Incomplete integration and the mystery "N"

Given the way computers have come to completely dominate our society over the past 30 years it's sometimes surprising when the digital fingerprints of living, breathing humans appear in places that they really shouldn't.

It's easy as a small web shop to imagine that everyone has by now completely integrated all their separate parts into one seamless, magical ESB - after all if we can do it with almost no budget, a larger company that can throw million of dollars at the problem should be able to do it as well. This is obviously an opinion that greatly discounts how difficult corporate inertia is too change - one client of a e-procurement system I worked on is just finally finishing integrating the system into their processes, 3 years after it was finished. But more than just corporate inertia, legacy systems and huge installed user bases make it extremely difficult to smoothly and completely integrate different pieces of a company's computer systems together - for example completely tying a website to a company's the back-end system.

We recently got back from a two-week vacation in Germany, and having been given some excellent advice from my father that international data roaming charges are exorbitant, I signed up for AT&T's "international data-roaming plan" for about $20/month which gets you 20 MB of emergency-email-checking and where-the-heck-are-we-GPS'ing on my phone while we traveled around the country. At least that's what I thought I did - when I got back I and opened my AT&T phone bill it said I owed them a whole lot money. That can't be right I thought, so I logged onto the website and verified that the international data-roaming plan was on the phone and read the fine print (expecting to see something like "except in southern Bavaria") - but no, everything looked hunky-dory.

I called up and talked to what turned out to be a amazingly friendly AT&T customer service representative that issued an apology immediately and said that the data roaming had been added the wrong phone - Martha and I share a family-plan for our business phones. I immediately assumed she had misspoken so I asked:

Me: Oh, so I added the data-roaming to the wrong phone?
AT&T Rep: No sir, we did.
Me: Wait, how is that possible, I did it on the website.
AT&T Rep: I'm not sure, it's billed correctly but someone here added it to the wrong phone.

They immediately issued a credit but the fact that something like this could happen speaks to a larger issue - AT&T most likely hasn't completely integrated the various parts of their wireless operation. I can only engage in wild, over-the-top speculation - but I'd guess that anything you do on their nice, modern website probably gets printed out on an old-school line printer fed with special printer paper, put in a small metal cylinder and then delivered via pneumatic tubes to the 9th floor, the "Account Modification and Liquidation Department" where a overworked, chain-smoking employee in a non-descript gray suit sitting at a small wooden desk manually enters the change request into a completely different system running on an old mainframe via a green phosphorescent terminal interface (In fact, in my head AT&T corporate looks and operates exactly like the office building in the Hudsucker Proxy )

As a small company, not having to deal with legacy systems and huge installed user bases is one of the reasons that we can do a lot more with a lot less. We don't have millions of users demanding certain existing functionality or hundreds of employees entrenched in their ways. We have the ability to be a lot more agile and a lot more competitive by working of a new technology picked specifically for the task rather than dealing with a system built on COBOL because it was the only language available at the time.

For another example let's take my name - I'm pretty sure it's Pascal Rettig - and I'm pretty sure that I usually spell it correctly. What is surprising however, is the amount of mail that shows up at our door addressed to "Pascal Retting." People really like to put in an extra "N" into my last name and there's nothing I can do to stop them.

It's enough of a problem that I always verify the spelling of my last name when I set up some service over the phone, but invariably a good portion of the time the first bill will show up and there it will be: "Pascal Retting."

What this means is that just like the AT&T snafu above - people are taking my information, entering it into a computer (unless their typing is just an IM to a friend), and then at some point along the line it's getting retyped in by someone who makes the inadvertant subconscious addition.

When National Grid acquired energy provider Keyspan in our area, the name on my account suddenly changed from Pascal Rettig to Pascal Retting (I can't be 100% sure that's exactly when it happened but it's there now). What that means to me is that during the acquisition, at some point, someone re-typed in my name, and by inference a couple of million other customers names into a new computer system. That is insane. It speaks to a corporate culture playing serious catchup in the digital age - a liability for them but an opportunity for small businesses not encumbered by the shakles of human error and inefficiency to make their mark. That being said, having a few million to throw at a project probably doesn't hurt.