Geoff Meredith: Tech Guru

A longtime friend & colleague of mine, Geoff Meredith, has just gotten back from a business trip to Banff with his wife, Rochelle. He turned it into an experiment of sorts to see how productive he could be away from home. He's written a fascinating pair of articles about it here and here.

Robert Dziekanski's Death: The Incompetence Continues

Canadian Border Services held a heavily controlled press conference to release their inquiry into the death of Polish immigrant, Robert Dziekanski, on October 14th. As I expected, it revealed nothing particularly new in substance, other than they had no idea what he was doing for 6 hours and 31 minutes, in between when he passed through primary inspection and when he tried to leave the luggage area.

It annoys me to no end how the process of tracking passengers is completely flawed. Nobody in this organization knew where he was. When his mother tried to find out, they didn't even know he had arrived!

Being in the I.T. business, it seems so glaringly obvious how a simple mobile database tracking system could have been implemented as long as 5 years ago. Federal Express has one. So does Wal-Mart. So does Amazon. But our Canadian government? Nope, they're still living in the 1980's.

How difficult would it be to have mobile wireless computers on every mobile official at the airport, each getting an update from their central database every minute. Anyone not accounted for, for more than 30 minutes could be red flagged and brought to the attention of one or the attention of many.

Additionally, each handheld computer could have prepared messages and/or questions in every language known to mankind, displaying them visually or audibly or even as welcome videos. Simple, simple, simple.

Yet will something so obvious get implemented? Probably not. Or if the government were to take on such a project, it would cost $100 Million and never get done right. If such technology was needed by a private sector facility, they would buy something "off the shelf" and just make minor modifications to suit their specific requirements. While I don't sell this kind of software myself I know many firms who do. I estimate the cost per mobile employee could easily be kept under $1,500 per person, for both the hardware & software.

What a concept, having timely, accurate information in the Year 2007! Who would'da thunk it possible?! Certainly not our public bureaucrats.