I have been reading (itBusiness, Globe, Star) about Toronto’s plans to get onto the global map for Information, Communications and Technology (ICT) research, development and production. I have to admit I am more than a little bit cynical.

The city’s report claims that Toronto is third to San Francisco and New York for ICT in North America, and yet, the city wants more. It sounds like a Rodney Dangerfield cry for ‘We don’t get no respect’. So let’s throw some government money to make us feel better. Toronto is number 3 in North America. It wants to be in the top 5 in the world.

Why am I cynical? This is the same city that has fought the telecom industry whenever it wanted to install fibre under the streets. In fact, it feels so strongly about the evil wealth of the telecom sector, that it has used their tax dollars to fund court appeal after appeal after appeal of the CRTC’s decision that says cities have to stop pillaging the industry. As I have written before, the CRTC and the courts have told the cities: “Enough!”

Toronto is the same city that pays for its publicly-owned electric utility to offer free WiFi, not to provide high speed access to the underprivileged areas of the city, but to compete head-to-head against the private sector in the city centre.

Want a good start to stimulate ICT? How about declaring the GTA to be a ‘telecom friendly free-trade zone’? If carriers want access to upgrade facilities, why not welcome them with the same gusto that Toronto has for the movie industry? It seems to me that movie production trucks are a bigger source of traffic tie-ups than fibre-optic construction, but no one (including me) would complain about them disrupting the movement of cars. Let’s be as positive about new telecom infrastructure.

Fostering private sector competition – vigourous competion – is a way to stimulate the industry. Treating high tech infrastructure as a monopoly public utility is a guaranteed road to failure. Every time I hear the traffic reports talking about the continued closure of the intersection of Jane and Highway 7, it serves as a reminder that our governments already do a lousy job maintaining civil works like sewers and streets. Why would we want to trust government with the provision of critical electronic infrastructure?

Sure, government does a good job up front. It is the ongoing capacity planning and maintenance that are just plain underfunded. It’s only natural. Initial installations are sexy and make for good photo ops. Maintenance is boring.

A federal public servant that I respect once told me that governments typically do a lousy job of picking winners. If Toronto wants a strong ICT sector, it has to foster an environment that creates the right incentives for businesses to do it on its own.

Like a best practice for management, it seems to me that the key to fostering a stimulating, energized and creative work environment for ICT in Toronto is for government to clear roadblocks and then get out of the way while the industry does its own thing.

Rather than knocking on the doors of the existing private sector success stories and asking for them to contribute to pay for this new ICT initiative, let’s hope the mayor is receptive to just standing on the sidelines and cheering them on to do their own thing. Sometimes, the best form of stimulus may cost nothing at all.

I started getting strange messages from the Hilton Honors (HHonors frequent sleeper) program this evening. The first message was in German, sent at 9:18pm. Then a message in Spanish at 9:27. English followed at 10:25 and now French came in time stamped 10:27, right after the kind lady at HHonors Customer Help Desk said ‘don’t worry, we have the situation under control and it is now fixed.’

I called HHonors the first time right after the German message, but they transfered me to a line with no voice mail and I thought ‘oh well, no big deal.’ When the next language came through, I figured it was time to try to get it fixed.

While I have been on hold in the Hilton call centre, I traced the origins of the email messages. They appear to be legitimate, but errant. It appears that Hilton contracted out this campaign to Epsilon Interactive who pride themselves at being able to send out 5M emails per hour. That means that they could have easily sent these messages to the entire HHonors database – at least 4 times.

It seems to me that improved email practices can be learned from this incident. Obviously, this is an accident. But one of the problems I faced in trying to notify Hilton about a problem is that no one at their call centre is even aware of the campaign, there is no phone number in the message, there is no escalation process.

I wonder if any of the people in charge of email campaigns make a point of being included in every mailing – just so that they can see problems as they are happening. Clearly, that isn’t the practice at Hilton.

As a result, the easiest recourse for their Gold level members (the target of this campaign) is to filter out all email from HHonors, or unsubscribe completely. That is the last thing that Hilton wanted from this campaign.

I like to think of myself as being somewhat technically literate. I can program VCRs and can figure out most software without a manual.

I have a confession. I don’t like the menu systems I have used so far for digital TV. I think the set top box industry is trying to force a computer application into a TV remote form factor and it just isn’t working for me. My wife? Ha!

Scrolling through hundreds of channels? No thanks.

And when I want to search for a program, there has to be an easier way than selecting characters awkwardly with the arrow keys. Why isn’t it predictive? The system knows the names of all the shows – when I enter W, the search subsystem should offer a menu of shows that begin with ‘W’.

If I find difficult, then what about all the non-geeks out there who still haven’t changed the clocks in their cars to Daylight Savings time?

IP-TV service providers take note. As Apple proved with the iTunes/iPod combo, there are great returns for a company that provides an easy user interface.

I was reading about the massive payout to former Exxon chief Lee Raymond and I couldn’t help but wonder why the telecom sector is so much against being turned into a group of commodity providers. After all, the oil sector seems to have made out OK churning out barrels of oil that look an awful lot like the barrels churned out by their competitors.

Sure, they have a little bit of differentiation – I only buy Petrocan gas in the winter because they have succeeded in convincing me that Petrocan’s blend of Winter Gas is best for my old beast.

I think most shareholders would be thrilled to have oil industry returns on their telecom stocks.

Tyco is paying $50M in civil penalties to the SEC for its previous management’s cooking of the books. Nortel settled a shareholder class action suit for $2.5B in February. What do these events have in common?

In both cases, shareholders are paying the price for management misdeeds. Notice that there aren’t payments from the Board of Directors. These aren’t payments from the management teams that misbehaved. The audit firms haven’t refunded their fees.

Instead, in some warped sense of justice, shareholders are paying fines and settlements for the transgressions against themselves. Perhaps it is supposed to be a form of penance; self-flagellation to achieve a higher level of forgiveness in order to move forward.

Sorry – I don’t feel cleansed. I’d like to see the Boards and the auditors held accountable. If the Board fell asleep at the wheel, despite their tens of thousands of dollars in retainers and meeting fees, then hold them accountable for these fines and settlements. Individual shareholders rely on and pay handsomely to have auditors and the Board look after their interests.

Yet individual shareholders have again paid for the failure of both groups to do their jobs.