3/21/2007

Zen and the art of CTI clairvoyance

I.
You’ve probably worked with CTIs before with the acronym standing for Computer-Telephone Integration, in which you have a software connected to your phone central so you can extract all kinds of data from it and coordinate incoming calls distribution through menu-based system, etc. A staple in telesales.

I work in telesales coordination (sort of…) but CTI for me has acquired a whole different meaning: Clairvoyant Technique for Interpretation and it works like this:
You implement a CTI structure with all the trimmings and the inner workings, then you buy yourself some allegedly nifty software which allows you to work wonders in data mining. So far so good, ok?
Then you call up Professor X at Marvel Comics or the X-Men Mansion or whatever and ask him for either a telepath or a clairvoyant to work on said software. If the X-Men are unavailable you might as well go for the disturbed, self-motivated (as in, “caffeine-addicted”) kid who just can’t say “no” to (what he deems) a challenge, then ask said kid to basically guess how the hell that damn system works.

Too easy, isn’t it? So let’s make it a little harder:

There are three catches to your plan:
1. No training whatsoever, obviously. We’ve all learned from too many Dilbert strips that it’s far better to get a cheap, unskilled but motivated workforce than to go for all those boring, demanding formalities. 2. There is technical support but the technical support must have even less knowledge than the clairvoyant-user himself. And 3. Last but not least, ”We aren’t entirely sure the database has a proper configuration” (and this is quoting from life itself!), so even if your clairvoyant operator is indeed some kind of intuitive whiz-kid busting his behind night and day to pluck a solution out of the ether that surrounds the visible world, there’s absolutely no reliance to whatever results he might turn up for the management.


II.
I suppose you’ve probably declared all’s lost by now, the whole “Woe to the inhabitants of the Earth” routine, after reading the bit above.
You’re wrong though, and it’s quite entirely related to the application of the contribution of 19th-century mathematician August Ferdinand Möbius to Euclidean geometry, to the 21st-century Corporate World. I assume you’re familiar with the general concept behind a Möbius strip.
This is how it works, CTI-wise:

The way out of the data mining inaccuracy problem presented above can be easily circumvented by basically downsizing the flowchart of the information analysis gig into a flat hierarchical structure, in the same manner 1970s Jack Kirby comics would consider it an OMAC-initiative. OMAC stands for One-Man Army Corps.
Okay, before I totally lose you with the half-baked references this is what I mean:

If the person making the reports… is the same person who’s actually studying them… and is the same person making decisions based upon said studies… then you’ve pretty much leveled the problem by having it un-created- by isolating it in some dark, forsaken corner of a Möbius strip within an empty conference room at 4pm on a Tuesday afternoon, etc.

Joseph Heller called it a Catch-22 in the book of the same name, by the way.


III.
There is this Zen koan that goes something like this:
You know the sound of two hands clapping. What is the sound of one hand clapping?