British Telecom Research Articles

Visions of a Digital Nation: Market and Monopoly in British Telecommunications by Jacob Ward (review)

Visions of a Digital Nation: Market and Monopoly in British Telecommunications by Jacob Ward (review)

Unpacking the Art of Customer Complaint Handling in Spanish and British Telecom Emails: A Cross-Cultural Webcare Study With a Human Touch

In spite of the rise of new media in a B2C context, companies still prefer to handle complaints privately. As such, many complaints are handled via email resulting in a professional communication genre of its own. In this study we performed a cross-cultural genre analysis to understand the specific discourse structure of the moves within response mails to complaints, on the one hand, and the importance of the communicative function of Conversational Human Voice within this genre, on the other. With this aim, we collected authentic organizational email replies to complaints from telecom companies active in the UK and Spain (36 and 44 emails respectively). The results indicate that the British and Spanish data sets show a similar discourse structure in terms of move frequency. The submoves that are prototypical for all data sets are Greeting, Explanation, Conclusion, and the closing submoves Sign-off and Signature. The data sets differ mainly in their frequency for the interpersonal submoves Empathy, Gratitude, and Apology, which are more prevalent in the English corpus, and the more business-oriented moves, such as Contact reason, Marketing, and Future contact, which are mainly present in the Spanish corpus. This suggests that organizational email replies to complaints are a rather conventionalized genre, with some linguacultures putting more effort in company-customer interactions by using more interpersonal submoves. Regarding the cross-cultural analysis of the expression of Conversational Human Voice we observed an influence of the respective linguacultures in the sense that the Spanish data are less personal and less invitational than the English mails, although they present more empathetic intensifiers. Furthermore, both data sets show only a limited extent of informal language. We evaluate these findings in the light of previous work.

Ethics and biomedical engineering for well-being: a cocreation study of remote services for monitoring and support

The well-being of students and staff directly affects their output and efficiency. This study presents the results of two focus groups conducted in 2022 within a two-phase project led by the Applied Biomedical and Signal Processing Intelligent e-Health Lab, School of Engineering at the University of Warwick, and British Telecom within “The Connected Campus: University of Warwick case study” program. The first phase, by involving staff and students at the University of Warwick, aimed at collecting preliminary information for the subsequent second phase, about the feasibility of the use of Artificial Intelligence and Internet of Things for well-being support on Campus. The main findings of this first phase are interesting technological suggestions from real users. The users helped in the design of the scenarios and in the selection of the key enabling technologies which they considered as the most relevant, useful and acceptable to support and improve well-being on Campus. These results will inform future services to design and implement technologies for monitoring and supporting well-being, such as hybrid, minimal and even intrusive (implantable) solutions. The user-driven co-design of such services, leveraging the use of wearable devices and Artificial Intelligence deployment will increase their acceptability by the users.

How TalkTalk did the walk-walk: strategic reputational repair in a cyber-attack

PurposeCyber-attacks that generate technical disruptions in organisational operations and damage the reputation of organisations have become all too common in the contemporary organisation. This paper explores the reputation repair strategies undertaken by organisations in the event of becoming victims of cyber-attacks.Design/methodology/approachFor developing the authors’ contribution in the context of the Internet service providers' industry, the authors draw on a qualitative case study of TalkTalk, a British telecommunications company providing business to business (B2B) and business to customer (B2C) Internet services, which was a victim of a “significant and sustained” cyber-attack in October 2015. Data for the enquiry is sourced from publicly available archival documents such as newspaper articles, press releases, podcasts and parliamentary hearings on the TalkTalk cyber-attack.FindingsThe findings suggest a dynamic interplay of technical and rhetorical responses in dealing with cyber-attacks. This plays out in the form of marshalling communication and mortification techniques, bolstering image and riding on leader reputation, which serially combine to strategically orchestrate reputational repair and stigma erasure in the event of a cyber-attack.Originality/valueAnalysing a prototypical case of an organisation in dire straits following a cyber-attack, the paper provides a systematic characterisation of the setting-in-motion of strategic responses to manage, revamp and ameliorate damaged reputation during cyber-attacks, which tend to negatively shape the evaluative perceptions of the organisation's salient audience.

