O&M manuals in foreign languages

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Large corporates have a special problem in managing their O&M manuals. On the one hand they need to have information to hand in order to centrally manage their FM services across all their locations, and on the other hand they need information readily available for the local tradesmen who will need to use the detailed information in the future.

The highly structured way in which we create manuals and deal with sub-contractors via a collaborative website, made it very easy for us to make this work. We supplied basic templates (section headings) that were translated into Italian, obtained the detailed information from the Italian sub contractors, and then translated certain key sections back into English.

This makes it sound easy, but the bit we gloss over is the ‘get information from sub-contractors’. Not all countries have the same legal and cultural expectations as to the level of detail that a good manual should supply, so even if the detail is specified in sub-contractors’ contracts it can be very hard to get it delivered in practice. Sometime it requires the Main Contractor to weald a big stick and a good working relationship over distance is a vital component in making it work!

I am delighted that we got this over the line and we now have a template for best practice that we are happy to implement whenever needed.

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The Chocolate Teapot analogy

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You are standing in a bar and a couple of guys nearby get into a heated argument. The first says that there is a chocolate teapot in orbit around Jupiter; The second equally violently asserts that it is impossible.  They debate the issue from all sides – why chocolate instead of something more substantial, who put it there, how long could it last etc etc, but in the end there can be no proof that will settle the question because the orbit of Jupiter is so large that it will never be possible to check all of it for the existence of a chocolate teapot!

The question you now need to address is, in the absence of proof either for or against the existence of a chocolate teapot in orbit around Jupiter, which are you going to choose to believe? In this case I guess it is a bit of a no brainer….

Clearly this is just a more extreme version of a dilemma that we face all the time when choosing between different hypotheses for which there is insufficient evidence to reach a final conclusion.  The normal scientific approach is to explore a ‘simple’ solution in preference to the more complex.  And in this case it is clearly simpler to assume that the chocolate teapot does not exist because of the complexity of the world view that its existence would imply. Occam’s razor is “the law of parsimony, economy or succinctness. It is a principle urging one to select from among competing hypotheses that which makes the fewest assumptions.”

Hadron Collider

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I was just listening to a science programme and it described the camera that is used in the giant Hadron collider that is searching for the Higgs Boson or God particle in CERN. Apparently the camera that captures the images of the collision is the equivalent of a 100M pixel 3D camera that takes 400m pictures every second.

It takes a moment for these numbers to sink in…

The idea that a camera can take 400,000,000 pictures every second at the level of detail implied by 100m pixels, and store all that information with a time stamp for each image, is simply mind boggling.

No wonder that it takes so long to process all the data that is being collected.  One has to wonder what world changing/shattering knowledge might be hidden in there.

I feel quite proud that human beings are capable of this level of enquiry into where we come from and how the universe works.

100 Mbps broadband for every citizen by 2015

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Unfortunately, that is only in Finland or South Korea where higher speed broadband access is recognised as both a human right and a vital commercial necessity.

 

Here in England most of us are still dawdling along at 6Mbps downloads and <1Mbps upload speeds, while dreaming of the day that optic fibre will reach far enough for us to enjoy the 50Mbps it promises to deliver. In the meantime the government is still intent on a massive investment in the old infrastructure of railways so we can shave 20 mins off a trip between London and Birmingham.

If the future of GB plc is dependant on us beating the world in the white hot technologies that will create competitive advantage, then the two most important elements that we need are

  • A modern infrastructure
  • A vibrant venture capital sector that will fund a great business idea, even if the entrepreneur does not have caste iron assets to put up as collateral.

A crisis is also an opportunity for change

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Pre Christmas gloom following Osborne’s scary Autumn statement has settled like a cloak of depression over the whole country.  A wasted decade of zero or less GDP growth, unemployed youth and 50 year olds thrown onto a scrap heap that is becoming cruelly indifferent to their plight. Business cut backs and loss of confidence creating a self fulfilling prophecy of decline.

There is no doubt that we live in dangerous times. The economic upheaval that started in 2008 with a bank liquidity crisis and has been transformed by the bailout then, into a sovereign debt crisis today, represents a major challenge to Capitalism as it has been played.

So where are the grounds for optimism?

“If  its not broke, don’t fix it”
– well now it is  broke, so we had better do something!

As a small business we know that our opportunities come when the tectonic plates of the existing established order start to shift.  That is the moment when businesses and institutions are prepared to contemplate the idea that unfamiliar ways of doing things, may be risky, but are better than the alternative.

We live in a time of unprecedented technical innovation and each one has the potential to create opportunities to re-invent business processes. Moore’s Law which described the speed at which computing power would double every 18 months and halve in price, is only one of the many defining events (programming, DNA, genomics, neural science and many others which are showing even faster rates of exponential growth) that will certainly transform our world over the next 50 to 100 years.

