When I purchased my Wisconsin fishing license the other day, I went on line, filled out the application, made my payment via credit card and received my physical license by printing it out on my own printer. Nobody at the other end handled anything or even needed to be in an office. Nobody took a printed license, folded it up, put it in an envelope, addressed the envelope and applied an expensive stamp for me to receive my license several days later. Never mind that they charged me a three buck convenience fee, which is kind of like Ma Bell's old trick of charging you for touch tone phone dialing even though if you did not pay they would have to install an expensive and difficult to maintain rotary pulse converter on your line in their office or sub station.
When I renew my USCA membership, in response to an expensive letter, I send a check which is taken out of an envelope, processed and a nice membership card is printed and sent to me. OK, I take back the nice part, it is a little hardly legible "card" that I clip off the bottom of the printed letter, put in my wallet and throw away next year. In thirty some years I don't think I have actually presented the card to anybody or made any real use of it. Neither the printed Wisconsin fishing license or USCA membership card would be very difficult to forge, but either they are not really needed or it does not really matter because sooner or later the deception would come to light with unpleasant consequences. Yes, I know you can probably renew your membership on line, but that is not the normal way it happens and it remains an expensive, labor intensive process.
The problem is that we are still running USCA like a mom and pop used toy store fifteen years into the internet and data base driven business era. Let me hasten to add that this is not some huge revelation, at roughly a half million dollars we are not really that big a business, and computer data base driven operations are only now becoming cost effective and practical for organizations of this size. But costs are coming down and the cost of the old fashioned army of clerks way of doing business is ever increasing, for each of those clerks takes up a desk in an office with increasing rents and real estate taxes, calls in sick from time to time and requires ever more expensive health insurance and other benefits. The time has come to modernize, to get out of the mind set of more people and bigger offices to house them.
No one should believe that there is some quick simple solution, like hiring a consulting firm to make a new web site in a couple of weeks. The current web site is fine for what it does, supplying static or seldom changing information in a convenient format. Throwing money at another new web site is not a solution for our real problems, is not financial or business planning. We need to go to the next level.
Consulting firms and individual consultants are at best a mixed blessing. In my business, police and industrial communication systems, we used to define a consultant as the guy who when you hired him to tell you the time borrowed your watch, told you the time, charged a fat fee, and kept the watch so you had to come back to him next time.
Consultants are in business to make money, and the best money is from a captive customer who has to come back to you because you have locked him in with hard to understand and undocumented custom software and procedures. You have just become his cash cow, and if you complain or are not cooperative he might just twist your tits.
So if we are going to hire consultants to do our software – perhaps a necessity – we need to have knowledgeable people reviewing the agreements and the work, and strict acceptance tests including verification of documentation and rebuilding after simulated disaster before complete payment.
What we really need is to entirely restructure the way we run the St. Louis office, from the ground up. Replacing file cabinets with computer records and the whole nine yards. This will be a difficult transformation, but one that needs to take place sooner rather than later. What we do not need is a massive, one shot renovation, that would be just another instance of starting a vast project with half vast ideas. What we need is real long term planning and the discipline to implement it as we can afford it and as our office staff and members can participate in and contribute to the planning and implementation.
The fundamental problem we face is that we fall in the fat crack between small enough to run the old fashioned way and large enough to hire an army of programmers and analysts. If we were a mom & pop used toy store taking in a hundred grand or so a year we could go on with written records, some Excel spread sheets and maybe even some records on an old style Access data base. No real problem, unless the guy that does your taxes pays way too much because of your screwed up records; but small businesses go on like this all over the country.
If we were a twenty or thirty million dollar operation, we would have a data processing department with a couple of hot shot programmers, and much more importantly a couple of people who really know how to structure a comprehensive relational data base and set up back up procedures. Real back up procedures that test the data to verify that you could restart the business if the office was destroyed, not just a bunch of old tapes or disks that have not actually been readable for the past three years.
An additional complication is that our needs are more demanding and complex than the typical small business because our trial and show records, judges records, certified helper records, score book records and so forth are not in standard garden variety business software packages which keep inventory records, pay roll records and accounting records.
