ICANN International Domain Names coming in November 2009

This rather extended title refers to ICANN’s decision to allow domain name extensions, specifically for country or region specific extensions initially, to be registered in non-latin characters or international characters.  This represents a major step away from the use of Latin based characters for the DNS and opens the door, albeit a small bit initially, to millions of users around the world who never use Latin characters in their everyday lives.  Large population groups will now be able to use their native or national language in its original form to register their domain names with, a major step in the right direction in my opinion and one more step away from US dominance of the ICANN as an organization.  Since releasing ICANN in terms of US ownership or control, the organization has been actively moving into a more international role focusing on bringing its services and the DNS to everyone around the world, regardless culture, language or creed.

[Totally tongue in cheek here, but...]

in South Africa it means we can finally use Khoisan for ours, since it is the oldest language of the original people of this country, the basis of our nation’s collective spirit (bushmen, the last of the San people, are very hardy friendly folk), and the language used for this country’s official motto.  Though it is so prominent, it does not take an expert to know that very few South Africans have a clue how to read or pronounce Khoisan, but that does not seem to stop us from using it as we have.  It just looks so impressive when writing into slogans or inscribed onto buildings or imbedded into country emblems, just take a look at our country’s Coat of Arms to see what I mean:

(The motto of the coat of arms – !ke e:/xarra//ke – is in the Khoisan language of the /Xam people, and means “diverse people unite”, or “people who are different joining together”)

So our national domain should reflect the same I think – something like southafrica.!ke or southafrica.e:/x – truthfully I cannot tell you where a Khoisan word starts or ends, even in South Africa I would need one of a very few Khoisan language experts to advise us on that, or a Bushman of course.  I may say it as ’southafrica.”click click tsk tsk tsk click”‘ or something sounding that way, since the Khoisan languages sound so much like tongue clicks repeated amongst other sounds in various tempos and with variable accents. Ultimately the San people would be now able to spell a domain exactly as they speak it, and we fellow South Africans would be able to look on with embarrassed pride at how good it looks without being able to read or speak it.

Regardless, this is a silly explanation of what the ICANN decision will lead to, and not at all the right one, but it is meant to show that everyone now would be able to use, spell and read their national domains in their own characters reflecting their own language, even the Khoisan of South Africa!

Fundamo in Pakistan

Telenor Pakistan and the Tameer Bank announced this week (Oct 14th) that they are launching branchless banking based on the Fundamo product.  This is a wonderful achievement for a team from South Africa who have long strived to deliver their quality product abroad.  Well done also to Telenor Pakistan and the Tameer Bank for selecting a truly South African solution for their mobile banking project.

Diversify, diversify, diversify

There has always been an interesting argument for diversity in application offerings on new customer channels or platforms.  Although the past methodologies for designing products have been to focus on one and serve it in a working, practical and robust manner to your customer, the value of one product per channel has been somewhat diluted over the years with the convergence of so many industries, and we see it most clearly where retail and banking have converged.  Customers like having different products offered through a single service or channel from both retail and banking, iow they want to buy things when they are on the bank platform and they want to bank when they are on the retail platform (virtually speaking of course).

In an e-business this to me then has become the trend, as opposed to the exception, but it still surprises me when clients battle to understand that their single product offering will not necessarily be enough to draw customers to their platform, and none more so than financial services clients.  Customers no longer want to visit your site and do only your service offering.  They go to sites where there is a sense of community married with a sense of responsible assistance that has all the popular tweaks to it, but focused around one core service offering, as this is what brings them back on a recurring basis.

You can argue that a beautiful website around your one product or service offering brings in traffic, but I would ask how much does the beauty of your site or presence bring them back again after the initial visit.  It is in recurring use that we find success online and even more so on the mobile phone.  Now we come to the crux of the matter for me, offering services or products over a mobile platform, where this multiple service offering is crucial or it will fail.  I think there is some important to allowing customers access to their accounts for mobile transactions from time to time, but that also states the obvious that they do so ‘from time to time’.  It is this infrequent use of the mobile banking platform at the current time that has be review how I see its design and its function.

