Potty

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This morning I underwent the annual ritual, The Attestation of the Tenancy Contract. I have never found it so straightforward, but then I've had a decade and a half to get my act together and prepare for the process. The annual Hunting For Every Possible Document You Might Ever Need ritual having been carried out, I'm good to go down to the government office at the Sharjah Vegetable Market.

The Attestation of the Tenancy Contract ritual is characterised by two things. One is that the rules change quite frequently. The second is that whatever documents you amass, you'll always find one that you hadn't expected or known was required, resulting in a disappointed drive home to regroup for another try.

The office that deals with such things has been transformed in recent years and is now a smart, marble-floored, airconditioned building with comfortable seats and a ticketed waiting system. We are now 'customers'. The surly looking bloke at the Information Desk scanned my wodge of Every Possible Document You Might Ever Need and looked momentarily disheartened. My heart raced. Had I done it? Had I finally beaten the system?

"Landlord passport copy."

This was awful. I had an attested copy of our marriage certificate, both passport copies, last year's contract, the landlord's ownership paper, our electricity bill and a photocopy of the page in the Domesday book that mentions my family. They'd never asked for the landlord's passport copy before.

And then I realised. He was just pissed because I had every document under the sun. I looked him straight in the eye. "I don't have it."

He grunted and gave me a ticket. I couldn't believe it - I was right! And I was through! Home free! I nearly danced to the girl behind the counter when my number was called. Which is when I found out that Sarah's passport copy included her old visa and we needed her new visa. Luckily I could get it faxed over and so my documents were duly scanned into the system, a considerable amount of money jemmied out of my wallet and our tenancy duly recognised in the eyes of the law. I do like the way that a sum charged by a government based on a percentage of a transaction is referred to as a fee here - presumably so we can remain 'tax free'...

Of course, the potty thing about the whole rigmarole is that it is all completely unnecessary. The majority of these documents were issued by the government in the first place and are certainly held on multiple government systems. The most basic integration of such systems would allow databases to cross-relate each document. Even in an environment where this were not possible (for instance, because of the complete lack of integration of any government system despite years of biffling on about e-government but little actually doing anything meaningful about it), you could save an awful lot of hassle by allowing people to scan the documents and send 'em over along with payment on Visa. It wouldn't be a complicated job. It's the sort of thing the Internet has turned out to be quite good at doing...


But then I'm running before I walk again. At least we've moved forward to a single point of transaction - there used to be twelve separate, discrete steps to renewing a tenancy contract, many of which consisted of removing the staple, shuffling the papers and then restapling them. Each of those steps used to involve long queues and shuffling, jostling crowds.

And at least now we're 'customers'. Whatever that means.

Pumped

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The rise in petrol prices that came into force at midnight last night means that my Pajero now costs Dhs100 to fill up. Two years ago, it cost Dhs70.

Given the fact that we still pay roughly per gallon what the UK consumer pays per litre, I can tell that any outbreak of sympathy for those affected is going to be very localised and immeasurably brief. But the move meant that the queue at my local ADNOC station last night backed up into the street, the usual amount of chaos and mayhem resulting.

Having lived through the days of petrol rationing in the UK during the 1970s, I was struck by the irony of queues in the 'Arab Street' as people tried to fill up with cheap petrol before the rise came into force. I can remember as a kid when petrol prices shot up to, gasp, over a pound per gallon. My dad used to drive around for miles trying to find cheaper petrol from garages that were still supplying at the old price. I'd point out to him that he'd burn any savings in the petrol he was using to try and find the lower prices.


I'm going on leave soon. One of my small and wicked little pleasures when going on leave is to strike up conversations with London cabbies about the price of petrol in the UAE. They really don't like it. This time I've got the ideal excuse, too: I can complain about the huge price rises and wait for them to sympathetically ask how much I have to pay for petrol before I tell them that we're getting gouged for something like 30p per litre.

It's an ill wind that blows no good...

