Friday, January 21, 2011

WHEN TECHNOLOGY FAILS

It's been a busy week for BIC, with a meeting of our Digital Rights Group, a presentation to the PA's new chief executive, Richard Mollet, who is also the new Chair of BIC's main board, a technical implementation group meeting, and the first awards of our brand new accreditation scheme for supply chain excellence. Every time I've got back to my desk, though, the first thing has been to check whether the BIC web site was back and to field emails from those who had discovered it wasn't!

In a way it's a reassuring indication of the many diverse things BIC means to so many people that the temporary disappearance of the site causes such widespread annoyance and frustration. It's also a reminder of how much we have all come to expect information to be available immediately. Not all users of the site are our busy members: Nielsen's small publisher PubWeb users depend on it for the BIC subject category assignment tool which it uses and which has contributed so much to simplifying that chore.

So apologies all round to those who have been inconvenienced. The site has been problematic for a few months and now that it has been reinstalled on a new server I hope we shall all see a great improvement.

The results of the Supply Chain Excellence awards have been very gratifying, though there are some obvious omissions from the list of accredited companies which we hope will be filled very soon. The quality of the submissions was outstanding, especially given the quite demanding application form and the awkward time of year, with a good spread of companies large and small and in all sectors making the very best use of technology to reduce their costs, improve customer service and give themselves some much-needed competitive advantage.

2 comments:

  1. Yes, we noticed the problems with the website, but I've come to understand those kind of issues because I run a few websites myself, And there's nothing to do when technology fails for a few hours.

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