Pandemic restrictions in 2020 highlight the significance of non-road NOx sources in central London

Abstract. Fluxes of nitrogen oxides (NOx=NO+NO2) and carbon dioxide (CO2) were measured using eddy covariance at the British Telecommunications (BT) Tower in central London during the coronavirus pandemic. Comparing fluxes to those measured in 2017 prior to the pandemic restrictions and the introduction of the Ultra-Low Emissions Zone (ULEZ) highlighted a 73 % reduction in NOx emissions between the two periods but only a 20 % reduction in CO2 emissions and a 32 % reduction in traffic load. Use of a footprint model and the London Atmospheric Emissions Inventory (LAEI) identified transport and heat and power generation to be the two dominant sources of NOx and CO2 but with significantly different relative contributions for each species. Application of external constraints on NOx and CO2 emissions allowed the reductions in the different sources to be untangled, identifying that transport NOx emissions had reduced by >73 % since 2017. This was attributed in part to the success of air quality policy in central London but crucially due to the substantial reduction in congestion that resulted from pandemic-reduced mobility. Spatial mapping of the fluxes suggests that central London was dominated by point source heat and power generation emissions during the period of reduced mobility. This will have important implications on future air quality policy for NO2 which, until now, has been primarily focused on the emissions from diesel exhausts.

Eddy covariance measurements highlight sources of nitrogen oxide emissions missing from inventories for central London

Abstract. During March–June 2017 emissions of nitrogen oxides were measured via eddy covariance at the British Telecom Tower in central London, UK. Through the use of a footprint model the expected emissions were simulated from the spatially resolved National Atmospheric Emissions Inventory for 2017 and compared with the measured emissions. These simulated emissions were shown to underestimate measured emissions during the daytime by a factor of 1.48, but they agreed well overnight. Furthermore, underestimations were spatially mapped, and the areas around the measurement site responsible for differences in measured and simulated emissions were inferred. It was observed that areas of higher traffic, such as major roads near national rail stations, showed the greatest underestimation by the simulated emissions. These discrepancies are partially attributed to a combination of the inventory not fully capturing traffic conditions in central London and both the spatial and temporal resolution of the inventory not fully describing the high heterogeneity of the urban centre. Understanding of this underestimation may be further improved with longer measurement time series to better understand temporal variation and improved temporal scaling factors to better simulate sub-annual emissions.

The Charismatic Organization: Vision 2000 and Corporate Change in a State-Owned Organization

British Telecom’s 1984 partial privatization set in motion the privatization and deregulation of many international state-owned telecommunications carriers. Most previous research on the privatization and deregulation of state-owned telecommunications carriers has focused on the economic outcomes. However, this was also a time of changes in managerial practice and thinking influenced by organizational theory. This article presents an analysis of the use of the prescriptions of Rosabeth Kanter in the attempted reform of the organizational culture of Australia’s largest business in the 1980s: the government-owned telecommunications monopoly Telecom Australia (now Telstra). It details the attempt to transform Telecom under the incipient threat of the introduction of competition to the telecommunications market and demonstrates how the country’s largest change management program, Vision 2000, represented an alternative approach to telecommunications reform.

Technology, market change and the privatisation of communications in Britain

PurposeWhat are the trade-offs between public and private ownership in the business and how does this impact industries responsible for providing and offering services on critical national infrastructure? The privatisation of British Telecom (BT), the UK telecommunications provider that was initially part of the British Post Office, is used to explore this question. By broadening the business perspective beyond the political goals and economic consequences of privatisation; this study aims to approach management history provides new perspectives of the benefits and challenges offered by both public and private ownership.Design/methodology/approachTo fulfil its purpose, this paper examines how the UK telecommunications incumbent proactively adapted from being an organisation shaped by its unique position within the public sector, to one embracing the challenges offered by the private sector. The analysis is synthesised by linking an understanding of the customer’s requirements, services and technology with surveys of the secondary literature, supported where applicable by archival material, combining perspectives from authors both within the organisation and external to it. Sources include specialist and more general academic material and contemporary and reflective publications from practising engineers and managers; supplemented by material held at the BT Archives and the Guildhall Library in London. It links the debate on ownership to the evolution of the market under study and provides a balanced view across the business, its market, competition and technology.FindingsThe arguments surrounding public or private ownership, are complex, in particular, it is difficult to separate effects due to liberalisation and privatisation. Whilst the former provided the impetus for beneficial change, the latter reduced the level of detrimental entanglement with government policy and enabled the technology and structural changes that took the market forward.Originality/valueA new and balanced view of the privatisation of BT is taken, with an emphasis on how the company needed to change to thrive in a liberalised market, noting how technological change both required organisational change and enabled it. In contrast to many studies, the emphasis is on what was driving the organisation rather than the policy of privatisation and its effectiveness.

