To Dither or not to Dither

Dithering is not productive. If you have a decision to make, make it, clearly having given it due consideration first, but it cannot take forever. And seek empowerment for goodness sake. It is an overused word in business these days, but we have to be allowed to use our commonsense. Most issues concern finding the right balance between risk and reward, and with clear guidelines most of us are able to see the wood for the trees.

Now you may be thinking that poor old Hugh has been plagued by ditherers in recent days. Well yes and no, really. I usually am one way or another because I have a sales function to perform and the time between offering my wares and getting a yes or no is often a frustrating one. I don’t get why it takes so long sometimes because it is not...it really is not...rocket science.

However, the customer is always right. You take as long as you like. But actually what caused me to put finger to keyboard right now is the idea of risk and reward being at the crux of the matter with every business decision.

The risk can be the cost. This is going to cost me £100 and the reward is that pile in the corner of the office is going to disappear. Sustainability will have been supported and my data will have been dealt with, leaving me with the paperwork to prove it and a warm feeling of indescribable joy.

It’s often the cost that causes the dithering of course. Oh the boss won’t like that at all, having to pay £100 to get rid of 3 old PC’s, that broken kettle and those two old phone handsets. There is no budget for that and if head office finds out, heads will roll for sure. In my experience there is much more dithering over £100 than there ever is over £1,000.

£100 is a decent meal out for you and the other half, with wine. It’s a trip to the cinema and a take away after. No popcorn though, popcorn is ruinously expensive in my experience. It’s almost two thirds of two adult tickets to see the mighty Arsenal lose to Monaco. It’s a year’s subscription to Netflix. It is not a fortune.

Quite often we get asked to take away some broken desks, or chairs, or cupboards along with our usual. And we charge for it. No one seems to mind about that too much, because we are doing them a favour. It is obvious waste and there is no perceived value. But for some unknown reason just because something has a plug people dither.

Oh do you know what? I am always quite excited when I see that someone has a pile of non-WEEE rubbish that they would absolutely love us to take as well as their WEEE, because it means instant gratitude. They could have found someone else to get the real rubbish but it would have cost them in time and hassle as well as cost, so all of a sudden we are the good guys.

But suggest that the aforementioned broken kettle, clapped out PC and old phone handsets are rubbish as well and will be charged for accordingly and there is a sharp intake of breath. The boss won’t like that.

Well the boss won’t like being fined when your database gets stolen either. He won’t like it if he gets caught trying to slip business waste into the local council tip either. There are lots of things he won’t like that £100 prevents him from suffering these days. So surprise the boss. Tell him you have saved the company database from breach, tell him that you have operated within WEEE regulations and the data protection act and have the paperwork to prove it. And tell him that it only cost £100. He will be dead chuffed. Promise.

Charity Begins in...Basingstoke?

I live near a council tip, which is next to a sewage treatment works of all things. In the summer, on the second Tuesday in July when it is always warm enough to have a window open, the stench can be extremely unpleasant. So much for stockbroker belt Surrey! The house may warrant a mansion tax should Red Ed get into power but you can smell the counties pooh!

But until I landed on Planet eReco I had never really considered waste. Now when I visit the tip, as is my wont upon occasion, I look at our rubbish through opened eyes, agog at our wastefulness and at the hoops we now leap through to recycle.

eReco’s fundamental principle is actually 0% landfill. That is what we are about here in sunny East Grinstead. Yes, data security is the other side of the coin, and we take that very seriously indeed, but what we are here to do is to stop stuff getting buried in the ground. Landfills are horrible things. The detritus of human life, the stuff we simply cannot use again, being dug into the good earth.

And yet, although we proclaim 0% landfill loudly and often, it is rarely something that resonates as part of the buying decision. It is almost a given I suppose. People are starting to expect business to be a lighter shade of green. Even though when they go to the supermarket that Avocado is still imprisoned within 6 layers of plastic you need a pair of scissors to get through. Even though we allow hundreds of thousands of tonnes of our WEEE to get sent to African tips every year.

That last one isn’t funny is it? Well neither is the Avocado actually, as you usually slice half a hand off getting it out, only to find out it takes 3 more days to ripen, but the export of WEEE to somewhere where it will end up in landfill is a disgrace.

Shame on us for allowing it to happen.

There are even charities in this country who boast about it. We have given 250000 laptops to schools in Nigeria, or Ghana, or Basingstoke, and aren’t we good. We are sharing our good fortune, thanks to your generosity, and these lovely children with no shoes can post on Facebook that they don’t have anything to eat tonight.

But it’s ok, because someone will earn a pittance helping to bury OUR waste in THEIR land in a few months or so. Because there is no mention of these ‘charities’ bringing the kit back when it breaks down, is there?

I am quite prepared to listen if some of these charitable ventures want to explain to me why this is a good thing. But let’s be clear about what they are actually doing here. They collect your old kit, nearly always for free, promising to remove your data and give you all the paperwork you will ever need, and then ‘donate’ it to those in need across the sea. So quite apart from the tricky problem of how they pay for the collection and processing of your equipment, how do they pay to get it Africa?