Social Media Tart

Image by HubSpot via Flickr

I've been doing quite a lot of speaking at 'online' conference events and workshops recently (this will surprise nobody who knows me) and consequently meeting a lot of people who are experimenting with social media within their organisations. It's something of a growing trend - typically, one person within an organisation has been using Facebook or Twitter, even blogging, and has come to realise that there is very real value to the organisation in 'being there'. A lot of these people come from the communications department, although by no means all. At a recent event where I spoke to an audience of event managers, I found quite a lot of people who had responsibility for companies' events were the drivers behind introducing social media to their organisations.

Something of a pattern has started to emerge. The enthusiast is given permission to open up a social media account because it seems harmless enough - the company's management doesn't 'get' social media and so doesn't see any danger in letting the enthusiast play with it. The enthusiast starts out and quickly finds a ready audience of people responding, interacting and demanding information, access and insight. It all becomes hard to handle precisely because it has been successful - one person can't keep up with the volume but has gained enough experience to see the potential for this new medium.

So they go back to their management and point out that the experiment has been a great success, customers are now talking to the company over this new medium and appreciating the new degrees of access it brings. Can we expend the programme now?

And many I talk to are right in the middle of that conversation, mired in 'not just yet, there's a recession on you know' and 'What's the ROI?' reactions from the management team that has allowed this thing to develop so far precisely because it has ascribed it no importance.

Because we're hearing so much of this one problem, it's going to be one of the aspects of social media in the region that we're going to try and address at the Middle East Public Relations Association (MEPRA) workshop being held at the Emirates Academy in Dubai tomorrow. Dubbed 'Get Real About Social Media', the workshop's a three-hour session intended to provide some ideas, insight, assistance and feedback of a realistic nature (not three hours of 'join the conversation' schtick). I'm going to be co-presenting along with the delightful Samantha Dancy, the corporate communications manager of Jumeirah Group, who'll be bringing the benefit of her experience exploring social media from the client side. I'll be doing the usual gibbering and speaking in tongues.

You can get more information right here. The workshop's open to non-members, so you can always just pitch up and heckle.

Taxi

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Regular cabbie Mr. G unable to take the booking, I was reduced to pot luck on the roadside. Unusually fragrant, today's surly gentleman wanted to know if I 'mallum' our destination. I've been here before and so asked him how long he had been a resident of this fair land.

"This my first day."

Oh joy, deep and frabjous. Off we went on our merry way and I discovered, by that strange form of linguistic osmosis that allows us to communicate, that our man is called Iqbal and he hails from Peshawar. He is highly amused that I am called Al Iskandar and that no, I don't speak Peshwari. I don't go around toting an AK47 and growing opium either, but I thought it best not to let him know that in case he thought I was soft.

We proceeded unusually slowly, it has to be said. My experience of gentlemen from Peshawar in the past has been a series of breakneck rides at intolerable speeds. I have always wondered if this is from experience dodging the bullets and IEDs of the mountainous Afghani border-lands. But Iqbal was a man who believed in not only driving within the 20kmh 'grace zone' but actually below the speed limit.

After a while I could stand it no more. It was like someone reading their powerpoint, a terrible slow-motion replay of obviousness stretched out to an unbearably tedious timeline. We were on the Etihad road from Sharjah to Dubai when I cracked.

"Mr Iqbal, you can go up to 120km on this road."
"Not good."
"Really? What is problem?"
"Brakes problem."


Mr Iqbal had obviously been a victim of 'give the crap car to Nobby Newbloke' and I felt for him. But my sympathy was nowhere near as intense as my relief when we finally freewheeled up to our destination.

Brollies and Bobbies

 This is turning into a series. How many men does it take to erect a steel umbrella?

Every morning from about 7.30am, as rush hour kicks in, Sharjah's roundabouts play host to solitary Anjads, members of the Emirate's elite traffic police force whose name translates as 'The rescuers'. These excellent gentlemen in their distinctive grey uniform daily help the traffic to flow East and South through the Emirate as people flock either to the schools area or to the arterial routes to Dubai - the Ittihad Road, Beirut Street or the far-flung Emirates and Dubai Bypass roads.

