DigiCha Link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZTxY2mojCs

“One of our contributors sent me through an urgent news story in the morning which I was completely unaware of until the end of the day – when 600 emails suddenly landed in my inbox.”

What I find funny is that email never has and never will be a synchronous and real time communications tool.  Don’t people get that?

Same Place, Same Time = Meeting Room

Same Place, Different Time = Email

Different Place, Different Time = Email

Different Place, Same Time = Telephone

Regardless of place or time and is urgent = TELEPHONE

The issue here is that this client needs to take action and educate his staff on correct communication procedures (Logic) and what the whole concept of information asymmetry is and how to deal with it.

The problem is NOT that the service provider messed up (we didn’t and weird stuff happens all the time in China and we are setup to be able to adapt fairly quickly and re route stuff – hence our CNN interview in August 2007 for being one of the few ISP’s that managed to deliver international email while no one else could for a week during the lead up to a CCPC event), the problem is that the worker was relying on EMAIL for “Urgent” matters.

FAIL.

This bizarre communications problem seems to happen a lot in China.  And 99% of the time it is the foreigners – bitching and complaining about an email not arriving and therefore THAT is why they couldn’t or didn’t do something.  That is the same logic as saying the reason why you were late to work was because of Beijing’s traffic.

FAIL.

It does start to grate on your nerves after a while.  Have none of these foreigners ever been dragged over the coals back home for such sloppy work communication practices?  Or do they just wait until they get to China to unwind themselves and become all slack and not responsible for their own situations?

No – they ignore that truth and send off a bitchy email to their boss without thought to the consequences and thus potentially exposing innocent and hard working people to undue persecution or the need to defend themselves.

Follow Up.

Follow Up.

Follow Up.

:-s

PS:  The dog ate my homework….

As they say, the tip of the iceberg misrepresents the mountain of stuff that is sitting below the surface.

Read on at http://www.chinaiceberg.com while he works out his bugs.

The following is a screen shot of a log from one client, who has a fairly large rack and a few servers for their thin client deployment. In this case the A/C failed and the servers shut down gracefully.

First noting the rising temperature and alerting CANDIS through our monitoring system and then when the failure threshold was met – issuing a shut down command to the OS and then powering off the server. All this happened on a long weekend and the final shut down was alerted to us as well.

Worked like clock work. Then again – I walk into many IDC’s in China and see flashing red failure LEDs and it seems they are forever on. Do SysAdmins in China not setup hardware monitoring? Do they not care? Why is this? Why would you want a failure to occur or interrupt your free time or your clients business?

I like their ratio of engineers to users… in China it is about the opposite.  We had 6 people come to change a light bulb last week.  Labour is a cheap commodity – but smart use of technology will be even cheaper!

FaceBook Infrastructure

All up it was 70 servers deployed with full remote management and power and network port control.

Images can be seen over at: Cross posted to the CANDIS Group Blog.

Most of it went well until we got to the AusTrade pimped trade show. I will just copy and paste the email that I sent to my cousin (Mitch Fifield) who is a federal Senator in Australia. A few of us are also going to be writing to Aus Trade directly as well. In a nutshell – more proof of how useless most government funded initiatives are and how it is just a waste of tax dollars.

G’Day Mitch,

Hope all is well down under. I must apologise for the dreary nature of the email that this is and I know it is not your area of responsibility and indeed we will be making a formal complaint via the correct AusTrade channels to register our dissatisfaction.

In a nutshell my company which sells and resells a lot of Australian invented IT technology in China is currently in attendance at the 3C trade show in Dong Guan southern China.

Today my assistant had her purse stolen with camera, phone and money from a secure area under a table at our booth. Where the dissatisfaction with AusTrade comes in is that they organised and solicited us to present at the conference. When I arrive here, I then find out that Dong Guan is the crime capital of China. With muggings, car jacking and drive by attacks a daily affair. Our taxi driver from ShenZhen was even scared to drop us off here.

While AusTrade should be commended for helping to grow Australian Business in China, it is incumbent on them to also look out for our interests. While they spend a good sum of tax dollars on fancy booths and arranging for official photographers, it would have been more appropriate had they spent some money on hiring private security to help protect and oversee the sizeable and fluid Australian Booth area.

While erected road signs of Kangaroo and Koala road crossings are all well and nice. One is unable to conduct business and liaise with potential customers and trade partners when they need to keep one eye on their belongings – in this crime capital of China. Numerous people have had stuff stolen already today – the police station in the hall was flooded by 10AM – 1 hour into commencement.

While personal property protection is ultimately a private responsibility. The situation annoys me as an example of government incompetence. The information asymmetry regarding the risk levels in Dong Guan is inexcusable. We should have been made aware before we arrived. The lack of security personal is also a major oversight.

The tax money spent by Austrade would certainly yield a better return if used in the form of grants to businesses than what is going on here now. Please let me know if there is anyone else I can or should contact on a personal level to help ensure some benefit for future Australian businesses that decide to deal with AusTrade. Whether we will again – who knows.

Cheers,
Richard.

What really bummed me out is the lack of focus in the efforts of Austrade. They made ICT or IT into some meta-umbrella label that also includes the kitchen sink. Asked why not make it more focused we received the answer “Because we’d have less exhibitors then”. Great so you drag us all out, waste money and no one goes home with anything – except a bad taste in their mouths

Wouldn’t it be better if only a few of us went and we actually got some traction and meaning out of it all? Oh no. The KPI used by AusTrade is how many exhibitors show up and spend their time and money to do so. Not how many actual exhibitors walk away with new business or potential trading partners. I wonder if the consulate in Guangzhou has some other inventive performance metrics like the number of toilet paper rolls used in the consulate to determine their operational success?

At least we had Kangaroo and Koala road signs….good to see that AusTrade has their priorities straight and knows how to focus and highlight the really important aspects of Australian businessnes. How does the rest of the world trade without Koala’s and Kangaroo’s?