It Happens Every Fall...

It is that time of the year where baseball is foremost in this blogger's mind. Yes, I am following the election, to the point of "election fatigue" and I have many things to say about technology and politics. In fact, I will be covering the action over at my favorite site since the primaries, fivethirtyeight.com. But that will come a little slower in this coming month, particularly with the Cubs in the playoffs...

In any case, I hope you hop over to Sabermetrati to keep up with all of the sabermetrically-inclined baseball news. A sneek peak: it could be a Red Sox vs. Cubs All Time All Futility World Series!

Question: Why Are Republicans Graded on a Curve?

Why are Republicans graded on a curve? Everyone in the Mainstream Media has said, "Oh, well McCain's not a good public speaker" and then said the same about Sarah Palin, basically the idea that she is inexperienced and will not do well.

Yet, when these tepid speeches are completed, why do the Media go into paroxysms about how much better they did than anyone thought? Particularly if you're a Republican, and you don't believe in quotas, or "grading on a curve", than why are McCain and Palin accorded such kudos for speeches that pale in comparison to even the worst Democratic speaker last week?

Just a question...

Standing in the Shadow of the Birthplace of Democracy

BOSTON - To take this picture, I stood at the spot where the Boston Massacre sparked a nascent movement for liberty, sovereignty, and freedom from colonial rule.

As I stood there, I imagined what it must have been like to be standing the exact same spot in 1776 with the rest of the assembled masses as the first reading of the Declaration of Independence in public. That was the technology of the day: public oratory and pamphleteering, the olden day version of YouTube and Blogging (sans the instantaneous global reach).

After Senator Obama's speach last Thursday night, I'd say oratory is still big in the ever-more United States of America. After walking the Freedom Trail, I felt a part of our revolutionary history.

To see more pictures from the Freedom Trail taken by The Wife and I, follow this thread to Flickr. My particular favorite is the Boston Massacre Monument, which is in the Boston Commons, the oldest Public Park in the USA.

For a Fenway Park story, go to http://sabermetrati.blogspot.com.

Trash Emailing = eTrashMail

I'm sure many of you have come across one of these "trash emails" trashing Barack Obama:

• Obama's Proposed Tax Plan
• Wake Up, America!
• Equitable Distribution

I recently received the first one about how Obama's tax plan is supposed to work. It was sent to me and my friends by a friend making fun of it. He in turn received it from what appears to be a very long thread. This thread is started by a VP at Bear Sterns.

His name was clear, his office number was there, and his title was clear. I will not reprint any of it, though, because I called him and asked him about it. Whether he sent it willfully as a show of support for John McCain, or as he told me, as an "I can't believe what people are saying about Barack Obama, look at this..." I don't think it appropriate to punish him further. He told me how many people have called or emailed him. His supervisor isn't happy with the notoriety, either.

This just goes to show the new playing field unfolding in the campaign arena: no longer does the negative campaigning come in the form of a negative ad, but it is a full-court press of emails (spam, actually!), YouTube videos, and blog posts. But the method in question today is that of the trash-talking email, or eTrashMail.

The eTrashMail format is one where blatant lies seem to be used but with the appearance that they are coming from an unquestionable source. For instance, in the one above, the source about taxes was coming from a VP at Bear-Stearns (yes, I know they are not exactly sporting a spotless reputation these days...).

eTrashMail can only mean that there will be only one winner this election season: the advertisers on Snopes.com! If you want to see who is the clear eTrashMail winner (meaning who's attacking the most), see the truth about Barack Obama and the same for John McCain. Obviously, the right wing smear machine is working overtime...

Mid-Season Baseball Prediction cross-posting alert...

See my mid-season prediction for the baseball season on http://www.bigshoulderssports.com.

The Great AT&T and Apple iFiasco of 2008

Yesterday morning, I took an early lunch at 11am to go see if the iPhone was worth getting, and if the line was short, so I walked the block from my office to the Chelsea AT&T store. A quick calculation of about 30 people in front of me, at least 6 salespeople, at 15 minutes per transaction (on average from what was being said on the webs) meant that I'd be taken care of in between 1 and 1.5 hours. I waited 37 minutes and was the 16th person in line, when an AT&T employee came out to announce that only 5 iPhones were left, all 8GB. I turned and went right back to my office.

I had been stymied, like the 100 people behind me (and 11 in front).

Over the course of the day, my RSS feeds on the tech sites and blogs I frequent started revealing the story (mostly on CNet's excellent coverage): Apple and AT&T (but mostly Apple) had completely screwed up what was poised to be a summer blockbuster of major proportions, and during a recession, no less. When I left to go back to the office, there were approximately 100 people behind me. Let's do a quick tally of how much was lost, at minimum, before Noon yesterday, for a single AT&T store's gross profits on the day: 111 x $199 (8GB iPhone) + $36 (activation fee) = $26,085. That obviously does not include the people who would have joined the line at Noon. Let's say this happened roughly equally around the country at all the AT&T stores (according to CNet, there's 1,800), that would mean an extremely conservative loss of approximately $46,935,000. In one day. Before Lunch.

