Nick Lightbody's Blog

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A Big Gas Bill: Out of the Blue

Having transferred our domestic Gas Supply to EDF from British Gas in 2003 we were naturally surprised to recently receive bills, out of the blue, from British Gas - claiming that we owed them several hundred pounds. This escalated after about 2 weeks to advising that they were commencing legal action to recover this debt.

Given that we were definitely not a British Gas customer we found this odd, and a little disturbing.

Was this a feature of global warming, or the Russian effect on the UK gas market - maybe they were charging us a suppliment for gas purchased years ago - or a penalty for daring to switch suppliers?

It was none of those things, in fact it appears to be an occurence of Data Transfer Drama.

Apparently many people have suffered similar problems. It appears that the new SAP system they are deploying has suffered teething problems resulting in many thousands of complaints about incorrect billing and accounts.

Energywatch

Having obtained our "Meter Point Reference" from EDF we spoke to Energywatch on 0845 9060708 who very efficiently checked and confirmed that we were indeed served by EDF not British Gas. Can't praise them highly enough, they were patient, efficient and authorative.

If you have a similar problem you can telephone British Gas on 0845 6070870, to escalate your complaint to the highest level.

Data Transfer Drama

In the end British Gas advised that they had a new billing system and that in transferring the data from the old system they had mistakenly allocated our Postal Address to another Gas Meter within the same PostCode.

Thus they knew the postcode area within which their meter was situate but, so they told us, were not certain of the correct address, and thus customer, for the meter, and erroneously allocated our address.

The bills we received were all addressed to "The Occupier", demonstrating that they did not know the identity of their "customer", merely the address.

What exactly has gone wrong?

It would be interesting to hear exactly what has gone wrong here? What is the underlying cause of this Data Transfer Drama?

It appears that the data conversion model may have suffered partial failure since they presumably had the correct addresses related to the relevant meters and Meter Point References under the old system yet appear to have failed to complete a correct transfer of that data?

Whilst it is true that address translation is not always easy it is a pity that British Gas's apparent failure in this case seems to have imposed great stress / inconvenience on many domestic customers receiving erroneous bills.

We await the promised letter of apology.

Update: 15/May/2007: We received an appropriate letter of apology from British Gas as promised.

Update: 15/August/2007: Amazingly we have now received another letter of demand from British Gas - it appears that letters of apology are ignored when a major business has an enormous and unresolved muddle within its data system.

Apparently "Legal Proceedings will be commenced". As we really don't have the time to spend hours on the phone trying to get them to update their records correctly so watch this space.

Update: 21/September/2007: Having used the British Gas Top Level Complaints Tel No above again ( 0845 6070870 ) to make another compliant after receiving further threats of legal proceedings and visits by Bailiffs I spoke with Robert Syson from their customer services who explained the following:

(a) The local delivery grid in our area is owned by another company, no longer Transco

(b) There are meters which British Gas supply in our area, on new housing developments, where they have the meter number and the Plot Number, but no actual postal address.

(c) As they have no actual postal address they send the bills for these new plots to the nearest postal address they have on their system which is not already a known British Gas Customer.

(d) Surprisingly they do not appear to address their bills to the Plot Number on the development.

It appears that although they apologise for the inconvenience caused they do regard guessing the postal address of a new meter and then treating that house holder as their new customer, threatening to sue them for debt etc, as legitimate business practice. Logically I would have thought that they should treat the developer of the new property as their customer until they are advised of the actual postal address.

It does seem amazing that they regard this practice as implicitely reasonable.

If Deskspace had designed their information system we would not have permitted this unfortunate situation to arise.

----ENDS----

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Have attitudes to, and use of colour in, information systems changed over recent years as monitors have got better and the number of things on professionals screens multiplied?

As screens get bigger and better, and many professionals now work on two or more screens, the issue has grown of how best to readily inform the user with appropriate cues about what he or she is looking at.

It is true that shades of neutral grey can be quite pleasing

Received wisdom has been that use of various shades of mid-atlantic grey is safe and generally best. This view has been strengthened where garish colours have been deployed and users have had to resort to dark glasses and aspirins. It is true that shades of grey can be quite pleasing and probably no-one ever got fired for developing a grey interface.

However, where any integrated information system, displaying a wide variety of data, nestles on your desktop amongst a variety of other similarly grey artifacts it can be quite difficult to know immediately what you are looking at and clearly data only becomes information when the user understands what it is they are contemplating.

