A while ago, we worked with a leading law firm to help them become more customer-centric. A key component of this work was understanding the networks of partners within the firm, and how natural working relationships mapped onto the formal organization structure. To do this, we used existing data and social network analysis.

Here is a live on-line simulation model of a hypothetical consumer electronics company, with a dashboard to let you play with it. The model aims to explore the trade-offs between short-term performance and the drivers of longer-term success. One way of looking at these dynamics is that an organization needs to build up and maintain stocks of resources in order to be healthy, a perspective for which system dynamics is very useful.

Vending and parking machines often display the message "no change provided", and retain any payment above the required amount. This is mildly annoying, but we live with it. But it got me asking what the value of this policy is to the vendor. Here is an interactive dashboard that uses random sampling to estimate the value of retaining change across many small transactions.

Last week, I received an GBP 60 parking violation ticket while parking at a museum, even though I paid for parking in advance and displayed my ticket on the dashboard as instructed. The charge is still being disputed, but the private parking company (PPC) involved has a good incentive to deny my appeal, however logical. That's because penalties can be hugely profitable for this unregulated industry. Let's look at the numbers.

We've just launched a new site at chron8.com that allows you and others to enter any number of events with dates, then shows these events as a graphical timeline. You can superimpose several timelines on top of each other, to see how they relate. A previous blog post explains how this helped me to find some patterns in musical composition dates.

I run my own Linux server, with Postfix for handling mail. I get a lot of spam, and have used a number of filters which can be tacked on to Postfix, but have always found them to be a pain. Here's a solution I have developed which takes a different approach, and works really well for me.

I've been working on a new timeline visualization tool that will be online soon. As a demo case, I have been using the composition dates of operas by three composers I happen to like: Bellini, Verdi, and Wagner. Looking at their production visually reveals some interesting patterns.

Following from our earlier conceptual systems thinking diagram, here is a simple working simulation model of a company with a call centre, that takes into account various interrelated factors such as call centre volume, staff retention, customer turnover, and staffing costs. This model runs in your web browser, so you can see how changing the numbers affects the bottom line.