On top of that, when I called to see if the other local AT&T stores had iPhones in stock, both told me that they were out and that all the AT&T stores were out and might, or might not, be restocked on Saturday, Monday, or the week after. That doesn't sound very good for AT&T or Apple.

On Wall Street, AT&T stock lost over .58% by the end of the day. Apple was down 2.28%.

Now for Apple's story: it is clear that they did not follow proper Business Process Engineering standards. Nor did they follow proper business procedures.

If I'm an Apple or AT&T executive, based on last year's successful iPhone launch, I would prepare, at minimum, to handle at least as much as last year (about 700,000 iPhones sold from 7/1-7/3 last year). Then I would also plan to handle at least that many concurrently at the moment I made the software upgrade available. Why would they not do something like the following: Day 1, release iPhone 3G in the North American market; Day 8, release software upgrade for iPhone 1 on Apple's Web site (or through automatic update) for the same market; Day 15: Release to Western/Eastern Markets in a phased manner (Europe first day, then Asia, then Australia, then South America, etc.); Day 22, release software upgrade to the rest of the world.

I haven't yet seen the bad sales figures for Apple, nor do I know what they predicted they would do. I can be fairly certain that they will fall far short of expectations for this opening weekend due to this iDebacle. We'll see how low things go when the markets open on Monday. I don't know what the total loss will be when all is said and done, but it will be in the high millions, no doubt, when taking into account lost revenue from the iPhones that weren't sold, the AT&T high rate data plans that weren't started (and compounded by the fact that people will continue to make money for their competitors while using their old phones!) and iPhone apps that won't be bought now, later, or never. This is without even mentioning what will happen to the Apple brand and can't-miss aura.

I wonder if AT&T is secretly happy: the next iPhone might have more telecomm partners (which is what usually happens to exclusive deals in the industry after 1 or 2 years--see Q, Motorola), and perhaps won't sell quite as many as they might have, had they been successful on this launch. Conspiracy theory, anyone? Hmm...

It's Social-Profit, Not Non-Profit!

In my quest to determine ROI in a charitable organization environment, I quickly came to the conclusion that applying the standard formulas used in for-profit businesses will not fit. Being a “Non-“ profit automatically means that a return on investment will be “nothing”. Since that is clearly not the case with any charitable organization, the “profit” must lie elsewhere. Reading the Good to Great Non-Profit version by Jim Collins gave me the idea that the profit generated by these agencies is actually social. He describes a social entrepreneur as someone trading in social benefit, rather than monetary benefit. That is, the efforts of so many volunteers and staff all working towards a social goal are generating a strong current of social profit that must be measurable.

It is within this measurement of social profit that I am stuck on. Sure, one easy measurement is the number of clients served. But that is more a function of the money we have, either through government grants or private donations. In almost all cases, if we had more money, we would be able to serve more clients.

Additionally, there are other social forces at work, some of which cannot be measured, although some can. For instance, we know that in the case of GMHC, where we have been fighting HIV/AIDS for over 25 years, the epidemic has changed many times, but one key fact has always remained, prevention (condom use, essentially) has prevented an uncountable number of people from being infected. But we’ll never know what the denominator is, and therefore cannot claim that we have prevented x amount of new infections.

What else can we do? This is again where I get stuck. I know that GMHC is generating social profit with 200 dedicated staff, and several thousand volunteers. So we can certainly total up the person-hours worked and certainly come up with a derivative formula that can measure something. But this would not help me with ROI because I still have the problem that it is money coming in that is driving the number of person-hours.

Perhaps another way to attack this problem is to try to come up with a “stock market” of Social Profit Organizations. The Social Profit Index could have several components:
• Private Funds to Market ratio
• Government Funds to Market ratio
• Volunteer to Market ratio
• Percentage of raising a dollar
• Black “Ink” Measure
• Concrete Social Profit as measured by clients served

Now we are reaching a point where the CIO/IT Director can start to get some numbers to plug into a model. For instance, once we have a Social Profit Index, or SPI, we can take the cost of any other administrative function, plug it into the model, get the return on the investment.

Additionally, we can look at only those areas of interest that we might want to impact, or areas that would be impacted differently with different types of technology. So, for example, we can measure ROI on raising private funds, or requesting government grants on the one hand, but also measure the impact of IT, specifically, on the SPI. We can finally begin to measure the validity of new projects, whether they fit the mission or are an expansion to the mission. In the next section, we’ll explore a way to measure these numbers across organizations in a meaningful way. Also, this might be used to provide an actual stock market Web site, where people could research their favorite charities and decide how best to spend their money. This could then in turn contribute yet another significant piece of information, a “trading value” that would be included on the site.