High Court grants website blocking injunction in relation to sports streaming and reconsiders confidentiality of such orders

Case No: IL-2018–000155 Matchroom Boxing Ltd and another v British Telecommunications plc and others [2020] EWHC 2868 (Ch), 23 October 2020 The High Court of England and Wales granted Matchroom Boxing an additional website blocking injunction in relation to the unauthorized streaming of its upcoming boxing matches. Whilst this follows a series of other recent website blocking injunctions in relation to sports, the judge provided further input on whether such an order could be made wholly confidential. Matchroom Boxing Ltd (‘Matchroom Boxing’) is a promoter of boxing matches. As a result of a surge in unauthorized copyright streaming activities, Matchroom Boxing had previously sought a website blocking injunction against the six main retail internet service providers (ISPs) in the UK, pursuant to section 97A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The purpose was to require the ISPs to take measures to block access to streaming...

AdaptiveSystems: An Integrated Framework for Adaptive Systems Design and Development Using MPS JetBrains Domain-Specific Modeling Environment

This paper contains the design and development of an adaptive systems ( AdaptiveSystems Domain-Specific Language - DSL) framework to assist language developers and data scientists in their attempt to apply Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms in several application domains. Big-data processing and AI algorithms are at the heart of autonomics research groups among industry and academia. Major advances in the field have traditionally focused on algorithmic research and increasing the performance of the developed algorithms. However, it has been recently recognized by the AI community that the applicability of these algorithms and their consideration in context is of paramount importance for their adoption. Current approaches to address AI in context lie in two areas: adaptive systems research that mainly focuses on implementing adaptivity mechanisms (technical perspective) and AI in context research that focuses on business aspects (business perspective). There is currently no approach that combines all aspects required from business considerations to an appropriate level of abstraction. In this paper, we attempt to address the problem of designing adaptive systems and therefore providing AI in context by utilising DSL technology. We propose a new DSL ( AdaptiveSystems ) and a methodology to apply this to the creation of a DSL for specific application domains such as AdaptiveVLE (Adaptive Virtual Learning Environment) DSL. The language developer will be able to instantiate the AdaptiveSystems DSL to any application domain by using the guidelines in this paper with an integrated path from design to implementation. The domain expert will then be able to use the developed DSL (e.g. AdaptiveVLE DSL) to design and develop their application. Future work will include extension and experimentation of the applicability of this work to more application domains within British Telecom (BT) and other areas such as health care, finance, etc.

Towards a Green Approach for Minimizing Carbon Emissions in Fog-Cloud Architecture

Fog computing is developed to complement cloud computing by extending the cloud services (computing, storage, networking, and management) to the edge of the network in order to reduce service latency. Correspondingly, the incremental use of cloud/fog resources and their applications has increased energy consumption and carbon emissions (CO2) of the data centers, which caused significant environmental challenges. Optimizing the placement of the requested resources and applications (e.g., in the form of virtual machines (VMs)) is one of the main solutions, which has a primary effect in reducing the energy consumption of cloud/fog architectures and consequently their CO2 emissions. However, due to the geographic distribution of cloud and fog data centers, there are varying levels of CO2 emissions to consider, which makes optimizing the placement of resources and applications in distributed cloud/fog more challenging than in centralized clouds in terms of carbon efficiency. In this paper, we propose a multi-level approach using a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model to minimize the CO2 emissions of data centers by optimizing the resources usage and the placement of VMs in fog-cloud environments. This approach calculates the CO2 emissions of the British Telecom (BT) network based on the carbon intensity data from the National Grid ESO, considering several scenarios of traffic demand during different times of the day and year. The results show that the optimal location to host applications highly relies on the carbon intensity and traffic demands. The results also show there is a trade-off between CO2 emission reduced by shortening network journey, and CO2 emission increased by hosting more applications into the fog nodes. In addition, the results demonstrate that the proposed green fog-cloud architecture outperforms the central cloud and the distributed clouds in terms of reducing the total CO2 emission by up to 91% and 71%, respectively. Finally, we develop a heuristic algorithm to mimic and validate the presented work, and it shows comparable results to the MILP model.