Mobile banking or transaction offerings must be done in collaboration with other products and or services to ensure regular use of the platform and more frequent revenues per head.  I think with the era of mobile technology having arrived with great gusto one has to seriously look at your own offering and review how it is a customer perceives your product.  If Web2.0 taught us anything it is that people like to drive their own destinies on the Internet, they like to feel that they too can shape their favorite services with their own input, creativity and content from time to time.  We lack this spontaneity in our product designs for transaction based businesses like banking, and we treat the mobile platform as a small sideshow to the core offering, possibly losing an entire generation of mobile savvy youngsters who were not introduced to the Internet via a browser but via a phone instead.  Designing flexible products then that can offer them all kinds of teasers and attractions along with the ability to bank when they need to must therefore be a priority for us as engineers.  Making applications that present more to them than virtual versions of a bank branch and all its boring trappings, should be our focus.

Mobile banking and financial services platforms or offerings should be enjoyable and we should be designing to attract customers on a regular basis even if it is not for a core service transaction, as on the mobile phone all interactions can generate revenue.  Therefore we should build our solutions to cater to the various users in a flexible manner, changing its format depending on who logs in on the phone, using a powerful delivery platform to deliver this flexible service if our own technology is not able to do this, and to allow their customers to have fun on the client’s platform regardless their intent.

A personal look at banking solutions in Africa

Banks and their facilitators have had many challenges over the years operating in Africa. It has been a painful process for many and one that has had 1st world integrators perplexed many times when considering rolling out their products here.

Africa is not unique in its problems, but it does set an interesting challenge due to the combination of issues that impact any such banking project. The usual challenges exist of course, as in the lack of consistent communication and power, as well as security and data protection. Throw in a healthy dose of political interference or influence or demands and the skills shortage, and it starts getting tricky.In my industry, it has become a trying process of carefully balancing all these factors to achieve an acceptable solution to all participating parties.

I remember how shocked I was to sit in a Barclays Bank (with the Caribbean & African regional managers of their card processing div) meeting some years ago in London and hearing just how expensive it was for them in 2002 to get their African merchant transactions processed, PER transaction! It was unbelievable how expensive, but against their customer’s perceptions something they just had to do as a bank. It was inconceivable for their card customers to pay with their Barclays Card somewhere in Africa and not be accepted, so this cumbersome network of links had to be created to authorize and settle their card transactions. At that time, mobile penetration was in it’s infancy and growing rapidly, and Barclays only had about 800 merchants of importance that they wanted to retain for their customers in Africa. Since then this demand would only have grown rapidly, and hopefully the ABSA deal would help their teams better understand how things can be done successfully at a much lower cost now, not that ABSA is perfect, not by a long way!

That said, it’s Africa and this vast continent has its own challenges that we simply have to overcome if we wish to serve the majority with a banking service. Today the mobile networks have offered us an amazing network for consistent wide area data transfers, making our banking solutions for real-time transaction authorizations, processing and settlement much easier to consider at a lower cost than before. Fraud is rife though and so we are forced to look at adding robustness to our solutions we would not have considered for a first world roll-out.

Many good banking solutions exist today both for the front end processing and bank-end accounting, but too many are fixed systems requiring the bank or client to conform to it instead of changing to meet that bank or client’s current process requirements. My own view here is that we must lose our colonialist approach of ‘we know best’ and start considering Africa as a market unique in many ways and worth accommodating with more flexible solutions.

Though regulations are always rigid and rightly so, they only protect where they are respected by the participating individuals, otherwise they are worth less than the paper they are written on. However, this is not just an African issue, but can happen anywhere in the world today – take the apparent cardholder data breach at PCI DSS certified Network Solutions as an example – so regulations alone will not ‘enforce’ a better banking environment for our solutions, services or products. Our technology needs to police itself better and hence the unique design challenges we face as technologists here, pitting cost against performance against customer expectations against robustness.

We see some giants arising within Africa itself to do this relatively well.  Two solutions come to mind, eTranzact and Fundamo, both mobile phone based banking solutions with excellent track records.  Both have years of experience with the African challenges for such banking solutions, and both have had many years exposed to African fraud and managed ways to continue to address this pro-actively.  They are good examples of solutions that work well in Africa and though one is an active service and the other a product provider in the banking space, both have been recognized by their peers for the excellent companies they have become.

