TSA Told To Tell Children That Groping Them Is A Game... Horrifying Sex Abuse Experts

Apparently TSA agents are being told that one way to handle the new groping pat downs for children is to try to make it out to be some sort of "game." This is apparently horrifying some sex abuse experts who point out that a common tactic in abuse cases is to tell the kids that they're just "playing a game." The TSA has said that the newer patdowns will not apply to children under 12, but the rules have been somewhat unclear -- leading to the statement from a TSA director, James Marchand:

"You try to make it as best you can for that child to come through. If you can come up with some kind of a game to play with a child, it makes it a lot easier."

He also said that the idea of making it a game would become a part of the TSA's training. Ken Wooden, who runs an organization to try to stop sex abuse of children was not pleased:

"How can experts working at the TSA be so incredibly misinformed and misguided to suggest that full body pat downs for children be portrayed as a game?" Wooden asked in an email. "To do so is completely contrary to what we in the sexual abuse prevention field have been trying to accomplish for the past thirty years."

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Pitfalls and Lessons Learned of Business Rules Implementation - A Business Analyst Perspective Perspective

Senior Artemis Alliance staff, drawing on their practical experience with what can go wrong from management, technical, and business analysis perspectives, provided insight into how and why business rules initiatives fail and strategies to assure the success of such initiatives.


by Alyce Neperud, Artemis Principal and Senior Business Analyst
Significant analysis pitfalls include:
Resistance to change Separation of rules from requirements Poor repository planning Selecting the wrong people to be rules analysts Solving the same problem in different ways No champion
Success Strategies
To overcome resistance to change:
Educate to provide better understanding of why the organization is doing it this way. Build support within all areas.DevelopmentAnalysisTestingProject Management Enable them to “skin their knees”.Let the team make mistakes quickly and see the value of the approach. Bring understanding of the “big picture” and the value of the approach down-stream in the development process.
To prevent the separation of rules from requirements:
Teach them to write good requirements and good rules.Avoid having one group writing requirements and another writing rules. Use concrete examples.Show the new version of artifacts after introducing the concrete examples.Tell the entire story in an integrated manner. Use short, fast iterations with experienced review to provide experience and feedback
To encourage good repository planning:
Do not take a document centric approach--focus on writing good rules rather than on where they fit in the document. Use knowledgeable people in designing the rules repository. Work through the versioning and change management in detail. Execute full rule lifecycle testing of the repository.
To select the right rules analysts:
Do not assume that every subject matter expert will be a good analyst. Do not assign critical tasks to people who are unproven. Have internal or external mentors who have time to help Pair experienced people with inexperienced. Explicitly determine skill levels of team members.
To avoid different solutions to the same problem:
Establish model for sharing information and lessons learned. Consistency is essential to precision. Do not let separate groups make their own decisions. Have some experts looking across the entire set. Do not overwork your experts. Be careful in how you tasks are assigned to avoid overlapping work. Alyce’s advice for the ‘no champion’ problem ia simple: Get one! No champion equates to a greatly reduced probability of success.
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GREAT Marketing will Ruin a GOOD Product

Sounds counter-intuitive doesn't it, but it's absolutely true.  Great marketing can simply ruin a low-quality or even good-quality product or service.  Before you dismiss this post on its face, let me offer an example we can all relate to.

Banking in the 00s has become a "Gotcha Marketer's" paradise.  Sky-high ATM fees, bank fees, huge conglomerates with no ties or interest in the community.  It's all pretty discouraging.

According to Bart Narter, senior vice president at Celent, a banking industry research firm, "Overdraft charges, in particular, generate customer steam. Fee income, primarily from bounced checks and overdrafts on debit card, account for close to half of all bank profits."

So while banks have been running brilliant marketing campaigns with spectacular offers like "Free Checking," "24-hour online banking" and "no minimum balance", the joke is on each and every one of us.  Big banks simply can’t live up to their own hype and still turn the kind of profits their investors demand.

A recent J.D. Power and Associates survey reports that satisfaction with banks in general, out of a possible score of 1,000 points, is now at a level of 748. That's down slightly from 763 three years ago. But what has really plummeted is loyalty. In the 2007 survey, 46% of customers said they "definitely" would not switch banks in the next 12 months. That figure has fallen to only 34% of customers in 2010, which represents a 26% decline.

So while great marketing can win you new customers, it's how you deliver your product or service that ultimately retains them.  Let your marketing promise the stars and you will only disappoint those hard-won new customers.

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Context sensitive Rule Management – Part 2

In my March 28th blog, I discussed process centric thinking and mapping business rules to process. As I stated earlier, business is a set of processes/services that it provides to its consumers. Business rules define how each process functions and how processes taken together allow a business to function. Let’s take an example of e-Commerce web site which takes orders from customers and fulfills customer’s orders. In this case, one process for this organization is, “Order fulfillment”. At the highest level it can be defined as
Gather customer information
Gather items that customer ordered
Take method of payment
Place a block or authorization on payment
Check the stock to fulfill the items that customer ordered
Place them in one or more boxes
Ship them to customer
Upon customer receipt, charge him.

Each step may itself explode into complex multiple sub steps or processes. So depending on organization size and number of processes; interactions between them may be very complex to define. When enterprise wide initiatives are made, even at the process level, people quickly get confused in communications primarily because they lack a common enterprise-wide vocabulary. The solution is to get control over what business can be defining by:

1) Creating common enterprise wide vocabulary thru which every one can communicate. (No interpreted meanings. Clear definitions)
2) Creating processes by using the vocabulary defined above to the granularity desired
3) Creating teams to define a process or sub process with an understanding of its functionality in end to end process definition.
4) Defining Requirements using common vocabulary (Enterprise repository) and creating any additional vocabulary before using it in Requirements

Strictly following the above rules automatically applies the concepts of “Contract first”, “SOA”, “Integration from day 1”, and handful unambiguous documents.