Exploring the power of supervised learning methods for company name disambiguation in microblog posts

Entity disambiguation is the task of identifying the real world entity that was referred to/mentioned in a context. Ambiguous references to entities may occur due to variations of how an entity is referenced (BT, British Telecom) or inherent ambiguities of the names used for entities (Orange Telecom vs. fruit orange), and misspellings (Best Buy vs. BestBuy). Ambiguities in company names however come with a price, when it comes to nding information about the company on the Web. Recently, tracking social media for brand management has become a very important part of the process in marketing, public relations, and product marketing. Therefore, resolving references to real world objects has become an important part of social media analytics systems. In this thesis, we study di erent machine learning algorithms for entity disambiguation in micro-blogging posts. We show that with the carefully selected set of features, supervised learning techniques would improve the disambiguation quality signi cantly.

A History of Women in British Telecommunications: Introducing a Special Issue

Abstract Women’s roles in telecommunications history remain underexplored despite a recent proliferation of work on women in the history of technology. This special issue seeks to correct that imba...

The effects of strategy and institutions on value creation and appropriation in firms: A longitudinal study of three telecom companies

AbstractResearch SummaryStrategic management has come to pay more attention to value creation and appropriation (VCA) among the firm's stakeholders, including customers, capital owners, and employees. Existing research has conceptualized this as a strategic choice bounded by the bargaining power of each stakeholder group, which, we argue, risks misattributing outcomes by neglecting structural constraints. Instead, these dynamics need to be understood within the wider institutional context shaping the behavior of managers and stakeholders. Using a question‐driven mixed‐methods approach, we investigate the evolution of VCA in three telecom companies located in different institutional systems—British Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, and Telecom Italia. Our findings suggest that national institutional and firm strategic effects must be considered together to understand patterns of VCA among stakeholders.Managerial SummaryUsing an emerging methodology, we quantify how three telecom firms (British Telecom, Deutsche Telecom, and Telecom Italia) have created and distributed economic value since privatization. Our focus is on explaining the extent to which various stakeholders—employees, customers, capital owners, and government—were able to appropriate the value created by the firms. Some similarities are found across the three companies, but we also found major differences. To explain patterns, we bring together (a) strategic decision making by managers within the firm and (b) constraints imposed by institutions outside the firm. We find both to be important, interlinked drivers of distributional patterns. The article gives managers and stakeholders a means to understand major changes and determinants of value creation and distribution.

Computer Models and Thatcherist Futures: From Monopolies to Markets in British Telecommunications.

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's 1984 privatization of British Telecom was a landmark moment for neoliberalism. It served to popularize and vindicate the sale of state utilities around the world. This article shows how computer models of the future were central for British telecommunications', and thus for Britain's, transition from social democracy to neoliberalism, from monopoly to market. The British telecommunications network was a key interest in both the social democratic and neoliberal British state's plans for the digitalization of Britain. I argue that computers were crucial to the rise of neoliberalism, both as a managerial tool that simulated futures of free markets and as a technology that symbolized and supported the contraction of the British state. This article traces the history of the British telecommunications system's Long Range Planning Department, which was at the heart of British Telecom's privatization. In doing so, it argues that the history of technology is in a unique position to study how tools such as computers both forecast and symbolize the political power of the future.