With the changes in the technology landscape happening very quickly, the African market will open up to many more players, and the whole ‘cloud’ computing world will pro-actively focus on this market to gain a strong foothold, with Google or Microsoft leading the pack.  Banking solutions will also see a strong growth and to me the SaaS model of service or product offering over the mobile phone channel may be the saving grace for many solutions wishing to gain a foothold in Africa.  Offering your product to banks and their facilitators in a SaaS format allows for powerful tools to be handled by basically trained staff remotely managed by well trained SaaS operational managers.

Building that SaaS model with the flexibility to adapt to a very unique business environment that is the African market, will be as important.  ‘Third world’ business processes differ enormously from first world practices despite the impact of British and French banking practices in Africa in the past century.  People just work differently here and one has to make sure your solution caters for this or it will fail, either in its implementation or its use.  This is Africa and people are innovative in their own right with how things are done here.  Just because a process uses 10 more people than we would have used in the west to deliver it’s respective responses in a business, does not mean it is a failure.  If it works that way, try to understand the reason it became that way before shooting it down and trying to enforce some first world argument on the client.

Solutions should show the same grace towards African traditions and business practices than shown towards Western traditions and business practices, whilst addressing very strongly any fraudulent processes with internal checks and balances.  Often we fail in this, as we keep offering our own Western developed ideas to a continent rich in its own culture of doing things.

When they do not work, and the evidence is clear that the process keeps failing, we should again handle it without arrogance and ensure that we highlight the failing processes with diplomacy and care.  Africa has had a long history of failed projects where people were ignored in the project.  They need to be included and the issues managed with the same grace they themselves show so often.

Getting one champion insider is crucial to the success of a project and ensuring its ongoing use will be through thorough training of the staff who would use such a solution.  Add to this that the solution should intuitively address the customers too, acknowledging that we are Africans and therefore may look at the application or solution differently is essential.  Let me put this thought across in an analogy – if you ask someone to play the Vuvuzela expecting music, you’ll be greatly disappointed, but if you were expected noise, you would be very pleased; handing that person a trumpet, expecting noise will again please you, but if you were hoping for music it will only happen through training and lots of it.  As designers of solutions we often design a trumpet and are disappointed in customers when all they produce is noise.  When that happens you may have missed the mark, as the customers may only have wanted a vuvuzela, despite your grand design for a trumpet or you may have underestimated the need to train them, not only in the use of the solution, but also in their perception of what the design is used for – in this analogy, for making music, as opposed to making noise.  So ensuring that the training and the interface design (GUI) brings across the proper message to the users of your systems in Africa, will achieve the proper results, both in their perception of your solution and in their use of it  (swing by South Africa for the World Cup in 2010 and see just what can be achieved with a Vuvuzela btw).

So step 1 for me is a basic SaaS framework of services delivered to the customer in SMS format (information messages, balance enquiries and remittance payments being the only considerations for transactions here).  Ensure that the use of this service first grows to an acceptable level before introducing step 2, so that you are clear that customers know how to use your solution.

Step 2 would be adding a Java based application for example, with AUTOMATED activation!  Don’t assume that the customer knows what Java is or how to activate DATA on their phones.  Design your solution with as much automated installs as possible, in partnership with the bank and the networks, or you will see failure very soon.  Also consider making this application introduction a non-banking feature, for example simply send customers the latest news and updates for free as a bank sponsored project.  Am I nuts here? No, not at all, but a bank solution in the mobile world is often an utterly boring feature to add to a phone, so one has to bait the hook as it were, and to me there can be nothing as exciting as a mobile chatroom with lots of down-loadable content driving the consumer to download the app for all this free content.  Once you feel that there are enough or agreed number of unique customer downloads of your application, introduce step 3.

