Technology with no thought behind it

OPEN Thought

I once said that often people think that throwing technology at a problem will solve it. What usually happens is that instead one gets technology lying around a bad system, only making it marginally faster, not better. All it takes is vision and bit of tinkering and not that much extra cash to turn a veneer into something that could be truly valuable.

One example that springs jarringly to mind is the parking system at the Esplanade shopping centre. At a glance, the system seems to be bang up to date with cameras to take license plates as well as smart cards used for the parking ticket. However, the facade quickly falls apart when it is time to get the ticket validated for cheaper parking.

The shops cannot do the validation - rather it is done at the customer service desks in the mall. So the first part that paperless turns to paper is the need for a receipt, or in some cases, leftover receipts from other customers.

Strike two comes when the ticket is validated. The clerk takes the paper receipt and then places the smart card on a reader. She then jots down, in a tatty old paper book, details that come up on her screen alongside details of the ticket before using a high-tech touch-screen system to validate the parking ticket for cheaper parking.

Strike three, well, arguably they are not out yet, but one could argue that strike three comes when all this valuable information, information that could be used as a resource for better business, actually costs resources to maintain rather than itself be used as a resource to build further systems upon.

Yes, smart cards and touch-screens may abound but the data is still captured on pen and paper in a book; a book that will no doubt never see the light of day again unless there is an inquiry; data that is forever lost. Forget about data mining or business intelligence, only rudimentary data is in the system, if at all. So by throwing technology touch screens and RFID smart cards and readers at a problem, the result is a problem with touch screens and RFID around it to further maintain.

Discount cards are another nice example. Last year I had a McDonald's card and while some information was taken at the point of applying for one, none was gathered when the card was used. Worse, whenever the discount was to be applied, the person at the till had to yell for the supervisor to come to authorise the discount, for which the receipt then asked for the manager's reason, with lots of space to write something down.

At least the card in this case was plastic but the potential for customer information to fine-tune operations and understand the customer better was gone. All it would have taken was a barcode to scan, a number to key in, and voila - business intelligence. Not that McDonald's probably needs BI and instead relies on more traditional forms of marketing.

And then there is the Thai Smart ID card. When did anyone last see it used as a smart card? Or e-Passport. Thailand was one of the first countries in the region to issue these high-tech biometric passports and obviously the high tech, RFID, biometric nature of them helps a lot when one has to write personal information down on paper and staple it to the high-tech pages.

The list goes on. How about the intelligent parking lights in the basement of Plaza Athene? High-tech sensors with lights to indicate free spaces foiled by lots of Thai VIPs who demand a plastic cone (which the sensors cannot detect) be placed in their parking space. Or a security-certified data centre that in effect is secure only for foreigners. How so? Access to the data centre at Empire Tower, its name eludes me, requires one to swap ID for a temporary pass at security downstairs. That means that when one actually signs in to the data centre itself, there is often no ID left. Of course, only Thais are a threat to building security and foreigners can simply leave a name card downstairs, thus the people who certified the systems there could do it the right way with photo ID present at the door of the data centre itself.

Obviously in each case, the idea of throwing technology at a problem only left bits of technology around the problem situation as it stood unchanged.

When I was in university in the UK, the car park system was changed and a hydraulic bollard was installed that would stop cars leaving until the token had been verified. As it so happened, when there was a bit of a queue, the system would sometimes time out and rise up, thereby skewering the car on the bollard in the process.

My professor, who was teaching information systems at that time, mused that as a system to control access to the car park, it was not particularly a good one, but as a system to impale cars, it was doing its job very well.

Old IT can afford to think that way. At the Esplanade car park, as a system to use smart cards and prevent the cashier at the exit from siphoning money, it is probably a good enough system that its owners are happy with. As an intelligent car parking system, it is a mess.

The lights at Plaza Athenee are probably doing their job as a system to make the hotel seem nice and high-tech. As a system to help guide drivers to a parking spot, it too fails miserably as frequent visitors quickly learn that green more often means a plastic cone rather than a space.

While management may pose a question to IT to modernise the parking lot, IT needs to say what more can be done at what incremental cost and argue to the CFO and CEO how it could be done and what the ROI would be.

Quite a lot of data-mining could be done by correlating the car number plates to times and shops visited, not to mention the marketing up-sell and advertising opportunities for the validation touch-screen systems (which they already use).

The CIO might even propose adding a touch-point at the door to remind the driver which door he used to enter the mall and then just across from the touch-point could be big screens with targeted advertisements and special offers based on the car license plate and previous validation points.

All of that information is already in the system, only today it lies in ink and paper rather than in a data warehouse that can be used for intelligence.

That is the difference between a CIO and an IT manager; the difference between those looking forward and those content to simply be told what to do.