The Technology-Service Tradeoff-

On my way to school each day, I usually listen to a 30 minute snippet of the Clark Howard Show. For those of you unaware of who Clark Howard is, he's a financial expert that deals with personal finance and essentially wants to be the source of knowledge for questions from his listeners. Some people like him, some people don't, but he's not the story behind this blog. Rather, I want to take something that he refers to all the time, which is what he calls "Customer No-Service".

For him, customer service representatives are the axis of evil. They are there simply to rip you off and not help you with your problem. This got me thinking about the trade-off in such a system. When you buy something or need help, technology is great, but what really makes or breaks the experience is the person on the other side of the phone or computer.

My personal example of this is with my iPhone. As I've said in a past blog, I'm a Mac user, and I've also been an iPhone user for about a year. Things started out really well with my phone. It worked great, 3G connections were fast, and calls were high quality, especially compared to my old phone, which didn't have capability for e-mail or the Internet.

However, over the past three months, technology in the phone has come back to bite itself. I'm sure most of you are aware of AT&T's struggles to keep iPhone service at such a high level. They can only install more infrastructure at a certain rate, and the number of users on their 3G network is outrunning their installation pace. As a result, speed on the phones is way down from where it was a year ago, despite the fact that I live in an area that is much less densely populated than I did when I bought it.

This brings me back to the technology-service trade-off. When I talk to AT&T, telling them that I'm consistently losing 3G coverage altogether, and I can no longer get coverage at home, their answer is that there's nothing they could do. When I bought the phone and service plan, I wasn't signing an agreement that they'd offer 3G coverage at a 100% coverage rate, even in areas that they covered at the time. I essentially paid for the technology at the cost of the capabilities of that technology.

That doesn't make sense, but that's not how we've created customer service for technology in this country. Selling products comes first, and even though the products may actually lose value and cause harm to their own technological infrastructure, adding a new user is more important than maintaining the current user. The economics behind that are questionable, but that's how manufacturers of new technology work here.

Something will have to change, or those companies will start to fail, as customers that theoretically cost less to keep than those being recruited from other places leave altogether.

Time and Technology

One thing I read about over and over again in our cases is the time it takes to develop technology and to do things the right way.

That has led me to a question: Does technology save us time or cost us time?

I think it really depends on what you do for a living. For those that are in non-technological managerial positions, I think the answer is that technology saves time on a daily basis. However, when it comes to the grand total of time spent, how much time does technology development, implementation, and use actually save us? More importantly, how much does technology development, implementation, and use actually cost us compared to the status quo?

I know I'm going to get a slanted answer in this class, and I'm even of the opinion personally that technology has been the main driver behind economic growth in the last 70 years. That's pretty much beyond question to me, but the answers are much more complicated than that.

For example, finding a qualified candidate to fill a position is much easier now than it used to be, and that's thanks to simple things such as employment websites and the availability of quick background checks on the qualifications of applicants. However, if you're hiring someone in their early-twenties, the odds are that they simply aren't as able to work face-to-face in groups as they used to be. Technology may make the cost of business cheaper, but what about those little things that we've lost over time, since technology has become the barrier between human interaction?

I know I sound like I'm 80 years old now, but it's just something to think about in a class where we push the advantages of technology so much. We talk about the drawbacks, but we always place the blame on something other than the technology, ignoring the fringe drawbacks of the effects of using such technology.

When Internet is Lost...

Over the last week, I've come to experience life before the Internet. I don't like it.

I live in an apartment complex/campus that doubles as an educational complex, so the information technology needs are a little different than most residences. Due to the increasing volume of users on the campus, the IT department has become overloaded, and the Internet essentially slowed to a crawl over the course of a few months. That came to a head last week, when the IT group decided to add another T1 line to the campus, though that required cutting off the Internet completely on the campus. That meant that my apartment couldn't reach the Internet, which is frustrating when you don't have any control over the decisions that are made to reach that point.

Since I don't work, I thought last week would be my chance to get ahead on the work of the semester, since I'm taking 7 classes. However, without Internet, I got no work done. I couldn't do my assignment for this class over the weekend, and I couldn't do any research for anything, other than reading in textbooks.

Why has the Internet become such an important part of my life? How come I was bored and useless for a week because the Internet in my home was out?

I love the things that the Internet can bring to the table. However, like the article we read for this week, it can be the best of times and the worst of times. Would we in society be able to function if the Internet went down worldwide? I don't think so. It just wouldn't be possible. What about if power went down everywhere? No traffic lights, no MARTA, no hot water.

Losing the Internet for a week isn't the worst thing in the world. I could go down to a coffee shop a mile from my apartment and do what I needed to do. Granted, I couldn't sit there for the amount of time required to do research for school, but I could go there long enough to check some e-mail from time and time and make sure the world wasn't falling apart around me without my notice, since I can't check CNN.com.

I'm here today, because the world wasn't falling apart, but I'll always regret my week without the Internet.