The only way this makes sense is if they sell it to someone. As I have said before on this blog that is easy to do, but it is not easy to do legally. I am sure some of it is done legally but I am equally sure that I don’t see how the economics work. As I say, if someone wants to explain it to me, I will be delighted to listen.

I want to see every child in this world owning a pair shoes and getting a good education, even in Basingstoke. No actually especially Basingstoke, because it won't end up in landfill down there. Not to mention healthcare and enough to eat and drink. I am not sure I care whether every child has a second hand laptop however. But I do care about hundreds of thousands of British WEEE ending up in African landfill.

I hope you do too.                         

Confused? You Bleeping will be!

Business is confusing there days. Designing a website is not hard or necessarily expensive, and you can look so much bigger and better than you are. You can use clever phrases to suggest things that are not a lie but are not exactly true either, and for a potential client, that is a nightmare.

One telltale sign to me is always accreditations. Most sectors have them, and obviously some are more easily recognisable than others. A kitemark or an ISO says something to most people. And I think it shows a certain commitment to quality in most cases.

A lot of third party accreditations evolve out of the sector itself and are therefore not readily recognisable to the uninitiated. We have one of those, ADISA, and the certification is meaningful. It is all on the ADISA website and is all fine and dandy. And that led us on to get DIPCOG approval back in January.

 DIPCOG is not widely known but far easier to grasp. It means we are allowed to work in the MoD/government space. MoD as in Ministry of Defence of course.

If you are very bored one day and have an hour to kill, put IT recycling into Google and look at some of the suppliers. I can save you a bit of time but it’s still quite funny. My time savers are that ADISA only has some 35 certified businesses and DIPCOG has approved 3, to the best of my knowledge, allegedly and at the time of going to print. There are more than 800 altogether.

eReco is not a huge business at all. It’s just me and you and a dog named Boo. But we are highly professional and committed to doing what we do better than the average bear. Having the DIPCOG logo on our website should make us stand out from the crowd.

And yet, you will soon be confused as you browse those sites. If you throw in a little jargon and like being deliberately obtuse, you can make my Ford Focus sound like a Porsche. So it is no surprise that people fall for it sometimes I suppose.

For instance, one such website mentions CESG approved baseline data erasure. CESG is a government committee that sets standards for data security but baseline is actually the minimum standard, as the term suggests. It is not recommended if you want to be data safe. CESG actually recommends something called Infosec 5 which sounds like the sequal to Babylon 5 but isn't. Google that, it has its own Wikipedia page! Isn’t life grand?

So my point is you have to be careful out there. You have to ask the right questions and understand the answers. With baseline software, the question should be is the data recoverable. The answer is yes it may very well be. Not easily but it is. With Infosec 5 the answer would be no, not on your nelly. There is no known way to recover data from a three wipe erasure.

But you see, Infosec 5 software involves paying a license. Every time we use it we have to pay a fee to the developer. Baseline software does not command a fee per use as I understand it. So if you are collecting kit for free and pretending to be a professional service, you use that. If you are a professional service who cares about their clients, you pay the license and do the job properly.

That’s ADISA. That’s DIPCOG. That’s eReco.

ECO Schools Fits EReco like a Glove (or pyjamas!)

Late last week eReco was confirmed at the IT recycling partner for the Eco Schools project, managed by Keep Britain Tidy.

This is big news for us.

Not only can we promote our fine services to 17,500 member schools but the programme itself is very close to our hearts. Eco Schools really is all about sustainability, reducing energy usage and bringing up future generations in an environment which thinks about what it is doing to the planet.

But the greatest pleasure was in finding out that KBT share our desire to raise the profile of personal data security to school kids at the same time. My next writing challenge is to develop some lesson plans that cover both IT recycling and Data Security – a challenge I am slightly daunted by but really looking forward to.

Regular readers will know that I bang on about more education and less regulation, and this is our chance to put our time and money where my keyboard is. 

This is the coal face, where we can win young hearts and minds early in the game and set ourselves on the road to righteousness in the years to come.

In my primary school years I remember being taught all about decimal coinage. I got my cycling proficiency and did some life saving which seemed to involve diving into a pool in pyjamas and rescuing a brick. All extremely useful stuff. I still keep a pair of pyjamas in the car in case I need to rescue anyone.

But I left completely unprepared for the technological revolution that was about to engulf us all in the nineties. I could not even use a calculator in my maths exam! Imagine the difference for a primary school kid today. Am I the only one who finds those ads where the Mum is asking her phone to help her educate her young son about a trip to the zoo slightly alarming?

They will live in a world where technology and the machines that deliver it are all around us, in and out of work, and they have to be taught how to handle it. Just as we were taught how to ride a bike or cross the road (I do realise kids still do that by the way).

Protecting their data from phishing attacks or at the point of disposal has to become second nature to them. Just as recycling is becoming normal, so must being data aware. Everyone at eReco is proud of our partnership with ECO schools.