Saving money by abbreviations

Case in point for the last post:
A large Swiss bank, lately in the news because of 2 billion bonuses for the management while needing state help to the tune of 20 billion, actually had a good example of how stupidity scales: There was an improvement drive to "abbreviate more and only write department names in the short form, thus about 10 bytes per email and 100 bytes per memo. At (I do not really know how many people work there) lets say 20.000 employees and a lots of memos and mails per day, this saves Gigabytes of NAS and SAN storage and frees up at least one FTE in the IT department".

Yay. Can you spot the mistake?

The chinese worker problem, a process view

We all had these math quizzes when we went to elementary school - if 2 workers take one year to build a house, how long does it take 1000 workers to build a house?
And the answer of course is: forever, because they form a union and start fighting among each other.

But I digress.

We see much the same problem when modern consulting companies want to push something through management. Implementing workflow solution A will save everybody 10 minutes per day! At an estimated 220 working days/year, that is a whopping 4.5 working days per year!
Wheee... this means for every 220 / 4.5 = 49 staff you have, you can fire one -
if you have your average medium size mobile operator, you can now lay off 100 people and save millions. Bonuses go up everywhere, hearty handshakes for the consultants. Since the savings scale the bigger the company is, at Siemens or General Electric you could fire thousands and save billions.

Where it all falls down of course is that the numbers are bullshit. For one thing, they are impossible to measure. I can claim any number of minutes I could save...

1. hey, if I have my own coffee machine on my desk I need not go to the kitchen any more, this saves at least 10 minutes per day
2. we could increase reading speed for internal memos if we left out peoples first names. We could also use a lot of abbreviations.
3. we can save about 10 seconds per person and meeting if we just say "hey, you" instead of peoples names. With an average meeting size of 10 people and 2 meetings per day, we can save even more than with a workflow program! and up with meetings of just 9 people!

You can see where this is going.

Economy of scale did not work as a business model in the Internet hype in 2000. It does not work in all processes, either - consultants beware, you need to look closer.

Furthermore, you need to be able to aggregate the time saved between people of similar skillsets, if you want to really cut down staff. Saving 10 minutes per day for widely divergent people and then randomly firing one is hurtful to the company.

Unintentional humour

Yesterday's mail included a flyer from an icelandic company who sell a risk management program - one of many on the market, from my perspective, and one of many that are just glorified spreadsheets. Oh well.

Anyway, lots of fun. There are German and English flyers; the German flyers have obviously been translated by a professional, and then there were last minute add-ins by technical people who do not really speak the language. One is reminded of chinese manuals.

The highlight for me is a customer testimonial that reads

Icelandic society is the society which comes closest to being called a cashless society.

Guys, you are SO right. I mean, what do you mean "come closest"? YOU HAVE NO CASH, we all read that in the papers a couple of weeks ago.

ROTFL.

Real life is better than TV

Sometimes, I am really happy I am (hopefully) out of the rat race.

This weeks highlights were

• a site manager whose site was closed down, without him
  being told until after the fact (hey, they just did not want to trouble you)
• the strangenesses of paying seperation pay correctly (following
  this story, you'd think some people are just unable to do things the
  easy way. That's a management attitude, not the fault of the guys)
• an org chart with the site managers name labeled as "that guy in fishtown" (we are a people company!)
• a press release lauding the president elect (never hurts, does it?)
• telling customers there are no Christmas presents and then sending lavish presents to the managers (neat move, really helps!)

I really wonder what happens next.

Xing / OpenBC Privacy Issues

Guys, you do have the chance to set privacy options in Xing, and I do recommend you use them.

It is kinda funny if you see a managing director of a company you know join the "managing low performers" group. Yes, we all have them, but it sheds a funny light on the company. More Dilbert comics!

Wtf?

Dear information security consultants all over the world, the guy who invented the PDCA cycle is called Deming. William Edwards Deming. One "m" in Deming. He is not called Walter and not Demming.

Sheesh. I will see a couple of presentations at a conference in Berlin 1st and 2nd of December about ISO27001, and if anyone spells the name wrong in their slides I will yell and throw things.

Be warned :-)

Aber natürlich!

Wie konnte man das nur übersehen :-)

>der Fehler steckt in eine Zeile der Datei
>
>XXX.properties
>
>
>in die dritte Zeile steht
>XXX.resource=XXXner300Res346ACF778E90BE56E39392227B4ACD7C915A484F052FAF8255AA2536CFD5D841.jar
>
>es sollte aber sein
>XXX.resource=XXXner300Res94022746370B2BE306091D2F94F38791E9C36933D4515BB5D429694633E6A285.jar


Hat mir nicht irgendein Professor mal erklärt, JAVA sei selbstdokumentierend?

Map of the Internet

http://xkcd.com/195. In case you wondered.

Glendronach und die WiPrüs

Gestern durften wir festellen, dass
a) Glendronach wirklich nicht trinkbar ist
b) Bunnahabhain cottages vermietet (!) - Islay ist sowieso eine Reise wert, mal wieder hinfahren!
c) Eine gewisse gelbe Firma ihre Wirtschaftsprüfer zum Socialising bei Radrennen verschleisst. Zur Frage des Dopings denken wir an b).
d) Tennant's Super anscheinend nur in Schottland seine ungeheure Wirkung entfaltet.

Wenn die Billigflüge nach Edinburgh über den Winter nicht eingestellt wären, wüsste ich wo ich jetzt bin.

Manager-Sprüche 1

Aus der Abteilung: du-unwichtig-ich-wichtig:

Merken sie sich, was sie mir sagen wollten, und schicken sie mir ein FAX.

Die Gipskrise kommt!

Ort: ERFA-Tagung einer grossen Auditorengesellschaft.
Thema: ISMS nach ISO27001

Nachdem das Thema zu GreenIT abgedriftet ist, erklärt ein Teilnehmer was das ist: Es geht ja gar nicht ums Energiesparen, ne? Green IT ist Ressourcen sparen, ne? Aus 100 Liter Wasse mehr Papier machen! Oder Gips, wenn ich in der Kalkgrube bei uns sehe wie die Gips wegschaffen wegen der Rauchgasentschwefelung, da kommt das Gips bald schneller aus der Grube als die Lastwagen fahren können! Da muss man doch sparsamer mit umgehen!

Und wir sehen: Nach der Energiekrise und der Finanzkrise kommt die Gipskrise. Bald wird es auf der ganzen Welt kein Gips mehr geben, nur noch wenige Bröckchen werden von den Königen der Gruben gehütet wie ihre Augäpfel, und die Organisation Gips-Exportierender Staaten wird von den USA zur terroristischen Vereinigung erklärt.

Erster Gedanke am Morgen

Das erste Wort, was Chris in den Kopf kommt im Hotel: Netzwerk-Zonen-Konzept.
Preisfrage: In welcher Stadt ist er?