Step 3 is the introduction of secure banking tools to the customer, who by now have shown that they understand and appreciate the need for bank information using their mobile phones (SMS services) and that they are savvy in the use of the Java or Flash based application you built as the interface to your solution.  You have a much more mature consumer base now for the full bank tool set to be featured to, and they would be expecting to manage more advance features on their phones too.  Introducing this feature to the various city based networks first and then using family or friend pushes of services to bring on more rural customers (migrant remittances or payroll for example) will help you manage the acceptance of the products during roll-out.

Using consistent market monitoring alongside these steps will help you best understand the needs and problems of your customers, and give you time to adjust for them.  Remember the customer  must feel that they remain in control and you need to be flexible enough in your designs to adapt to THEIR requirements, within the regulatory framework of the country or region where you are commissioning the solution of course.

Feel free to add your comments to this post as it only reflects my personal view at the moment.  As a design community we can better address this type of challenge as a group and I look forward to hearing from you all on what you believe we can add, change or take away from the post and the issues of bank solution design and commissioning in Africa.

Card Fraud for Dummies – card fraud the easy way

Got your attention right? Well, it should as it is easy to commit card fraud, and especially in the very countries you do not want this to happen. We see such tight controls being implemented in 1st world countries, but somehow lack the legal, moral or financial motivation to do the same in 3rd world countries. This post covers South Africa, but my experience in Vietnam was much the same.

Having gotten married in South Africa, placed home delivery orders in South Africa and just recently moved back to South Africa from London, I have had the most brilliant examples of fraud opportunities presented to me each and every time. If I was that way inclined here is what I would do:
1. Join an hotel or B&B as a staff member, any really since access to what you need truly seems oblivious to who you are or what you do within such an establishment.
2. Love this one, be the person to capture the ‘emailed’ credit card orders from a well known fast foods home delivery service.
3. Simply start working in the railway booking office.

What do these three places have in common? They all ‘email’ or ‘fax’ the complete set of cardholder data in the open. In fact two at least repeatedly fax or email cardholder data to various internal destinations. Lovely! And yes, every one of these three had sets of cardholder data printed out beautifully for me as a customer to view and even peruse in the time I was placing my own orders or making my own bookings. Nothing like untrained staff and insecure transaction processes to get the old fraud juices flowing!

There are obviously many others, but I want to keep this post in line with my own personal experience. Am I a card fraudster though? Absolutely not, as I am completely opposed to the idea and make it my professional job to enforce better protection for customers where possible. However I am stunned that in South Africa, with its much acclaimed banking systems, such blatant cardholder data abuses are still completely accepted and even encouraged at times.

Cardholder data should NEVER be visible to anyone before or after authorization of a card transaction. NEVER! There should simply not be a moment in a transaction process today where you as a customer should be required to send your cardholder data on paper or email to anyone! Yet in South Africa this is currently the norm, and especially in the hospitality and travel industries.

Heck, the country will soon be hosting the World Cup (2010) and I shudder to think what real fraudsters are planning at that time, since it is clear to me as a novice that opportunities abound thanks to a completely relaxed approach to security within the cardholder present and CNP applications in South Africa.

To the banks, processors and players in the South African payments market, this post is not meant to discredit or harm, but to highlight a real issue within the current system. I suggest the market implement PCI DSS regardless of the initial cost as it is a fraction of the losses incurred by cardholders, merchants and institutions due to fraud.

A friendly warning to tourists wishing to book a room, trip, flight or ‘adventure’ in South Africa, heck anywhere for that matter, to insist on a proper payment process and refuse to send faxed or emailed cardholder information anywhere to confirm your booking.

(You may also like to read – http://newideasconsult.wordpress.com/2009/07/02/pci-dss-certif…the-essentials/)

The uncomplicated world of information technology

Technology is uncomplicated.

Yes, I know that this seems to be a contradiction in terms for many people, but technology has to be this to be successful.  In my experience technology must always address one or several needs in an uncomplicated KISS manner or it will almost always turn out as an expensive and bloated solution.  IT where I focus my efforts embodies this for me, even in its most basic form it exists as ones and zeroes. For me as a trained engineer it has always been about looking at a problem or challenge and seeing how to solve it, with or without technology. It has always been a situation where getting from ‘A’ to ‘C’ may or may not require technology, and if required then what technology solution would be best fit to get from the one to the other quickly, economically and simply.