The Anjad accomplish this by standing on the roundabouts and blocking incidental traffic to let the most congested streams flow, invariably encouraging drivers to get a move on by making  a series of hand gestures and even occasionally urging them to speedier movement by use of a whistle. The hand gestures, through the wearying process of repetition, occasionally become strange, a sort of floppy echo of the proud beckoning that starts the shift.

Rather sweetly, Sharjah's roundabouts are now being decorated with white-painted welded umbrellas, which appear intended to provide shelter for the rush hour Rescuers. It's a lovely thought, but it did rather leave me wondering quite where Anjads are going to stand now, because at 7.30am, each umbrella casts its shadow some three or four metres away in the middle of the road. By the time the shade actually becomes useful, the traffic has calmed down and the Anjads are back in the police stations writing up traffic fines and pulling the wings off beetles or whatever it is traffic policemen do when they're not waving and whistling at traffic.

Incidentally, Sharjah's roundabouts are all named 'squares'. It was the last straw for a friend of ours, the deeply lovely and eccentric Gill Hollis, who left after 20 years here muttering foul imprecations about squareabouts...

Sharjah and Kyoto

The last few JCBs filling in the final watery holes are all that remain of Sharjah's Old Landfill. The enormous site has taken years to be remediated, the largest such project anywhere in the world. The project has run over by about two years, if the United Nations is to be believed, but has in many ways been a pioneering achievement - all carried out under the Kyoto Protocol.

Remediating Sharjah's landfill was carried out under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The project has meant scooping out something like 7.5 million cubic metres of old, festering rubbish and has resulted in turning something like two million square metres of land into 'brown field' real estate. Buildings are already going up on the remediated land.

The project has been truly a landmark affair - basically diggers have been scooping up buckets of waste which are then sorted and graded. Two sorting lines took out the bulky stuff, while organic waste was crushed and ground into material suitable to refill the site. Stuff that couldn't be used or recycled was taken up to the new landfill site (out in the desert on the Dhaid road).

This is the site - the Al Falah area of Sharjah. The Emirates Road runs along the base of the diagram - the purple stuff is the last area to be worked on (and pictured at the top of this post).

It's taken five years. Five years of digging through a pile of festering, stinking muck and sorting, then recycling it. The massive project has been financed partly by the sale of  real estate and partly by the sale of climate credits, or CERs (Certified Emission Reduction) - carbon credits to you, mate. From what I can gather, the carbon credits were bought up by Austria. The project qualifies for carbon credits because old landfills release huge volumes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere - the original project plan outlines reductions of something like 438,000 tonnes of Carbon Dioxide or its equivalent over the original, rather ambitious, 2005-2008 timeline for the project.

The whole thing has been carried out to European standards, with the waste materials produced tested against German legal standards. Carried out by contractor Halcrow, the project was put together by EET - The Emirates Environmental Technology Co which is itself 49% owned by Austrian company IUT.

We drive past it every morning on the way to work and have watched, fascinated as the diggers have slowly reduced the enormous pile of fetid, black-looking rubbish until you can now look across an area of flat land - a little piece of Kyoto...

Telephone Fun

Having a camera on one's phone is occasionally a delight, particularly when life's little quirks send one an amusing scene and the freedom to snap it. This weekend presented two such opportunities. The first answers that perennial question, how many men does it take to pump up a car tyre?

I was also rather struck by this website, advertised on the back of a truck. To my amazed delight, there's actually a site there.

Check it out!

Bye!

Image by Leo Reynolds via Flickr

Today we say goodbye to the unlovely Emirates Business 24x7, the newspaper that managed to be as unwieldy and unattractive as its name. Its passing will only be mourned by PRs who found it an easier target than other papers when selling in any story that had a positive Dubai spin. Emirates Business 24|7 was always a sucker for a positive Dubai angle because that's what it pretty much became - the in-house newsletter for Dubai Ltd.