( Side thought: Other canine organizations have similar needs. Most of the AWDF breed clubs are empty shells not really operating any of this sort of thing, but a couple like perhaps the Malinois folks seem to have similar problems, shared software or even shared systems my be a helpful option. And what does the SV do ? Would they and could they provide software or guidance ? )
So our problem is that we need a couple of key people to design and implement this system, and then maintain it and provide support. And we need to face the fact that sooner or later these people are going to move on, that is, die, take another job or whatever. So there needs to be documentation, periodic verified maintenance operations and the whole nine yards so that USCA can continue to operate the year after the St. Louis office burns to the ground or a couple of people move on unexpectedly.
And there are huge potential problems and liabilities, you really can screw this sort of thing up. If the system is on line, people are going to try and break in. Change records, steal money or just screw around in a sixteen year old pimply faced punks idea of fun. (Not that nobody ever tries to game the present system or makes off with money now.) It does happen, and putting the safeguards in place, which means rigid staff adherence to operational protocols as well as properly implemented software is essential. And paper records are pretty safe unless you have a fire or flood, but the wrong key stroke can blow away a generation's worth of data in a poorly implemented system.
And there are significant risks. A few years ago the FBI spent millions, or perhaps billions, of dollars over several years producing a new do everything data base system that was going to revolutionize the operation of the Bureau. But you know what ? That sucker didn't work, and never went into operation. The tax payers were bled for millions or billions of dollars and got zip zero in return. It could quite easily happen to us. Details Here.
How can this happen ? One road to failure is to think of it strictly as a technical and operational problem and dictate a solution from on high. To be successful, the planners need to get down to the level of the people in the trenches, in our situation the St. Louis staff and the various officers and members, and see how they really do their work today, what they think the needs are and where the improvements are appropriate. You need to trust your people and understand that most of the time they really do know how to do their job better than you do, and have probably known for months and years that there are better ways.
In my many years at Motorola, back in the days when we were a very successful operation, as a Research or Product and system development engineer one of the things I was expected to do was spend time riding in real cop cars and staying up all night in dispatch centers on busy nights in places such as Chicago, Virginia Beach and San Diego; getting your hands dirty was part of the job. The people planning the next generation of the USCA operations need to do the same thing, spend time in the St. Louis office and learning what these people do and what they think.
So this is not a matter of spending a few weeks whipping up a new "data driven" web site. It means transforming the operation of the St. Louis office from the ground up, entirely changing the way each of our employees does her or his job. It means a transition plan which includes training for all our employees, and could mean that some who can not or will not adapt would need to be replaced.
A point apparently not well understood is that this sort of thing may not require any computer hardware at all, nothing more than garden variety personal computers which can run a browser.
Because many commercial ISP operations run very sophisticated data bases, with underground servers, diesel or gas back up power and physically remote on line redundant servers, so that if the Dallas office burns down the Seattle office picks up without missing a beat, we might never even know that it happened.
There is an enormous variety of possible configurations of people, software and equipment to put a modern operation into place, some of which would transform our operation in a positive way and some of which would trap us in out of control long term cost and ineffective operations. In order to minimize risk in the solution of this problem, we need to go forward in the traditional way, that is, create a real set of requirements, that is, a description of the things a new system needs to accomplish. Only at this point is it appropriate to investigate and evaluate candidate technical solutions; jumping into implementation without a well defined set of requirements is a classic road to failure.
It is important to understand that neither I nor anybody else has all of the answers at this point, let alone any sort of workable "master plan." This is just much too complex for that; but we do know a lot of the questions, and that is the right starting place.
Because in the twenty first century all you really need in terms of physical facilities is a post office box, destined to be used less and less, and someone to answer the phone as a back up to the computer operations. We need to get out of the growth is more offices, more filing cabinets, more clerks mind set and take advantage of twenty first century technology. No matter how difficult this will be there is no avoiding it, it is necessary to contain costs and provide the modern member services people have come to expect.
How do we get there from here? First, we need to know that throwing money at something called a "new data web site" is not the solution, will not really change anything. We need to take incremental steps over a number of years, with priority going to the improvements with the most immediate impact, the so called low hanging fruit. The key to successful incremental steps is a long term plan, you don't lay the foundation for a building before you know how high it is going to be, how many elevators and power distribution lines you are going to need, what form the organization and its operations will evolve into.
What we desperately need is a long term "Business Operations Policy Steering Committee." The name is not especially important, but it should not include terms like "web site" or "software" because these are business and people challenges, web sites and software are only tools to select and implement after the over all solution is outlined.