Observing the news about current and past IT projects around the world seems to me to show that many of these projects take the approach of ‘I have a technology solution, now where is a problem I can fit into it’ or ‘I have this great solution, I just need to find where in my organization or my customer’s business there is an ‘A’ to ‘C’ issue I can use to press this into’. So they start a complicated under-planned and often unneeded project that ends with the customer believing the complexity of their problem can only be solved by the solution offered, who then spends a fortune on consultants, integrations and licenses only to sit back a year or five later and realize that their savings from this project is either non-existent or in fact negative, or that the ‘problem’ was never as huge as it was sold to be.

These are possibly bold statements to make in some readers views as technology almost always seems complicated and features difficult to comprehend, but those are most often design faults or bad planning in my view and not something to label technology or information technology with.  Information technology over the years grew into a domain for geeks like me, and as is often the case in the land of the blind where the one-eyed find they become kings and leaders, geeks realized soon enough that customers should be treated as mushrooms, kept in the dark, fed manure, and billed and billed and billed.

I generalize here and that is clearly unfair, but there is a large group of people in IT who still prefer to keep their customers in this state for as long as they can so as to maximize their revenues and profits.  After all, if we are listed IT companies, our shareholders become our priorities and not our customers, as with many industries these days I guess.  When we design solutions we do the same again, where we believe representing a solution in the most complex of ways will keep the customer astounded and paying, very often much more than the work is really worth.

The current way to address problems offered to IT companies by their customers, is to consider ways to ‘fit’ them into the solution from one of the big brands, or to bring in consultants who maximize their own revenue opportunities by making lots room within the final solution specification for even more consulting opportunities, which then leads to branded solution providers bringing in their own pre and post sale experts to see what added products could be included, whilst the going is good, and finally a team of integrators to put everything together, with a project manager hoping the final product will come in above the expected profit margin his employer demanded, with very little thought of coming in on budget or on time, or within a working specification for the actual customer who will be paying for and using this solution.

Again I generalize here, but it is absolutely true from my point of view that many such projects over the years have made IT the ‘complex’ industry it is branded as today, and laid the foundation to the fog of ignorance we hope our customers are lost in, so that we can remain the ‘experts’ who can save the day at a fee of course…

Information technology is actually about solving real business problems for me. About finding the lowest cost solution to a business issue, designed to require the least amount of customer employee training to manage in an ongoing manner. Compare that statement with what has been happening in the IT world today, and it comes somewhat short of reality, I agree. I guess for me it is panacea that consultants and IT professionals can think this way, but I stand by this statement. We as professionals have to come to a point in our careers where we change the view we have of ourselves, from ‘lets take short cuts and make loads of profits off our customers’ type of people to ‘let’s help our customers in a real way saving them real money and being there for them over the long term’ type of people. I am not forcing this on anyone, just lamenting the fact that there seem to be much more of the former type of person in our industry these days than the latter, leaving us with a false heritage and little integrity in the end.

Technology is a simple and wonderful solution to many things and it should be sold that way, even to our customers. We should make it our primary focus to roll out the most simplistic of solutions that actually solve business problems and improve productivity, instead of cause more problems and cost productivity. IT can be this to our customers, but it takes a fresh look at our own approach to them, their budgets and their actual business requirements to make a lasting change to our industry and the way people perceive it.

Microsoft and the EU agree on Internet Browser solution

In a surprise announcement on Friday, it seems there has finally been a resolution to the years long battle to get Internet Browser and Windows separate, and to offer Windows users a choice in the browser they wish to use.  I am not yet quite sure of the technicalities (a web page will offer you this choice?), but am confident that a reasonable option may finally be in the offing for users of Windows who prefer to use their own choice of browser brand in Europe.

In terms of users selecting this from a web page as is hinted to in the announcement, I am quite convinced that this will simply lead to a dual browser setup, i.o.w. you select your browser of choice for your personal use, whilst the operating system (Windows) will keep using Internet Explorer in the background for its use.  Not quite a win for the EU then, but I am not sure we can expect any better from Microsoft.

