and it was a raging success. Not only was the content much improved but the spirit of fun that emerged last year in hurricane-blasted Baltimore was sustained and enhanced. For me, the year was about internationalization and while the name change was important, the proof was in the attendance. By the start of the conference we knew 38 countries would be represented, a major increase over previous years, with attendees from as far away as Australia, Brazil, China, Ethiopia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Israel, Jamaica, Japan, Korea, Kuwait, Malaysia, New Zealand, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, Taiwan, Trinidad and Tobago. We had 40 attendees from various European countries and 89 from Canada. It was a pleasure to meet so many and to turn the attendee numbers back up into positive territory after several years of decline (we passed the 600 mark once walk-in registrations were counted). Kudos to the program committee and to the local help provided by the School of Information Studies at McGill who put in a lot of effort here, culminating in a fabulous dinner celebrating CAIS and ASIST at the university’s Faculty Club on Tuesday evening. If anything, the program suggests we need to think again about adding in Wednesday to the conference program, there is just too much happening in the evenings to get to everything. Regardless, this was the best ASIST conference in years, and the stage is set to move further into international leadership in the years ahead.

Posted on

Hooverpalooza at the iSchool

On Monday evening we hosted an event celebrating Gary Hoover’s appointment here as Entrepreneur in Residence (are we the first? Probably….Have we the best? Certainly). I anticipated a gathering but was not quite prepared for the almost 200 members of the Austin entrepreneurial community who came to discover the wonders of our school. Superb support from our staff and students enabled us to dazzle folks with demos of the IX Lab, the Digital Archaeology Lab, touchscreen document management systems and more. If ever a group of people seemed to spontaneously celebrate information, innovation and enterprise, this was it.  Check the pics here.

 

Posted on

Trumping the Trump

So Donald Trump imagines he can influence the presidential election by requesting college and passport records from Obama (and THIS is what he told us would be a major scoop?). Seems he is less than willing to provide his own records, at least according to The Guardian’s story today. The paper asked him for his equivalent records and the request was declined – but only after further bluffing when the records were offered in a direct swap with the journalist’s own records. Well, same Guardian reporter agreed to do just that…..only then for Trump spokesman to declare the request ‘stupid’.  Well, at least one part of that exchange was correct. One has to feel sympathy with journalists — imagine drawing this story as your beat on the election trail. ‘Farce’ is too limiting a descriptor but who would imagine such information would ever be such a focus of public attention?

Posted on

ASIST name change?

The latest ASIST Bulletin contains a challenging column by the President, Diane Sonnewald, relating to the name of the society. In short, she suggests that we might seriously consider retaining the acronym (ASIST) but allow for broader participation internationally by switching American Society to another term e.g. ASsociation for Information Science and Technology. I never liked the addition of T for technology to ASIS back in 2000 but I do feel that the time is right to adopt a more internationalist stance through our name (when on the board in 2002-4, I suggested we grab the name ISIST to cover the eventual internationalization of the society but I prefer the current idea of keeping us ASIST).

You can find the column, and engage in ongoing discussions on this topic online until May 1st by visiting QuickTopic. And of course you can find the ASIST Bulletin in full here.

Posted on

Symantec Ranks Cities for Cybercrime

Symantec this week released a study that purports to rank US cities in terms of their risk for cybercrime. The full report offers a ranking of the top 50, and might at first blush give you pause if you live in the one of the top 10:

1 Seattle, W A
2 Boston, MA
3 Washington,
4 San Francisco, CA
5 Raleigh, NC
6 Atlanta, GA
7 Minneapolis, MN
8 Denver, CO
9 Austin, TX
10 Portland, OR

Of course, a little closer reading of the study reveals a highly positive correlation between rank and Wifi hotspots per population density, amount spent on computers and internet access, and frequency of use. Symantec, hardly a dispassionate observer of network security trends, confirms that where people use the Net more often, there are more security problems. Thanks for that folks.

The study is not all common sense though. The full report does list estimates per city for such variables as expenditure, daily use, online purchasing, and broadband connectivity. So, you can ask yourself why, for example, people in Virginia Beach spend up a storm online compared to the good folks of Detroit. Not quite enough here to give the Pew Internet Life project a run for its money but it’s sure to give the news media a convenient headline in some cities.

Update — and wouldn’t you know: http://www.dailytexanonline.com/content/strong-tech-sector-increases-austin%E2%80%99s-risk-cybercrime

Posted on

Text in decline?

