RIM Tracks Employee Calls, Maintains a Monoculture

A startling report on Cnet reveals that Research in Motion, maker of BlackBerries, records all employee calls. The extent of the recording is not quite clear — do they just log the times and the numbers, or do they literally record the content of the call? If the former then there is nothing unusual in that, but if they are recording the content then it seems another kettle of fish. Is it even legal? It’s one thing if the employees know about and agree to it, but my understanding is that the other party on the line also needs to know the call is being recorded.

The Cnet article about RIM’s CIO Robin Bienfait says:

When asked exactly whether it was conversations, rather than just written information she kept tabs on, Bienfait answered: “Everything. I record everything.”

It wasn’t a violation of privacy, according to Bienfait, who maintained the workers were aware of the surveillance: “They’re doing business inside of RIM. Everything they can say or do can be patented…We’re not violating anybody’s privacy. They’re aware that their information is transparent and in visibility.”

It goes on to say:

[S]taff can only use BlackBerry devices for work. Bienfait said she had never had to deal with a request to put the iPhone on the network.

She said it freed her from some of the problems which plagued other companies, where IT departments had needed to deal with people wanting devices to be hooked up to the network which might compromise security. “I think it is a challenge for the industry to be able to manage some of the Gen Y’s,” she admitted.

Aside from the legal question that I’m not an expert on, there are a couple of other worrying things that come out of this — worrying for RIM that is:

1. If you can’t trust your employees, then you’ve either hired the wrong employees, set up the wrong culture and incentives in the organization, or created such a widespread sense of paranoia that everyone assumes that everyone else must be doing the wrong thing, so it’s OK for them to as well. The idea that they can uncover new ideas for patents simply by tracking phone calls is absurd — and certainly about the least efficient way imaginable of coming up with new patents.
2. Maintaining a monoculture of devices is bad practice. I saw this at Sun Microsystems when I worked there years ago (I don’t know if it’s still the case). We were not allowed to use non-Sun machines for anything, even if Suns were patently unsuited to the task. This mentality leads to a lack of understanding about what your competition is doing, and creates a monoculture of devices that other customers are probably not experiencing. You should buy and use all your competitors for extended periods of time and find out what makes them tick. Besides, any large company’s IT organization most likely has some sort of heterogeneous infrastructure of different types of devices, users, needs, technologies and security systems. By forcing a monoculture and not “dealing with” requests for new devices like iPhones, you put yourself in an idealized world that makes it hard to empathize and design for the vagaries of more complex systems.
3. Lastly, the high-handed and dismissive comment about managing Gen-Y’ers really bugs me. This is another example of the holier-than-thou attitude I’ve seen from RIM executives before. Get over it.

Intrusive Advertising, Again

The NY Times has a depressing article on the fervor around “out of home” advertising - in other words sticking an advert on any conceivable surface outside your home, in the hopes that you will see it, fall in love with what it’s advertising, and buy it.

A little while ago I coined the phrase “indentured advertude”, after indentured servitude (where people are forced into slavery in order to pay off a debt). Likewise, indentured advertude is about forcing you to look at advertising in a place or circumstance where you’ve already paid a fee to be there (such as movie theater or airplane seat), and have no escape exit.

Here’s what the Times has to say:

The ardor to reach consumers outside the home — and outside the realm of traditional media like television — continues to grow among marketers. They hope to fight back against technologies like digital video recorders, which make it easier to avoid conventional advertisements like commercials.

Out-of-home media was once commonly known as outdoor media, reflecting its roots in billboards, posters and signs. The term has been changed to reflect the expansion into places like airports, offices, malls, schools and health clubs, where the ads are inside but not inside the home…

The new places for ads — as well as the addition of digital and video capabilities to signs, bus shelters, phone kiosks and other sites — are among the reasons ad spending in the out-of-home category are second only to online advertising in growth.

The goal is to engage consumers “during the course of their daily lives in places they go on a frequent basis,” said Rick Sirvaitis, president at StoreBoard Media in New York, which puts ads on the security pedestals at the entrances and exits of retail outlets like drug stores.

“In 36 years in advertising, for the first time I can look people in the eye and guarantee every consumer will be exposed to the message,” Mr. Sirvaitis said, referring to a StoreBoard sign, “because you can’t miss it.”

Unfortunately this doesn’t look like it is going away as companies face ever increasing pressures to keep up consumer spending and revenues. But it’s going to make for a depressing lived environment.

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