In the ideal world, this committee would have people that understand our tax and legal situation, business analysts, security people and so forth. Again, this is not fundamentally a computer problem but a business operations problem.
The primary function of the committee would to be to pull together an overall plan which could be implemented in stages. Key parts of the plan include:
This will be a definition of data tables for all relevant entities of our operation, such as people, dogs, trials, conformation shows and so forth.
A key aspect of this design is that we do not have tables of judges, helpers, competitors, members and so forth. We have one table of people, and the judges, members, and officers are attributes of the people in the data base, not separate tables. Thus is necessary because when the address, status or phone number changes it can be changed only once, because a person only exists once in the system. Even dead people, dead is just another attribute, and dead people are in the long term our history and legacy. This is vitally important, for if a person, or any other entity exists more than one time, the data will not remain in sync and confusion and eventual failure of the system will result.
Five or six years ago I pulled together and implemented a system, in PHP, including people, dogs, trials, conformation events and so forth and put it up on the internet. Nobody, but nobody, was interested. Perhaps the time is coming closer.
Not that PHP is t necessarily the right language, and
this prototype will not necessarily evolve into an operational system; but something
concrete to evaluate is necessary. In my
professional life as an electrical, systems and computer engineer, this is what
a prototype was, something done for the insight it can provide, not as an end
in itself.
Disaster recovery is much more than a lot of data back ups on tapes, for if you are not testing the back up data, by actually rebuilding the operational system, then you can go for years in ignorant bliss of the fact that your back up tapes or discs are corrupt or incomplete.
This probably means concurrent operational redundancy,
probably incorporating remote physical sites. This is probably a service that we should subscribe to rather than own,
but that would be a down the road decision.
Anybody listening to the news knows about all of the problems with personal data showing up in the wrong hands, and people stealing money, changing grades and everything else you can imagine. Security is a real and significant design consideration and cost that needs to be planned up front, this is truly a case of pay me now or pay me later big time.
In order to succeed, the high level elements of these plans need to be in place up front, so that incremental implementation stages can proceed orderly, according to need and available funding. We need to have people working this now.
I have not mentioned financial records and budgets. Because of security and legal considerations, my guess now is that these records belong on a separate system. But going forward on somebody's guess or hunch is a plan for disaster, we need to be planning now.
Since I began creating this little document, Amazon has come out with a $140 version of their Kindle text reader. These text or book readers are revolutionizing the way we obtain books and magazines, Amazon is now selling more books as computer down loads than hard copy books.
I am working on a book on police dog history and deployment, and will probably not submit it to a publisher. I will go to Amazon and/or other providers and provide them with the book in data format. Customers or subscribers will make a payment, a very low payment like one fifth of a book price, in the area of ten bucks, and down load the book. They can download it on up to about five devices, and if they change readers they can delete it and download it on the new device. When a copy of my Bouvier book sold for in the area of fifty bucks, I got a measly couple of dollars. But if I go through Amazon or a similar vendor, the customer will pay about $10 and I will get most of it. Win – win for everybody but the publisher; eliminating the middle man is good for everybody.
Our rule books should be delivered this way, if we insist on selling them.
Same deal with the magazine. We could provide members with a subscription and / or sell subscriptions separately and not have any printing or mailing costs. If we have the trial records in the data base, the trial results would get published without anybody but the person making the entry and the trial secretary or judge having to make data entries. Members or people taking out a subscription could search out results based on a dog or person's name on line rather than trying to look through stacks of magazines.
These are big challenges and big opportunities. In the long term a lot of money may need to be invested in order to contain costs and enhance member and employee services. If it is done right, the costs will be spread over a number of years, and will go out incrementally, that is in a number of stages each of which improve the operation of the St. Louis office and member services.
In order for this to come to reality, we need to be working on a comprehensive, written long term plan now. Sure, as we go forward the plan will evolve, but done right it will bring decision points to our attention in a timely manner, helping to prevent going down blind allies.
We have been in avoidance and procrastinating for years, and the time has come to enter the twenty first century, we really need to get serious about this now.
The alternative is out of control costs and slow, inefficient and error prone services which will suck the life out of our organization.
We are only getting away with this now because we have no direct competition, but one of the primary limitations on the growth and survival of Schutzhund is that cost is locking out the young people.
We need to do better.