In a short but provocative piece at edge.com Berkeley’s Marti Hearst suggests we will see text decline in favor of video and speech based interactions in the future. This is not the first time the predictions for the power of new media have been made (David Jonassen infamously predicted in 1982 that the book would be dead within a decade) but Hearst’s argument is more nuanced and based on emerging trends in video search retrieval and mobile technology use. Of course, the real bottleneck here is text input – for years I’ve argued that we are slaves to qwerty keyboards and that the really meaningful and valuable parts of our information resources can be transported and stored easily except for this handicap of needing a screen and a keyboard to access them. That said, I don’t see text in decline as much as unfortunately shackled to interfaces that in turn shackle us, and it’s not clear to me that a shift from text to video solves this particular problem. Ideally we would find ways of providing input and display technologies pervasively in the built environment or about our persons so we can access what we want where we are without carrying a keyboard everywhere. It speaks volumes to the power of the keyboard that so many people are willing to use one even when it’s reduced to the size of a telephone keypad. Text has evolved a series of affordances that extend beyond the mechanics of input and output however — the text genre of science reflects social practice and the cognitive advantages of being able to re-read and navigate through a familiar structure cannot be easily replaced or even replicated. Imagine ‘reading’ the Hearst article as a video (well, it might be more pleasant if Marti herself was delivering it) and try jumping around to revisit some points. The smoothness with which you can do this on the textual display is very hard to replicate with voice and video. Add to this, we can process textual information as skilled readers faster and in more fluid temporal forms than we can listen to a voice.

Naturally I am biasing my argument to the design side informed by human psychology, and there is obviously a set of related arguments about culture and the decline of typing and written text in favor of chatting, watching, demonstrating and presenting via images, It may be true that, as others have argued, serious extended reading is in decline and the communicative forms we will share and create in the decades ahead may well be shorter and less textual. But it is also possible that we will just retain text and supplement it. Remember, digital technology was supposed to be the death of paper too, until we realized that printing and faxing were so easy. Still, Hearst argues that video and images, not text, will do the cultural heavy lifting in the future and if nothing else, the point is worthy of consideration. I’m just not sure what medium is doing any of that lifting at the moment given the apparent insatiable appetite people have for images of a pop singer’s funeral when the world’s leaders are discussing global warming but the public gets what the public wants, as Paul Weller put it so memorably, in a song not a text (and can you be information literate without knowing that reference?)

Posted on

Amnesty launches campaign to protect humans

Check out the site, view the pictures and read some of the horrific data of our current world from the Amnesty 2008 report which shows that sixty years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations, people are still tortured or ill-treated in at least 81 countries, face unfair trials in at least 54 countries and are not allowed to speak freely in at least 77 countries. And never forget item 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression: this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

Posted on

Dinner with Madelaine

I had dinner last night with Madelaine Albright – yes, shameless name dropping, I know, but the fact remains, I and a few other people did have the pleasure of hearing her talk frankly about US foreign policy on her visit here to mark the opening of the LBJ School’s new Masters in Global Affairs. Following tradition, dinner with the assembled guests was run as a single conversation only, so we all heard each other. Nice style but somewhat forced and it left little opportunity for chatting with the other people there but I was impressed nonetheless with her insights, very factual tone and honest telling of the personalities and politics involved in negotiating with other countries. Yes, state leaders do shout at each other, get moody, threaten, weasel and generally behave like everyone else negotiating a pay rise or promotion. Best line of the night? Many that are unrepeatable here but she did admit that experience consists of more than lipstick.

We touched on the issue of cybersecurity and there was a general agreement that this is where the action will be in the decades ahead. I didn’t want to depress anyone with my take that we are relatively clueless on how to guard against the actions of the fanatical few in this arena who now can create the military equivalent of an invasion online in a way that’s not possible in the physical world of traditional warfare. But there was a brief suggestion that maybe the Russians were a little ahead of others in this regard. The public part of the evening was streamed into second life, from where a few folks even submitted questions. Reminds me, didn’t Obama promise to hold court on C-Span if he gets elected?

Posted on

Usability now a religion?

I was surprised and a little annoyed to find an advertisement on the the ACM CHI-JOBS listing today that, before even describing the interface design and UX skills required for the position, made clear that the person hired had to be a current member of a particular church and prove ‘temple-worthy’. Yikes, this is 2008, and I suppose a church can require what it wants in an employee but I’d rather not have our professional society membership lists used to push for such practices. What next? You can only work on the website for a clothing company if you have the right body shape? No employment for accessibility designers who don’t themselves have a recognized disability? You can only hold public office if you believe in a particular god? Oh…we have that one already. Surprisingly, nobody on the list has commented yet but since it’s not a discussion list, and it appears to be moderated, maybe something is brewing. The recruiter told me it was the church’s call. I’ve asked ACM for clarification on their policy.

Social Widgets powered by AB-WebLog.com.