Can colour improve the user experience?

There are many ways of informing the user but I have long held the view that colour is the best. It is simple, non verbal and quickly becomes intuitive.

So how do you do this well and avoid the aspirin syndrome?

Clearly a good designer is a great start, but we thought maybe there was more to it than just artistic intuition, maybe there was a pattern we could identify and use?

Every software designer worth their salt is an expert at spotting and exploiting patterns, pattern recognition is at the heart of analysing a system and delivering an effective solution.

We took the mathematical approach

Having been guilty in the past of some arguably heavy handed use of the colour brush, we decided to look at the maths. The outcome was a series of colours which had consistent RBG values, different combinations of a limited set of RBG values, where related types of information had colours associated with them which were themselves associated mathematically.

Avoid large areas or blocks of colour.

We took various shades of grey and used minimal areas of the chosen colours, just enough to cue the user subtly so that they would automatically associate each colour with the relevant type of information. We took it as axiomatic that we should avoid any big blocks of strong colour.

Then we used different densities of the colour to signify immediacy, more dense more immediate, less dense less immediate - further away. Fairly simple, but effective.

An unqualified success - "easy on the eye"

The result has been consistent user approval and a complete absence of any desire to make any further changes so we have at least secured feature-lock on colour. Thus I would conclude that professionals are now ready for the introduction of some colour into their lives, provided it is done just right, so it is pleasent to look at - as one client observed - "easy on the eye".

Some questions for you:

1 how do you feel generally about colour in your computer interface?

2 do you associate any colours with happiness?

3 do you associate any colours with sadness?

4 do you associate any colours with success?

5 do you associate any colours with failure?

-----ENDS-----

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The power of the Web

When I first discovered the internet in about 1996 I decided to create a website focused on my main area of the interest at the time, Contaminated Land in the UK. This was having an increasing effect on UK home owners. As a lawyer dealing with buying an selling property it was potentially a big issue but at that time not many people were interested in it or regarded it as relevant. I started collecting reports of problems with Contaminated Land and legal documents and published them on my site, initially just one big page, initially written in a text editor.

Quick Route to being Known

What I found amazing was how easy it was to become an acknowledged expert in such a short space of time. The web had bridged the gap between people and publishing. To have become an expert previously I would have had to have published a series of articles or a book. This way, having admittedly put in quite a lot of time, and used my wide experience, I was an expert in less than a year. This lead to journalists contacting me for quotes, my site being noted on university reading lists, my being invited to join a Law Society Committee dealing with environmental matters, my being asked to edit the environmental law chapter of the Conveyancing Handbook and my being asked to contribute to the main UK Legal Precedents Encyclopaedia on the same subject.

The House Buyer Liability Issue

I was very concerned about a big black hole of liability awaiting unsuspecting home buyers as the contaminated land issue grew and believed that solicitors had a responsibility to think about this issue and advise home buyers rather than either pretending it didn't exist or being ignorant of the issue. After several years of intermittent discussion the idea eventually found a powerful champion in Brian Greenwood then the Chair of the Law Society Committee on which I sat. I assume that his firm had had a liability problem which brought this issue to his attention.

A change in how Solicitors deal with buying land

The result was that in 2001 the Law Society issued guidance to the solicitor's profession that effectively required some form of historical land use search to be carried out on each purchase. The effect was create, or make viable, a small industry involved in creating such searches at a cost effective price.

The Public Benefit

The benefit is that generally house buyers in this country now know much more about the previous history of their proposed new home and whether there is a risk of an environmental cleanup claim against them if they buy it. In consequence, they are no longer buying with their eyes closed to potentially devastating liability in the future. ------ends-------

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Graham Neilsen

A couple of years ago we were introduced to Commander Graham Neilsen and his TS Pelican Project in Dorset.

TS Astrid

A retired Royal Navy Officer Graham had previously created the TS (Tall Ship) Astrid, a square rigged sailing ship designed to enable young people to learn about life comradeship and teamwork. The fundamental idea behind all sail training is that you bring the best out of alienated disaffected young people by having them work together at sea, up masts etc, in generally exciting and potentially hazardous circumstances. The great thing about the sea is that you can wake up each day to a new place - which is pretty stimulating for most people.

That project failed, eventually, when it proved to financially unviable in the long term and Astrid was sold to the Dutch.

