Oh, say can you see by DM’s early light…

Budget Smudget

I’m a big believer in customer service excellence, but Ryanair Chief Executive Michael O'Leary’s recent announcement that he’s serious about making passengers pay for the right to relieve themselves on flights by installing credit card-operated loos really takes the cake.

Or should that read ‘toilet roll’? 

O’Leary’s both king of the in-flight surcharge and full of bombast, in my opinion. Maybe he’s just taking the piss (or set to charge for it, at least), but Ryanair is apparently intent on making its passengers suffer wherever possible – particularly when it comes to their hip pockets.

There’s no debating that Ryanair offers incredibly low internet fares (£0.99 to Cork, anyone?). But by the time you’ve paid add-on costs for taxes and fees, airport check-in, baggage, priority boarding passes and credit card surcharges, you might as well fly a non-discount airline.

Hell, even B.A. starts to look attractive.

To my way of thinking, Ryanair’s propensity for treating customers like cattle and working down to a price rather than up to a standard is the antithesis of service excellence. Maximising profit is one thing, but let’s all try to look beyond the current quarter’s P&L if we truly want to retain customers and grow our businesses, shall we?

Needless to say, I for one won’t be flying Ryanair any time soon.

Blacklists and Perfect Storms

Well, a pox on The Consulting Association, a Droitwich-based firm currently being prosecuted for a ‘serious breach’ of the Data Protection Act for secretly on-selling personal information to around 40 construction companies (among them Taylor Woodrow, Laing O’Rourke and Balfour Beatty), so that said firms could allegedly weed out potential trouble-makers from amongst job applicants.

I’m hardly a card-carrying unionist, but the whole notion of collecting and selling non-consented personal information really must be deplored. As reported by the BBC, The Information Commissioner’s Office believes that some 3,213 workers had details of their personal relationships, trade union activity and employment history traded by The Consulting Association for as low as £2.20 a pop.

I don’t know what’s more offensive from a data protection perspective: The fact that The Consulting Association’s ‘blacklist’ ran for over fifteen years or that the cost of violating workers’ privacy was deemed to be roughly equivalent to the price of eight cans of baked beans.

On another data front, I see Security Minister, Lord West, has announced that there’s no decision yet on the Government’s proposed giant database of phone calls, e-mails and internet use. Richard Thomas is calling for ‘a full democratic debate about where exactly the [data collecting] lines should be drawn’, so it will be interesting to see what happens over coming weeks. Because if you put Jack Straw’s controversial Clause 152 of his Coroners and Justice Bill alongside the Communications Data Bill, a near perfect data protection storm is certainly brewing over Westminster way – one which could impact on all our personal lives.

Goodbye Data Protection, Hello Data-Sharing Debacle

And the winner is… Staff Fraud!

Crazy Canucks

 What’s not to love about Canada, eh? Amazing scenery, great food, Neil Young, its total ban on nude sunbathing – the list is nigh on endless.

So it came as a surprise last Friday to read about a Superior Court in Ontario ruling that Canadian police can now use Internet Protocol addresses to find the names of people online, without need of a search warrant.

Justice Lynne Leitch was presiding in a child pornography case in which Bell Canada released the IP address of a south-western Ontario man to police as part of a child sexual exploitation investigation without a warrant. Leitch apparently accepted the Crown’s argument that there is ‘no reasonable expectation of privacy’ in cyberspace and that an IP name and address are not ‘biographical information one expects would be kept private from the state.’

Whilst I support the need to prosecute suspected child sex perverts to the fullest extent of the law, Canadian civil libertarians are justified in being up-in-arms about the implications of Justice Leitch’s ruling. Everyone’s ten-digit IP address is the key to not only their online identity, but the entire history of where they’ve been on the web. Nature-lover that I am, you can be certain I’m never going to Google the words ‘Canada’ and ‘beaver’ ever again!

With a mass surveillance, ‘super database’ still apparently on the UK Government’s ‘To Do’ list this year, developments in Canada this past week unfortunately make me all the more pessimistic about privacy rights – both here and abroad.

Promises, Promises

Meant to mention this last week, but congrats to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), on the new Data Protection Promise. Good to see the safeguarding of personal data getting a much-needed boost – particularly as 99 data breaches (no, not Luftballons!), were reported to the ICO in the final quarter of 2008 alone.

According to ICO research, 95 per cent of companies are apparently strong advocates of the Data Protection Act. Which is just as well, as an estimated 70 per cent of consumers are concerned about the amount of personal information companies hold about them, say Ofcom.