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BEST PRACTICE

The term ’best practice’ is a simple concept. I am at point A and I want to get to point B. How should I go about it? I brainstorm some options. Have I done something like this before? Has somebody else done this before or something similar to it and what were the results? What resources are available to me? How quickly do I need to achieve my goal, what do I need to be prepared for at point B, what are the consequences of my actions? I make a decision based on my goals, values, and strengths. If part way there I learn something new, I make adjustments. If many have gone from point A to point B before me, I have a broader base of experience than my own to draw from. The other experiences are not likely to match my own exactly, but I will assess them to see if they are applicable -provided I have the information to do so. If others who have experienced this situation first hand have found some common ground or best practices, this is even more valuable. I have best practices and examples of these practices to reinforce my understanding and guide me.

In the context of business rules, what is currently available to help us navigate from point A to B, or even from A to Z? Our knowledge is much more fragmented than in general software development practices. On one end of the spectrum, we have a significant body of knowledge on defining and modeling business rules, independent of a technology implementation. On the other end, we have the low level details for using a business rules engine. The problem is the knowledge gap in-between. While we see examples of businesses that have achieved success, we don’t have a body of best practices yet to guide us. We need to make more connections from one end of the spectrum to the other. If the gap persists, we will not achieve the true value of business rules.

We need to work in both directions, from business to implementation and from implementation to business. From the implementation end, we will not realize business change by simply extracting rules out of code and putting them in a rules engine. We need to help our organizations identify and understand the opportunities made possible by business rules. We then need to organize and implement our rules in such a way that we can achieve the business objectives.

As a business we may be looking to implement business rules because we value consistent application of business practices, managed complexity, retained and accessible knowledge, and quick response to business change. But more specifically where are we today and where do we want to be?

Business X, for example, is feeling pain because it currently takes six months to implement and rollout a moderate-sized change. This type of change is not uncommon to the business – it is a regulated industry and there is a regular cycle of change. If the business values quick response to business change, how quick is quick? What type of change occurs and how often? What are the change points? Who has the knowledge to make these changes? Who should implement the change and what type of change control process is needed? How do we test the change? Do we need to support versioning so multiple rule versions can co-exist? What types of rules do we want to be able to change without having to modify the application itself? There are lots of questions and opportunities for best practices to guide us.

Take for example pivot points- the attributes around which our business changes. In insurance, there are different rules for different states, so states are a pivot point. If you include this pivot point in the rules, you will be changing the rules often. Just because rules can be changed, doesn’t make it a good practice. A better practice is to use attributes on rules to handle change points. Changing attributes on relevant rules is simpler and more expedient than changing the rules.

What does all this mean? Good design practices still apply to business rules. We need to make the connections from the business goals through to implementation. We need to look to existing design practices for guidance, assess how business rules need to change or enhance these practices and be rigorous about their use.

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Social Media Marketing Tips from OMS

The 2010 Online Marketing Summit was recently held in Dallas. Take a look at a few of our social media learns from the conference.

Forget "Inbound or Outbound" Marketing Communications

During almost every session, "Forget inbound or outbound" was the mantra. The Big Idea is all about two-way dialogues that are relevant, local and compelling. Delivering your marketing message to the individual—not the demographic. "Personally Engaging + Emotionally Intelligent + Highly Interactive = Dramatic Customer Results," According to Ephor Group's Charles Bedard.

Leverage Web 2.0

Web 2.0, or the ability for users to generate content for you by interacting with your website, is the key for small and large businesses with anything resembling a content marketing strategy. If you're a smaller company, form a "content team" that adheres to an editorial calendar. However, don't expect them to do ALL the work. Leverage user generated content. Case in point, Amazon leverages its user to write most all of its book and product reviews. It would simply be impossible to hire experts to write a review of every book, CD and product.

Develop a Culture that can React Quickly

These days there are countless tools that allow you to monitor social media mentions, trends and analytics, but what can you do with all that real-time data if you can't react quickly and efficiently?

The trick is to develop a culture that allows for quick reactions that can ride a trend wave. Encourage employees to participate (personally) in social media discussions around your business and its activities. If you can weigh in on the trends surrounding your brand in a relevant, value-adding way in real-time, you're already weeks ahead of your competition.

Forget "Web Chat"

There was a time that being able to chat live with sales support staff during the buying decision was the epitome of a modern brand. These days, its reputation as a value adding service is completely shot. According to Patrick Bultema, web chat has "been polluted by call center mentality and over-scripting."

Save your breath–er–fingers.

Relevant Social Media Content:

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The 5 Second Focus Group

Traditional focus grouping, eye path mapping, and split tests are all valuable tools, but they're cumbersome, expensive and slow. Enter "FiveSecondTest.com."

Created by an Australian duo at Angry Monkeys, FiveSecondTest.com allows designers and developers the ability to run a fast (and mostly free) test on any new comp.

Let's face it, with fast approaching deadlines and unreasonable expectations resting on creative design and web development marketing activities, who has time for the traditional focus group, eye path mapping and A/B split test approach?

Take it for a spin yourself. Here's the test we set up for JDM's new homepage flash. It's good karma...

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