To take a step back:-

    • The genus Homo arose about 2,500,000 years ago
    • I took a couple of million years to for Homo sapiens to evolve, about 500,000 years ago
    • We had reached the Bronze age about 3,000 years ago.
    • The industrial revolution and the birth of  our modern age is about 300 years old.
    • The age of modern computing and communication started about 50 years ago and I only have to think back to the world of my youth to see the impact that has already had and will continue to create on the way we live our lives.

If we can be flexible, imaginative and focussed, there is no end to the opportunities and the excitement that the very near future holds.

Data Feed opens new markets for INEA

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INEA presented a new data feed that enables estate agents to add high levels of functionality to their websites at very low cost.

The Independent Network of Estate Agents yesterday launched an XML data feed that supplies a WordPress plug in with all the details of the properties the agent has registered with INEA (ie both their own and any shares). For the first time this means that an Agent’s website can easily be kept up to date with the ‘current’ details of any commissions available.

Managing data feeds between websites is a great way of keeping data current.

Confidence is good for the individual and bad for the organisation

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We all look to experts in order to help us navigate round an increasingly complex world.  The difficulty is in working out who to trust?  Is it the person who shows plenty of self confidence and never admits either being wrong, or not knowing? Or the quiet self deprecating person in the corner?

On the whole we tend to look to those alpha beings who are prepared to take a stand and trust them to make at least some of our decisions for us.  Unfortunately there is now plenty of evidence that their self-confidence is often misplaced. (Click here for details). Autopsies have shown that even doctors who declare themselves total confident in their diagnosis of patients when they were alive , were proved to be wrong 40% of the time.

It seems that Bill Clinton has taken this very much to heart and now has a new Mantra.  Once a day he makes it a rule to say out loud “I didn’t know that” and “I was wrong”! While I don’t doubt that this makes him a better person and it is certainly a interesting  experiment from somebody with his background, the question that I would really like to get answered is whether there is any way he could have been elected as President of the United States with that level of public self doubt? My guess is that he would have been ripped apart by the press, his political enemies and the public at large.

We all claim that we want leaders to say sorry.  But it is up to the great public to enable it to happen.  In the meantime keep this definition in the back of your mind.

Definition of an Expert:   X – an unknown quantity.
Spurt – a drip acting under pressure.

Construction Sector Slows

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The latest quarterly survey by the Office for National Statistics shows a fall of 0.6% since the last quarter and a fall of 1.8% compared with the same quarter last year. (Where the construction industry is defined as: construction and demolition work, civil engineering, new construction work, and repair and maintenance.)

This is a worrying reversal of the slight recovery that we saw immediately after the 2008 banking crisis and reflects the slow down in infrastructure projects and in home starts.

The exceptionally low level of Housing starts (a further fall of 9% from a very low base in March 2011) see details is contributing to the dangerous increase in rental prices that is occurring as a growing population, largely excluded from home ownership by mortgage constraints, now collides with a shortage of supply.

I am optimistic that we will shortly see results from the political pressure to deliver a Keynesian boost to the economy by investment in infrastructure as one of the few acceptable routes for delivering economic growth.

The Greek Financial Crisis – June 2011

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There is at least a chance that we will look back on the next 3 months as the time the world stopped!!!

The country of Greece has a sovereign debt of about $500bn, which is just a bit less than that of Lehman Bank when its bankruptcy plunged the world into a banking crisis that was only averted by the wholesale transfer of bank debt into sovereign debt.

The UK banking system currently has outstanding loans of £6.5tr (yes that is trillions) which is 4 times the size of our GDP. And the banks themselves hold a mere £300bn of equity capital to support those loans. Nobody really has a handle on where those loans are placed and how much any individual bank is exposed in the event of a Greek default.

But what is certain is that when the default happens, if it is not managed far better than past experience gives us cause to hope for, it will lead to another crisis of the banking system as they all refuse to lend to each other as happened in 2008. And this time round the countries will not have the funds to bail out the banks.

There is no doubt that the Greek people have been culpable in that the they have been living far beyond their means for years, and they have been doing it on borrowed money.  But the punishment that is being asked of them is that they pay €100bn of debt repayments (reparations) pa.  This represents 40% of GDP and is plain impossible. This is why a default is considered inevitable.

The weather is not the only thing that is looking stormy this father’s day weekend.

An atheist in a moral universe

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There was a time when the possibility of the earth revolving round the sun was the subject of much debate and, since there was a limited amount of evidence, it was basically a matter of belief and philosophy. Today there is no longer any serious debate, not least because we have actually travelled to the moon and walked around on it.

100 years ago the only way to understand the ‘moral’ laws that govern our social construct, was inductive reasoning; but over the last few years we have made amazing discoveries in genetics (popularised in “the selfish gene”), and how the brain works (read “The tell tale brain”) and a recent book “The braintrust” now argues that morality originates in the biology of the brain. It describes the “neurobiological platform of bonding” that, modified by evolutionary pressures and cultural values, has led to human styles of moral behaviour.

I am not saying that science has all the answers, but I am sure that it will bring new insights to the function of moral codes and explanations of how they can work even without recourse to the authority of a god figure to back them up. As an atheist it is important to understand that our moral code is just as strong and well based as that of any religious person.