I have a couple of minor quibbles with the Promise, though: (i) it commits signatories to what I regard as being minimum ‘good practice’ standards; and (ii) as we’ve all seen more gaffs in recent months than the North Atlantic tuna fleet, shouldn’t we, as responsible data handlers, be trying to raise the bar and do more?

But I don’t want to throw the data protection baby out with the ICO bathwater. With an estimated 100 million items of misaddressed mail still providing too ample opportunity for fraudsters each year (address forwarding fraud constituted a disconcertingly high 36 per cent of total ID fraud cases in 2008), let’s hope advocacy translates into tangible data hygiene and security action in 2009.

Strike Me Pink

Wildcat strikes at Lindsey, Grangemouth and Sellafield and over the use of foreign labour; The Good Childhood Inquiry announcing that ‘the aggressive pursuit of personal success by adults is now the greatest threat to British children’ and the Prime Minister railing against the rise of neo-protectionism in Davos… Was it just the bottle of Grenache I downed last night or are these disparate events symptomatic of something?

Namely: Fear.

Fear of losing one’s job; fear of not being able to pay the mortgage or put food on the table; fear of not being able to keep up with the Joneses – fear is plaguing the British psyche at every turn. Fuelled by a tabloid media diet of unadulterated gloom, more than just the temperature seems to have turned sub-Arctic here on our little island these past days.

I’m hoping that Total’s subcontractor agreements are indeed meeting minimum UK employment conditions and that the strikers’ response is a knee-jerk one. Either way, this situation needs to be resolved ASAP as the world is watching. GB’s standard ‘when the going gets tough, the tough go on strike’ predilection just won’t cut it in the new, post-credit crunch world, I’m afraid.

As for our kids… At the risk of sounding like an old softy, it kills me to think we’re impairing the potential of the next generation by straight-jacketing them with a success-at-all-costs mentality which is utter nonsense. Where will it get them? Just ask Bernard Madoff.

I like the perks of success as much as the next CEO, but we all need to foster a greater sense of community if we're to get through the current market mire. So good on you, Gordon, for trying to put the best spin on our prospects for the world's financial elite in Davos over the weekend. But from the look on CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour's face I saw in one news clip, methinks the economic dynamism you're touting needs a hell of a lot of further nurturing.

UK Data: Fighting Fit or D.O.A.?

Time to beat the data protection drum again, I feel. Self-interest aside, this is an issue we all need to be acutely aware of, both as data handlers and consumers. Citizens even, for that matter.

The Data Protection Act (DPA) and Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations (CPUT) wield big legislative sticks against companies and government departments who inappropriately use or, worse still, lose sensitive personal information.

So imagine my surprise when I read last week that the NHS is trialling the roll-out of its new Summary Care Record scheme (SCR) across Stoke-on-Trent, Medway, Brighton-and-Hove and the Isle-of-Wight. In principle, the SCR sounds like a very good thing, as it enables ‘each person’s detailed records to be securely shared between different parts of the local NHS, such as the GP surgery and hospital’ (NHS website). Long story short: The SCR is designed to speed up the effectiveness and quality of care we receive.

But let’s pause here for a moment. Contained in each and every person’s SCR is their name, address, date of birth and NHS number as well as detailed information about past and present medical conditions. Highly confidential and sensitive stuff which most of us wouldn’t like to see fall into the hands of, say, insurance or drug companies. Yet this is precisely the information that is now being shared internally by the NHS in the aforementioned areas – the same NHS that was responsible for around 27 per cent of breaches of confidential information reported to the Information Commissioner’s Office last year.

While thankfully, to date, there is no evidence of any personal information falling into the wrong hands, neither have their been any prosecutions or even wrist-slapping against NHS trusts or employees for failing to fulfill their legal responsibilities under the Data Protection Act.

Doesn’t inspire confidence, does it. But the NHS isn’t alone in this ‘data malaise’, as only 42 per cent of UK organisations have any form of data quality strategy in  place, according to a 2008 QAS survey.

Hmmm... I think it's time some of us booked in for a data health check-up, don't you? 

Mind Your B’s and C’s This Week

Starmer’s Stinker

How unfortunate that our newly minted Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), Keir Starmer QC, has begun 2009 by voicing his support of Westminster’s proposed ‘super database’.

By contrast, the DPP’s predecessor, Sir Ken Macdonald QC, declared before Christmas that the Government’s plan to record and store all UK communications data (including e-mails, VOiP and mobile calls) to be a ‘hellhouse’ of private information.

Pandora’s Box is more like it, if you ask me.

As if the civil liberties and human rights issues the new database raises weren’t serious enough,  what I find particularly alarming is that the new database is apparently to be run by the private sector, ‘in a bid to increase access for law enforcement agencies’ (The Guardian, 9/01/09).