Failed Commonwealth Project

Graham started on Pelican after he was asked to find a ship to act as the basis of a charity Commonwealth project, but having started the project the money failed to arrive.

Don't Settle

However, having developed the idea of a business model which would combine commercial charter work with training young people, which he believed would work financially he soldiered on, very slowly and without much money for a decade bringing this project to fruition.

And what a Result! We spent a day on her before Easter sailing in light airs in Weymouth Bay.

An amazing sailing ship

Pelican is a amazing sailing ship. She is still undergoing trials at Weymouth as I write, but her innovative rig means that she can sail to windward, fast, virtually unheard of in a ship with square sails. She will complete her fitting out in a few months and will then start a planned Europe and the Caribbean annual cycle, avoiding hurricanes and cold weather on each side of the Atlantic.

In one of my former careers I was a sailmaker with Phil Morrison, we designed and made sails for racing dinghies and small yachts - so looking at Pelican's rig and trying to work out how it works was a fascinating puzzle.

The secret

The secret was logical thought, an investigative mind and a lot of hard work by Philip Goode a naval architect based in Majorca. He developed his rig by researching and working out the secrets of the fast sailing ships of the Arab Barber Coast Pirates.

This created some real technical challenges, so that, for instance, Pelican has had to have single piece masts, rather than masts constricted from several overlapping sections. Her web site and Philip Goode's site will bring enlightenment if rigs are your thing. The Telegraph reported the unusual rig.

A Metaphor for Life?

I have often thought that yachting is a useful metaphor for real life. So in this case Graham followed, probably unknowingly, Steve Job's pithy "don't settle" maxim. He never gave up despite enormous obstacles and has shown what can be acheived if you pursue an idea that you know is right even where those around you don't necessarily realise that until later. Not a bad example to the rest of us, provided you have the staying power to succeed in the end.

I wish Graham and Philip every success with Pelican, they deserve it.

------ends------

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18th April 2007:

Why Blog?

Everyone else seems to be blogging, even Ryan Rosenberg, VP Marketing & Sales at Filemaker in the US is doing it. Why? How does he get the time? What is the purpose?

In fact, he gave me part of the answer when a few other UK developers and I meet him at Filemaker last year. He wanted to develop a two way dialogue with the developer community, so that his decision-making could benefit from that dialogue, from that understanding. Essentially he wanted to become better informed.

My old friend Justin Kirby gave me the rest of the answer yesterday. "Tell people what you are doing" he said. "Show them how and why you are passionate about you do, and ask them to tell you what they think. Ask them real questions and tell them when your decision making has been influenced by what they have said. By doing that you will open a dialogue and develop a relationship which will enable you to create better and more appropriate products and they will develop a more informed view of what you are doing and why."

How to Blog?

This made sense so first thing in the office this morning I had to decide how to do this, how do you blog? Logically, if you were able to edit a web site easily is seemed to be merely a case of writting straight into a html page, otherwise a framework that would produce the html would be required.

Fortunately, when we asked Phil Johnson to re-engineer our new web site last year we specified that it needed to be delivered as an Adobe Go-Live site i.e. ready for us to edit and manage from within Go-Live. Having discovered the delight of Go-Live's Components several versions ago it seemed to me that using Components for the site navigation would make editing and change fairly straight-forward since you just needed to create some new pages and redirect the navigation links in the main components to the new pages. It's really just a smart database. So you change one link, press save and every page containing that component gets re-written automatically. No doubt there are other ways of doing this but I like this method, it is fairly easy, fairly quick and reliable.

Then after another conversation with Justin took his further advice, found typepad.com and decided to publish through this blog service and repeat the material on my blog pages in deskspace.com.

Question: Can anyone tell me how to automate transferring the material in this blog to and from my own web pages?

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Update: I have linked this typepad blog into deskspace.com in place of the original local page and topped the blog with a banner to look like the web site - sort of. This avoids the previous question of how to move the data from one site to another. I also note that GoLive CS2 includes a set of Typepad tools - but that one needs to subscribe to the pro service in order to get the access required to build the Blog page from scratch and thus have complete control.

Is this correct: can anyone confirm, deny or expand this simplistic analysis? Ideally I think I want the Typepad blog page to appear as part of our own web site including full navigation both ways. The only possible concern is that the speed of display of the Typepad page seems somewhat slower than I would expect, slower than our normal pages.

------ends-------