Thursday was our first full Vocational Day. This was a good vocational day. Once upon a time, a vocational day for an unmarried, Catholic male, nearing 30 would have involved a trip to the seminary... But for me, it was far more secular!
Graham, my host, organised a number of opportunities for me. Now, Vocational means specific to your career. Most of you know I’m in ICT, so this is your one warning. This could get long and dry and boring, so bail out now if you want. No hard feelings.
I mean it… Westy wants us to write a full report on the day to send home, and I’ve got a whole notepad full of thoughts to collate, so this could ramble on more than Led Zepplin. If you just want the sum up, skip to the last paragraph. If you are just here for witty repartee, then read one of the other posts! :-)
BNI - Business Networking International
Our day began with a 7am meeting of the local chapter of Business Networking International (BNI). Read more about the organisation here, I won’t expand. I mentioned in a previous post that Graham is involved with this organisation, and few Tasmanians responded that BNI has chapters at home as well. It’s interesting to note that there re no lawyers (or ‘attorneys’) represented here in the Stockton club, so Michelle or Dayne or someone else from DMA, perhaps you can expand over here??
The little ‘infomercials’ that the club members presented were fun and professional. The brash, confident way people presented reminded me a little of the stereotype of the overconfident American we sometimes have at home. But this was different, because these men and women were all business people, educated and well spoken. They weren’t loudly telling us that we were wrong to call the ketchup tomato sauce when they are visiting our home country. OK, I’m probably walking a fine line here between making an observation and being offensive, so I’ll stop there. Let’s just say that this group of people were well presented, friendly, engaging and interesting.
I had a good chat with the local IT bloke, gentleman George who runs a Credit Card Processing business, and a lady who sells Corporate Health Insurance plans.
ISP - InReach
Next stop was an ISP named InReach. Rotary Club of Stockton member Lisa Bickford is President of the organisation, and was kind enough to give me about an hour of her time. I think the original plan was that I’d speak to her for about 15 minutes, and then spend an hour and a half with her technical team. I figured that I could learn much of the technical stuff from a book, and that I don’t often get access to the CEO of an ISP, so we changed things about…
I spent almost an hour with Lisa discussing the state of the US Internet Industry. Some quick facts for anyone interested:
- There is about a 50-50 split in the home user market between cable and DSL internet. Cable is almost non-existent at home, so this is interesting to me. Lisa says that the two have been in competition for some time, and although DSL is making up some ground, cable is still winning. Cable companies provide bandwidth and TV services, but had struggled to provide telephony. VoIP is changing this. Conversely, Telcos provide bandwidth and telephony, but have struggled to get access to good Video. Access to youtube and other streaming media services are changing this. The cable companies have one big advantage though, Lack of competition. There is legislation here (like in Australia) that requires that a Telco give retail ISPs access to their network at a bureaucratically determined wholesale price (like Telstra does in Oz). There is no such legislation for cable companies, so they have a big natural advantage there…
- Interestingly, there is legislation that says there must be two Telcos with infrastructure in any area. We tend to only have Telstra, but they might have AT&T and Verizon in the same area. Large extra setup cost, but possibly more competition, I’m not sure.
- Landlines are more expensive here, but mobile plans seem cheaper. My prepaid AT&T local phone has a cap of $1 per day for calls to other AT&T mobiles. All the team with AT&T, so this is great.
- Broadband costs about the same.
- Standard DSL speed here is 1.5 Mbps, just like our faster services at home. I thought they might have been faster than this.
- We discussed wireless services. There are quite a few areas that have tried to institute local government sponsored or commercial 802.x wireless mesh infrastructures. Palo Alto. It hasn’t worked terribly well. There are legislated maximums on the transmission power of antenna, and these don’t typically allow good coverage inside buildings. So you end up having to have a powered booster inside, or a wired service anyway!