Launched as Emirates Today by Awraq Publishing, a subsidiary of government-owned Arab Media Group, the paper was meant to be a quality tabloid. It was seen by many as a reaction to 7Days, an expat-owned tabloid that launched almost by stealth, originally a weekly but moving to a daily schedule and managing to survive a number of scandals triggered by its UK-style tabloid editorial. The majority holding in 7Days these days sits with the UK's Associated Newspapers, the owners of the Daily Mail and 7Days' natural cousin, freesheet Metro.

Emirates Today launched on a ticket of media freedom - I knew journalists who were contacted as part of the paper's recruitment drive and they were sold heavily on a ticket of 'Here you can finally be free to write what you like.' Some of us who had been around for a while thought this was interesting, if naive. Sure enough, wrangles over content policy started to see defections, talented journalists finding that perhaps there were a few more rules being laid down than they'd been led to believe. Emirates Today never really carved a place in the market - Gulf News remained the heavy hitter, 7Days its snarky, populist competitor. At the time, Khaleej Times was  arguably passing through something of an identity crisis, one symptom of which was a slew of often amusing headlines that could reach six-lines in depth.

Relaunched as  Emirates Business 24x7 (or 24x7 or 24|7 or 24/7 or whatever), the newspaper attempted to position itself with a differentiated proposition - there was no business newspaper in the market and yet the reason we're all here in Dubai is to do business - a regional trade hub, it made absolute sense to have a heavy-hitting business and finance focused newspaper.

Except Emirates Business 24x7 never hit heavy. Its slow descent into relentless positivity was accelerated by the recession, the increasingly shrill and desperate-sounding headlines becoming more and more witless as the recession deepened. As people facing waves of redundancies packed up and left Dubai, they did so to the sound of Emirates Business 24x7 shrieking 'It's not happening!' For many, this was so at odds with reality that they lost all interest in the newspaper.

So what do you do with a newspaper that has signally failed to deliver since it was first launched? That nobody will pay for or advertise in? That's right, you close it. You stop the constant haemorrhage of good cash into the maw of the printing press and you take it online. And that is precisely what Emirates Business 24x7 has done - today's copy is the last and we told to expect the launch of multi-media, multi-modal, multi-platform and multi-dimensional website Emirates 24|7. The website will launch, according to today's editorial, in mid-July. I personally wouldn't launch a new media project in the UAE in mid-July with Ramadan starting on the 10th of August (August already being the 'holiday month'), but then who the hell cares what I think?

You can follow @emirates247 on Twitter (@emirates24|7 remains unregistered) but not on Facebook, where Emirates247 is not a thing. Emirates 247.com takes you to business24-7.ae, so at least it's registered. Nowhere is there any hint of a smart thought-through approach to handling online queries as a result of today's announcement and the Twitter feed is simply a list of headlines with links to content - not the best use of Twitter I've seen. If we are to believe in a hyper-smart approach to a new and dynamic online initiative, the evidence is sorely lacking today.

Let's not be hasty, though. The new website could well be a smart, popular and brilliant product that we all gravitate to. Let's face it, it's going to have to be. Gulf News already has a significant online presence, with multimedia production teams creating numerous streams of content around the core newspaper website. The National also has a high quality website with additional content to the core paper, including some fine blogs. And then there are players like arabianbusiness.com, Maktoob, Zawya and AME-Info. It's already pretty competitive out there and creating a strong, differentiated brand that serves compelling multi-media content is the name of the game. If you're just setting out to save a print bill, you're not going to cut it. Worse, it's an unforgiving medium. With limited online experience, transitioning from paper to protons is going to be hard and made harder by online-savvy competitors with existing audiences.

The move will undoubtedly up the ante for Middle East media online. But if you're waiting for me to start wibbling on about how this is the beginning of the end for print, I'm afraid you're going to be disappointed. This has nothing to do with print vs online. This is about a bad idea that should never have happened in the first place - a largely undifferentiated newspaper with little to offer launched into a highly competitive market, slowly failing until finally breathing its last weary gasp.

Service With a Snarl

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I've got into the habit of carrying a bottle of Masafi around with me, so pretty much every morning starts with a quick nip into our local ADNOC service station to buy a bottle for myself and one for Sarah.