I can see the Government Tender Document now, can’t you? ‘The Home Office, the UK’s biggest data loser, seeks private contractor to store sensitive personal information for several months before breaching national security by misplacing a laptop containing millions of call and e-mail transcripts on the 4.50pm express bound for Charing Cross.’ 

For history will repeat, believe me.

It was one of the more sensible recommendations contained in last year’s Walport Report – better data handling protocols for government departments. The wider data community’s yet to hear how that hornets’ nest of issues is to be tackled when this super-stupid-whatever-the-hell-it’s-to-be-called-database is put back on the agenda.

2009 Luftballons

La Toya Jackson on Celebrity Big Brother, the latest bloodshed in Gaza, Woolworths closing its shutters for the last time, Waterford Wedgwood going bust... We're only days into the New Year and already 2009 seems to be taking on a decidedly scary and apocalyptic tone.

So imagine my surprise when, mulling over the precarious state of world affairs as I was last night, a welcome Laphroaig in hand (when the going gets tough, the tough sip single malt, right?), it suddenly occurred to me that I'd heard all this talk of doom, gloom and military overreaction before, and in a bloody pop song, to boot: Nena's 99 Luftballons, to be precise.

I've been banging on about this a lot lately, I realise, but seriously: I reckon it's time we cut the crap, people. We urgently need a paradigm shift in just about all areas of daily life. The economy, politics, education - you name it. Surely we need new attitudes and new ways of thinking as never before.

Roll on Obama's Inauguration Speech later this month. Maybe he can supply some inspiration-slash-clues to the best way forward.

Incidentally, whatever happened to Nena? Colour me a bad ‘80s pop aficionado, but I'm feeling right nostalgic now for 1984.

2009: The Year of the Ox

Normal 0 At the risk of showing my age, I'm a survivor of both the '87 stock market crash and the recession of the early-Nineties. On both these bleak occasions, there were copious amounts of hand-wringing and generous dollops of market gloom. But neither saw the end of capitalism or business life as we know it.

Far from it, in fact.

Call me perverse, but I'm quietly optimistic about 2009. Surely, contrary to what our illustrious Chancellor would have us believe, we are at best unlikely to see a return to positive GDP territory until Q4 in 2009 or Q1 of 2010. But better times are certainly ahead - shimmering on the horizon and most definitely within reach. How? Well, below are some suggested Do's and Don'ts that I hope can hold us all in good stead into '09:

Do...

• Tend to the fabled four P's - price, place, promotion and product - as surviving (nay, even flourishing) in a downturn is all about revisiting your business fundamentals;
• Run a tight, 'green' ship (your bottom line and the environment will both thank you);
• Focus on client retention (it costs between three- and ten-times as much to acquire a new customer as it does to retain an existing one);
• Put customers first (emphasising the additional value your goods or services create will provide a winning edge);
• Give rewards (be they small or large) to yourself, staff and clients for their loyalty. Your gratitude will be remembered long after this recession is but a distant memory.

 Don't...

• Shy away from DM and marcoms (why slash budgets when finding the right combination of channels can maximise both your response rates and ROI?);
• Spend what you don't have (cash is always your best friend);
• Retreat from investing;
• Be afraid of change (it's the management thereof that's key);
• Forget that we're all - each and every UK company - in this together.

According to Chinese Astrology, 2009 is the Year of the Ox, so being strong, patient and tireless will indeed be virtues over the next twelve months. But if your business planning and product/service delivery are sound, then in spite of the current market meltdown, opportunities still abound.

This blog will return the week of January 5th, so here's to wishing you and yours a safe and happy Festive Season.

Don’t Worry, Be Happy

Kids being taught how to live happy and healthy lives - that's surely enough to make even the most hardened cynic smile. So congrats to Sir Jim Rose and his government-commissioned report into what is taught in primary schools for suggesting that children should be taught about emotional well-being and social skills alongside traditional subject areas.

Great to see a holistic, forward-looking education plan for a change, no?

I was happy too to read that the US Supreme Court has rejected an application by retired New Jersey lawyer Leo Donofrio contesting Barack Obama's recent election win on the grounds that he is 'too British'.

Long story short: Even though Obama was born in Hawaii, Donofrio's assertion was that, as Barack's father was a Kenyan citizen, he was subject to the jurisdiction of the United Kingdom - thus making Barack not the 'natural born' US citizen  as required by the US constitution to be president.

A case of 'Only in America', huh? Mind you, if they do want to deport the President-Elect across the pond to Old Blighty, Obama's talent and dynamism would be most welcome. We need an injection of new vision just as much as our American cousins.  

All I Want For Christmas is Obama's 'Big Bang'