- You can buy wireless access via the 3G mobile network for about $60 per month, but only on a 2 year contract (I’d already checked this out at Verizon and Clearwire shops the day before). Lucky for me, Lisa agreed to sell me a wireless card for the two months that I’m here at wholesale rates. I signed up in about 30 seconds, and have now collected the gear and paid. Unfortunately it doesn’t work yet, but we’ll sort that out on Monday…
After Lisa finally had to get rid of me so she could do some work, I spent another hour or so with her call centre manager David. We spoke about managing a call centre that deals with Tech Support, Sales and Provisioning. He talked about selecting, interviewing and employing staff. We discussed managing work flow and levels of customer service. It was very interesting and educational.
David spoke about the need to find a balance between Tech skills and an ability to work harmoniously in a team. He said he loves to ask a few difficult questions in an interview. For example: “Tell me about a time when you had a conflict with your boss and how it was resolved” – If you’ve never had a conflict then he reckons you’re a liar, two faced, or a walk over. In any case, he doesn’t want you. Another one, “You’re stuck in a circular room with no doors or windows with only a box, a spoon and an orange. What do you do?” He said he’s basically just looking to weed out anyone who “gets that deer in the headlights look.”
It seems that salaries are much more directly market driven over here. David talked about offering salaries. The economy is depressed over here at present, so they are paying new hires less than they were a year or two ago. I could be wrong, but I don’t think we do that quite the same way at home. David is also happy to ‘take a flyer’ on someone who doesn’t necessarily have the right experience, provided they have the right temperament, and are prepared to work for less. He says that, when it comes to salary, “The first person to mention money loses.” (He does ask for the employees expected range on his employment application form though… so I guess the prospective employee always answers first and loses!)
UoP - University of the Pacific
I left InReach about 1:15, grabbed a quick lunch with Graham, and then headed to my last stop, back at UoP (University of the Pacific).
There is wireless internet access all over the UoP campus, and as we came in we saw a blonde under grad student lying on the grass working on her laptop in a two piece swimsuit. In April. As Graham says, “You could get quite distracted here…”
(I don’t have a picture, sorry guys)
I think the plan at UoP was similar to that at InReach. I meet the top guy for a few minutes, then get shuffled around all the Tech Team. I used a similar approach. Ask the top guy lots of questions, keeping him talking as long as possible, and learn as much as you can…
The Chief Information Officer of UoP, Larry Frank, is a top bloke. We spoke for about an hour and a half, which is a ridiculous amount of time to have the ear of someone so senior. (I think CIO is equal third top of the Uni after the President and the Provost). Conversation ranged widely, from the strategic to the specific to the personal. It was all very valuable.
We discussed:
Advisory and professional bodies in the industry
The notion of ‘best practice’ and supporting research
Setting strategic direction, prioritising and budgeting
Upcoming challenges and new technologies
After leaving Larry, I met with the universities top Network Architect to tour the network core and discussed, VoIP, WiFi, WAN Design & optimisation, equipment models and vendors, how to achieve redundancy as widely as possible and UoPs planning for an upcoming move of the entire server and communications room is going.
All this was fantastic information from an experienced and skilled professional. What a treat…
Two pieces of non technical info to finish.
1 - The Chief Network Architect was from Paraguay. We were discussing cooling at one stage and he gave me the temperature of his server room in degrees Celsius, and then stopped to try and convert that into Fahrenheit. First time that has happened on the trip! I can definitely empathise though. The old 5/9 +/- 32 is getting a workout for me...
2 – When I left, I went back to give CIO Larry a gift and thank him for his time. I shook his hand and thanked him saying something like, “It was very generous of you to spend so long with me, I wouldn’t have expected to get so much of your time. I appreciate it.”
He could have said something like, “No worries, I like to help out” and I would have been happy.
But instead he said, “I consider it a professional courtesy between peers”
He was a hell of a nice guy.
Thanks Larry, and thanks for organising the day Graham…
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