Invariably, the lone blue-trousered cashier is stacking newspapers, crushing crisp packets or doing something else more important than actually standing next to the till and waiting to do the one thing cashiers do best: take the cash. I usually leave the money and walk out waving the two bottles. They know the code, so I don't have to wait around for them to scan the bottles, something one is now forced to do if buying anything else there, thanks to the Tyranny Of The Scanner.

I have watched people buying other stuff and the drill is always the same - the customer is studiously ignored until he or she is standing waiting to pay at the cash desk and starting to fidget, at which point, the cashier will slowly shuffle across the shop and grudgingly swipe the goods before demanding payment, usually with a grunted number.

It struck me this morning just how very wrong this scenario is. The customer is almost always made to wait upon the convenience of the shopkeeper, who has defined pretty much any task in the shop (a destination intended to be attractive to the customers it depends upon) as more important than actually serving the customer. Nobody complains, partly because this is the way things are and partly because finding anyone to complain to who has any power to effect any degree of change is just too much investment for likely no return.

I only thought about this at all because I had been in a workshop thingy the day before and one of the questions we had considered was where UAE banks' pain points were. I had made the point, not unreasonably, that one of the greatest pain points for banks in the UAE is that their customer service, without exception if anecdote is to be believed, stinks. I have found nobody who would recommend their bank to me, have never complained about my bank (which I, admittedly, do quite often) and had someone respond with a cheery, 'Try my bank, it's great!'. If anyone ever does, I think I might have to be treated for shock.

Someone else in the workshop thingy corrected me.  The abysmal customer service of banks in the UAE wasn't a pain point for them, because it doesn't actively hurt them. People still bank with these people, despite their anger. So banks don't care about it, it isn't a business issue for them, my colleague claimed. And he was right. Well, sort of. It's not a pain point for them simply because they're ignoring the issue - not because there is no issue to be addressed.

Like the awful ADNOC shop, banks treat their customers with very little consideration. The many instruments and vehicles of international finance do not include customer service, although all of the money banks play with belongs, ultimately, to customers. There is no thought of anticipating customer needs, instead the customer is forced to wait upon the banks' pleasure. Escalating the complaint is almost impossible - you get stuck in the numbing vortex of the call centre, which has been designed to take customer feedback and beat it into submission before discarding it. And so 'management' is effectively cushioned from the pain - the call centre is where pain begins and ends 99% of the time.

Because there's nobody listening to the customers, the management of both ADNOC and banks don't see that there's anything wrong - that perhaps there's a better, happier, way of doing things that likely costs less than the annual staff party but that has the potential to transform the brand experience of the people the business depends upon - it's that inability to see the customer as germane to the business that informs the appalling customer service of both. They'll spend millions on telling us we're happy, but not one penny on actually making us happy.

The easiest thing to do is craft a mission statement that puts the customer first, conjure up some brand values that include 'customer-centric', then run some nice, reassuringly expensive, ads that talk about customers and then completely ignore the customer in any business process, staff training or management objective.

Because customers aren't king any more. We're just dirt on the shoes of management teams sitting around in focus groups congratulating themselves on how much they invest in us, whose last thought would actually be finding out what we think or feel.

I'm quite enjoying watching companies start to experiment with social media. The first step any half-decent practitioner (ie: anyone who doesn't call themselves a 'social media expert' or, worse, 'guru') counsels companies to take is to start listening.

We've already seen some rather shocked reactions as a result of that advice. The first shock is frequently at the whole idea of listening to customers. ("Yew! Who wants to listen to them?"). The second one is when they hear what customers actually think about, and are saying about, them.

I wonder when ADNOC (the Abu Dhabi National Oil company, thank you for asking) will start...

(Yeah, so I'm grumpy. Bite me.)

GeekFest Update

Quick update to this week's GeekFest Dubai post - we do, in fact, have a TechnoCase. The nice chaps from Samsung Gulf are coming along to show off their nice, shiny new Galaxy S Android SmartPhone.

That should go down quite nicely, methinks...