Why do I propogate a complete replacement as opposed to dual use?  Because it will prove once and for all that Microsoft has opened the Windows platform to all brands of browser.  If Microsoft can use your choice of browser, like Firefox or other, as THEIR way to maintain their OS and applications, then we will know for a fact that Microsoft is finally fully accessible to all.  I have a dream…

Worst Customer Assist System Ever for a leading Internet service

I discovered somewhat surprisingly that my LinkedIn.com profile sometimes shows interested parties – for example agents searching for suitable profiled members for some job or position they wish to fill – telephone and address details 6 years old, leaving them unable to reach me except via email.  Guess what? They don’t and they give up and find someone else.

So I set about the easy task of changing my contact details and personal profile information on LinkedIn.com.  I logged in and went straight to Account & Settings only to find that n0thing there really says ‘Personal Telephone Numbers’ or ‘Personal Address’, other than the feature where you can add them to your profile.  I don’t have these details added to my profile and possibly never will, but that still did not stop LinkedIn.com from giving out my personal information to these folks.  Nowhere on the entire accounts & settings page could I find any reference to the information clearly given out. To prove to myself that this was in fact information that existed somewhere on LinkedIn’s database, I did a ‘mock application’ for an advertised job found on LinkedIn.com and right at the bottom under the ‘Enter contact information:‘ section the company auto-fills telephone and address fields for you.  Somewhat shocked to see the old data there despite having made several changes over the years to my LinkedIn profile, I set about with more vigor to track down the settings that would allow me to change them.  Nothing, nowhere!

So, never mind, I thought, LinkedIn.com was a fantastic system over the years for me and so somewhere on the site I was convinced I would find ‘Contact Customer Service’ buttons or something similar.  Much to my surprise, there are a few online assistance tools, like the old Q&A section called ‘Customer Service’ (always reminds me of a badly implemented telephone answering service) where if you use the wrong words or description of your problem, you’re simply directed to the most useless information.  Then there is the rather weirdly named LinkedIn Learning Centre that has a lot of How To information on it, but again nothing to assist me in my specific request.

So two hours later, no contact phone numbers or even a customer service email address!  Eish!!!  Come on, LinkedIn, you guys can do better than that!

ICL Reconnect Group on LinkedIn.com

I started a group on LinkedIn.com some time ago to try and find some of my old ICL workmates.  It has grown to almost a 1,000 members and that’s amazing to me.  ICL was a company filled to the brim with brilliant people and just having this venue to reconnect with them and find out what they are up to these days, brings back fond memories for me of the old ICL South Africa days.

ICL may have suffered from some management quirks during those last few years, but it was an honour to have worked for them.  I guess it was the history of the corporation that truly drew me to it, with such innovative products over the years built around VME.  I never actually applied for a job there, as ICL bought over the niche service provider I was employed by, and I sort of landed in the employ of ICL South Africa to start another colourful chapter in my professional life as a technologist.  I learnt a lot during this time, from a better and clearer understanding of GIS systems, learning about the local council/municipal solutions en-route to the actual client, to coming to grips with the demanding retail environments ICL was involved with and appreciating the solid presence of a mainframe system with the wonderful revenue opportunities it presented to the company.

Balancing all that against my own knowledge of newer technologies like the Internet, Microsoft’s ventures into the corporate environment and so on, was always a trick I never quite managed. I remember just how bad I would feel when I upset some mainframe specialist with a cocky response about his or her old technology vs my much newer and ‘obviously’ more brilliant Microsoft or Netscape solutions.  I guess I grew up in ICL and came to learn that there is definitely a ‘horses for courses’ methodology in technology, and I believe because of that experience I left behind those petty ‘my dad’s better than your dad’ arguments I so often fell into during the first 10 years of my IT life.

If you worked for ICL before or still work for Fujitsu Services or Fujitsu itself, you are most welcome to join our community on LinkedIn.com.  Just click the link and you will be taken right to the group.  Once there, look me up and let me know about your experiences there.

Mind mapping tools

I would normally write my own experience here, how expensive Mindjet’s Mind Manager has become, how I still battle with Freemind in terms of document outputs, and so on. However this time I am posting simply to encourage you to read open-tube.com’s superb article on the same.