Canadian companies have come under increasing pressure to lower their cost structure.

On top of having to keep up with productivity improvements among our trading partners, Canadian firms have to deal with the dramatic strengthening of the dollar – which lowers the cost of imports and challenges the pricing of our exports.

Some Canadian telecom carriers have moved some jobs off-shore and are now wholesaling their experience in successfully delivering services using a global workforce. How do firms preserve their unique character in a strategic sourcing arrangement? What parts of the firm can be sourced off-shore? How does global sourcing impact reliability and other quality metrics?

We’re going to be looking at strategic sourcing in a session on Monday June 16 at The Canadian Telecom Summit. In addition, CP Gurnani, the international operations president of Tech Mahindra, a leading global outsourcing firm that focuses on the telecom space, will be participating in a session with the CIO of BT Wholesale to end the day on June 17. Their session will look at how British Telecom has restructured to compete domestically and globally.

Early bird rates end in two weeks on March 1. Book your place now!

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strategic sourcing, BT, Tech Mahindra, Canadian Telecom Summit

Travel kept me from providing some thoughts on the theft of customer data that Bell revealed on Tuesday.

The Globe and Mail reports that the privacy commissioner is now going to look into various aspects of the data loss. Bell has not been completely forthright with exactly what information fell into the wrong hands or in what form (digital or paper) that theft took place.

While Bell says that it is notifying the affected customers who had non-published numbers, the company hasn’t said whether or not it plans to notify the remaining 95% of the 3.4M affected subscribers about what information was stolen. Bell says

No information relating to personal identification numbers, customer credit, credit card numbers, reference checks, billing or long-distance calling details were included in the stolen material.

However, Bell says that it was more information than is found in the phone book:

The customer information recovered in the investigation includes name, address, telephone number and list of Bell services.

There is no mention of exactly what details were in the “list of Bell services.” For example, did the thief get a list of cell phone numbers? Did they find out who subscribes to a Bell security service? A Bell long distance plan with special rates to certain countries? Details about the TV channels that are in subscribers’ Expressvu package? Information about who gets the adult channels? Did they learn about combinations of services that might be indicators that there are children in the home? Or disabled? Or snowbirds who leave their home vacant for months.

Besides the invasion of privacy, all of this information can be used to assist in social engineering fraud or help criminals in targeting vulnerable households.

Bell’s customers deserve to hear the specifics of whether they were part of the affected group and to learn exactly what information was released.

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Bell, social engineering

RIM’s outage this week, on the opening day of the Mobile World Congress, couldn’t have been timed any worse. Mind you, Alec Saunders reports that connectivity in Barcelona “has been an absolute bear.” A day later, RIM says that it is still investigating but the outage was caused by an upgrade to a routing system that had been recently upgraded.

I have been going back through my files and there seems to be a pattern of Blackberry network failures every 10 months or so. February 11, 2008, April 17, 2007, July 12, 2006, March 13, 2006.

We need to look at some trend analysis here. The July 12, 2006 outage was more localized and was blamed on a fibre cut. The other failures were more major network outages. What is going on?

Al Gore might blame the trouble on climate change, given the winter / spring time of year (February, March and April).

Is there anything to be found in the dates themselves? You will notice that the dates are in the teens. The 11th, 13th, 17th. Relevant? Maybe.

I might be more inclined to note that the failures were on Mondays and Tuesdays – given that software upgrades are usually a weekend activity, it may be that we are seeing problems that don’t manifest themselves until the stress of weekday heavy traffic loads are applied.

Why would the April 17th outage have waited until a Tuesday? That was ‘Tax Day’ in the US, and perhaps the traffic loads were even higher in the rush to file. Sure enough, the outage last April was due to inadequate testing of a new storage system.

I think most of us would generally like to see more communications from our communications service supplier, especially when there are problems. As end users, we don’t seem to get lots of information out of the folks at RIM, but I’d want to hear how they are going to improve their test plans and procedures before boinking with live service.

These are somewhat fixable operational problems.

The bigger question may be whether the service architecture itself is flawed in allowing such catastrophic failures to occur in the first place.

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RIM, Blackberry

Last fall, a coalition of American groups began to call for the establishment of a “Do Not Track List” to parallel the telemarketing Do Not Call List.

Their intent is to protect consumers from having their activities tracked and used by advertisers such as the cookies planted by various websites.

Across an ever-growing array of electronic devices, from the Internet to mobile devices and beyond, consumers leave behind a vast amount of behavioral information that is being tracked and targeted without their knowledge. This “behavioral tracking” — the practice of collecting and compiling a record of individual consumers’ activities, interests, preferences, and/or communications over time — places consumers’ privacy at risk, and is not covered by federal law.

Business Week had an article in November that described why such a law shouldn’t be necessary.

One of the concerns, of course, is that most free content on the web is supported by advertiser based business models. Advertisers will pay a premium to target the ‘right’ eyeballs.

The flip side is that people should be rightfully concerned about the ability to control the type of personal information that is available to strangers.

There is a balance of consumer interests at stake on this issue. Behavioral targeted advertising is a rapidly growing business for service providers, but it has attracted associated controversial policy issues. How do we establish an informed discussion of the issues?

Bob Dykes, CEO of NebuAd, will be participating on a panel at The Canadian Telecom Summit entitled Consumers in a Multi-screen World – examining the technologies, applications and issues associated with converged services.

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do not track, DNCL, behavioral tracking

Light Reading has an story that contrasts the views of AT&T; and Verizon on dealing with copyrighted material on their networks.

Verizon is said to reluctant to monitor what is traversing its network. Besides privacy and the risk of missing content that should be screened, Verizon is concerned about the slippery slope: having to identify what other types of content should be blocked.

Verizon’s executive vice president for public affairs Tom Tauke said:

We generally are reluctant to get into the business of examining content that flows across our networks and taking some action as a result of that content.

On the other hand, AT&T; CEO Randall Stephenson told the World Economic Forum that AT&T; was looking for ways to actively block unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material on its network. He told the conference in Davos:

It’s like being in a store and watching someone steal a DVD. Do you act?

If the state of deep packet inspection technology for traffic management provides information about the nature of the content, even the rightful ownership of the content, can service providers continue to turn a blind eye to their role in transmission of contraband material?

AT&T;’s official statement on the matter is:

We want to set the record straight that we have not said we are going to filter, and in fact, there is no technology solution available at this time. What we have said is that we are working with some in the content industry on the very real issue of piracy that has raised costs for all Internet users. It is our hope that this relationship leads to encouraging the legal downloads of movies, TV shows, and other entertainment and content.

We will be exploring the issue of net neutrality in a special session on Wednesday June 18 at The Canadian Telecom Summit in June.

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Update [February 11, 11:30 am]
Michael Geist’s column in the Toronto Star today speaks of cloud computing and raises the question of an legal protection for ISPs for hosted content but over which they have no knowledge or control.

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net neutrality, AT&T;, Verizon, Canadian Telecom Summit