Inspiration and insight into the myriad complexities of modern IT issues can find me in strange places. None are stranger, to my brief and limited perspective, than a maize field in Serbia. Computers and communication, procedures and management all snapped into clear focus… until the slivovitz took its toll.
A 20 knot wind in my hair, warm autumnal eastern European sun on my face and there I was with a mind filled with fresh insight on how we get it all so wrong so expensively.
This epiphany followed on the heels of a wholesale reconstruction of a Windows 2000 server into which some incautious user invited a bit of noisome software from a suspect website despite antivirus controls and a firewall. The server was damaged even more significantly by the cack-handed removal of the offending guest. The recovery time was measured in days though data loss was negligible.
A peek behind the worn plastic laminate counter at the less than palatial Hotel Termal in Vrdnik 50km from Belgrade was the starting point for this ramble through the differences between rural post-war Serbia and more familiar IT territory floating placidly in the Irish Sea. Can you believe it? Not even Windows 3.1 on the hotel screen. It was a green screen hooked into what appeared to be a SCO Xenix server.
Even though the SCO of today is a noisy proponent of graphical Unix and Linux, until very recently in its history it was making a lot of Xenix sales because it runs on almost any Intel processor that came after the 386 and can handle a dozen users with half the amount of memory I have in my notebook PC.
SCO probably still makes millions off Xenix — which ironically was originally a Microsoft product — maybe even as much as it makes on Linux! In terms of terminal costs, the veritable green screen is almost as cheap to give away as AOL CDs. Serial cabling has its limitations but for reasonably compact installations, is cheaper than Cat 5 wire.
If you need to talk to a database for hotel rooms, tot up the daily takings, and send and receive e-mail, what more do you need? (Apart maybe from a standalone PC running Word to process the daily menu.) It was in the director’s office as befitted his rank. You don’t need a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 running XP on every desk. Or worse, the new server hooked up to a leased line.
From my view of the doubtless complicated management workload at any hotel, in rural Serbia you can subtract the cares that accrete due to overblown IT infrastructure that is prone to crashes, viruses, hacking, misuse and consequent loss of productivity — capitalisation of an installed base in need of continual upgrade and the bandwidth expense of post-e-mail Internet usage. A message from a rocket scientist friend recently extolled the virtues of CPM — only half tongue in cheek.
PCs are expensive to buy and own. Servers are even more so, but at least there’s fewer of them. That’s all settled wisdom. I suspect that the management of the Termal spent less on their hotel system in a year than I spend feeding and fettling my daughter’s notebook at college. And they run their whole business with it. And I dare say they are not confronted overmuch by the prospect of their staff whiling away their productivity using instant messaging and e-mail for personal ends, surfing up holidays or dirty pix or downloading RIAA-baiting MP3s.
Misappropriation
A recent survey of 200 UK businesses commissioned by Blue Coat Systems discovered that two thirds of employees use instant messaging or chat for personal conversation during working hours. It worked out that more than three quarters used it for gossiping, 40 per cent for sharing copyrighted music and video files, a third used it for romantic prospecting and a fifth were passing porn around.
You can’t ban instant messaging altogether because it can be very useful, but the downside is begging for management attention. One suspects that the increase in non-business related chat stems from an increase in corporate e-mail and Web surfing vigilance. Cool technology routes around management strictures.
To be sure the Hotel Termal had a lot of interesting features. Take the natural thermal springs that fed a steamy swimming bath that was many, many times bigger than the Prospect House (home to ComputerScope) car park. One feature that it didn’t have was telephone extensions in the room.
That enhancement would probably have dragged the management of the Termal down the all too predictable path towards Windows and all that entails. You would not have wanted to use them anyway. In common with most other hotels in the free world, if you call anyplace off site, you’d better be ready to pay way over the odds.
It’s amazing how fast these former planned economies have adapted to the most refined ways of ripping off captive customers even if they don’t have the PC-based cost basis to justify a fraction of it. The beer (Lav Pivo) in a large glass was only half a euro, which was some compensation despite the unfortunate name.
What attraction does the ability to get online for an e-mail fix serve in a spa that survives as a monument to the heyday of planned economies of the 1970s? Although a connection to Belgrade could get me my megabytes of daily spam for a mere EUR12 an hour, the call would cost a further euro a minute, making a grand total of EUR72 an hour to get cheap mortgage offers, pictures of naughty girls and herbal pills to make me young again? Maybe e-mail is too cheap to appreciate how much the value has been diluted by e-crap. Cheap telecommunication has spoiled us. No clear answer has yet crystallised to the downside of cheap bandwidth and an egalitarian distribution of processing power to every desktop.
In the UK, recent proposed legislation to limit spam has drawn fire. While purporting to protect Internet and mobile phone users from unsolicited commercial e-mail, it is nothing but a waste of governmental time and money. And Ireland is also in danger of passing a similar badly crafted bit of law pretty soon.
The new law is Britain’s implementation of the European Union Privacy and Electronics Communication Directive. When it comes into force in December it will be an offence for a UK company to send junk e-mail or text messages unless the recipient is an existing customer or has given their permission. A £5,000 (EUR8,000) fine awaits the miscreants for each breach.
Clauses of adhesion
The new law only covers personal e-mail accounts, so spam away to UK corporate e-mail addresses to your heart’s content. Watch out for the blossoming of clauses of adhesion in the privacy policies on commercial websites granting the necessary permission. The good members of Parliament have forgotten that the global nature of the Internet makes their straight-faced determination to stamp out British spam a laughing stock to those that ply their loathsome trade outside the UK or Europe.
I had my trusty Treo with me in Serbia and could have downloaded important filtered e-mail but it would have been via international dial-up at 9800 baud. There was not a whiff of GPRS in the vole-filled maize field and not even in the capital. However, GSM reception was much better in the maize field than one would expect at home. Go figure!
The shop windows were not filled with dust-gathering 3G point of sale materials like they are in the UK. My trusty Belgrade taxi driver, Boban used his mobile with equanimity, so it couldn’t be costing a bomb. He didn’t need wireless video to get his son to translate for him when I exceeded his English comfort limits with my frenzied ravings about post offices and airports. Do we need more than GSM? Do we want to pay more than we already do? Do you think that the burgers of Belgrade can’t wait for pay phones and McDonald’s to turn into WiFi hotspots like Starbucks already are in the US? Nyet! Nyet! Nyet!
Despite the billions invested by carriers on 3G and the millions invested in handsets (some of which actually work), the gulf between promises and deliverables is not narrowing at a great rate. Yankee Group, Gartner and Datacomm Research all cite the user cost factor, proliferation of non-compatible standards and the lack of real utility once you get beyond ‘Honey, look! I really am on the bus’ exculpatory phone cam videos. It will all come, with fits and starts as soon as the political/industrial hugger mugger settles down and true interoperability dawns on needed applications beyond train timetables. But we don’t need it soon so why fret?
I left Serbia with some fresh insights into what it takes to run a bustling business with constrained resources along with a reinvigorated commitment to best IT management practice. It really takes a whole lot less to do the biz than what we take for granted here.
Will the influx of first-world IT infrastructure and products finish off what NATO bombs didn’t take out (the hulk of the Chinese embassy was sobering)? Or do we stand a chance of learning something valuable from our poorer cousins in the east?
24/09/2003
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