Classification Algorithms Framework (CAF) to Enable Intelligent Systems Using JetBrains MPS Domain-Specific Languages Environment

This paper describes the design and development of a Classification Algorithms Framework (CAF) using the JetBrains MPS domain-specific languages (DSLs) development environment. It is increasingly recognized that the systems of the future will contain some form of adaptivity therefore making them intelligent systems as opposed to the static systems of the past. These intelligent systems can be extremely complex and difficult to maintain. Descriptions at higher-level of abstraction (system-level) have long been identified by industry and academia to reduce complexity. This research presents a Framework of Classification Algorithms at system-level that enables quick experimentation with several different algorithms from Naive Bayes to Logistic Regression. It has been developed as a tool to address the requirements of British Telecom's (BT's) data-science team. The tool has been presented at BT and JetBrains MPS and feedback has been collected and evaluated. Beyond the reduction in complexity through the system-level description, the most prominent advantage of this research is its potential applicability to many application contexts. It has been designed to be applicable for intelligent applications in several domains from business analytics, eLearning to eHealth, etc. Its wide applicability will contribute to enabling the larger vision of Artificial Intelligence (AI) adoption in context.

Does Employee Happiness Have an Impact on Productivity?

This article provides evidence from a natural experiment on the relationship between employee affect and productivity. We link highly detailed administrative data on the performance of all telesales workers at British Telecom with survey reports of employee happiness we collected on a weekly basis. We make use of the interaction between a worker’s access to windows while at work and the presence of gloomy or bright weather outside of each call center, in order to derive quasi-experimental estimates for the causal effect of happiness on productivity. We find a strong effect of happiness on sales. This effect is driven by changes in labor productivity – largely through workers converting more calls into sales, and to a lesser extent by making more calls per hour and adhering more closely to their schedule. We find no effects of happiness on various measures of high-frequency labor supply such as attendance and break-taking.

TCBH Duncan Tanner Essay Prize Winner 2018 Financing the Information Age: London TeleCity, the Legacy of IT-82, and the Selling of British Telecom.

This article is a history of the privatization of British Telecom. BT's privatization occupies a central position in histories of Thatcherism as a pivotal moment in Thatcherism's ideological focus on popular capitalism. These histories, however, overlook the important intersection of financial institutions and information technology policy in shaping BT's privatization. Financial institutions in the City of London formed a lobbying group, the City Telecommunications Committee, that pressured for BT's privatization and secured preferential treatment for the City from BT, ending a decades-long policy of uniform telecommunications services across Britain. Margaret Thatcher's government positioned BT's privatization as central to the success of two of Britain's information industries, electronics manufacturing and the City of London. Her government also cast BT's privatization as essential to an 'information revolution' that, through personal, networked computing, would further personal freedom and free markets. BT's privatization thus performed two important and related functions. First, it oriented Britain's telecommunications network to the City of London's needs, and secondly, it enacted an 'information revolution' that was portrayed as essential to the success of the City of London and British electronics. I label this fusion of City finance, neoliberal politics, and British telecommunications the 'London ideology', and this ideology shaped the broadly-held assumption that privatizing telecommunications was essential to reaching the 'information age'.

PEMAHAMAN SISTEM PENGENDALIAN INTERN, ASIMETRI INFORMASI, KOMPENSASI DAN KENDALI RELIGIUS TERHADAP PENGUNGKAPAN FRAUD AKUNTANSI OLEH AKUNTAN PUBLIK

<p><em>Fraud accounting a phenomenon that has not been detected by a public accountant as a party that checks its financial statements. Latest Fraud in the field of accounting re-occur in the giant company and not tracked by an external accountant (public accountant). The beginning of the first half of 2017 has emerged the issue of accounting fraud in British Telecom. On one of its subsidiaries in Italy. The public accounting firm doing the audit work on British Telecom is not a small public accounting firm but one of the bigfour, Price Waterhouse Coopers (PwC). The British Telecom accounting fraud mode in Italy is actually relatively simple and much discussed in the literature of auditing lectures yet many auditors fail to detect it. To know the existence of accounting fraud the auditor seeks to understand corporate governance and knowledge of forensic accounting is adequate. In this study, forensic accounting variables, internal control system, information asymmetry, compensation and religious control as variables used to detect and understand the presence or absence of accounting fraud in the company audited by the auditor.</em></p>

News - Briefing. Communications - UK cities to profit from rival 5G kiosks as they refuse BT next-gen phone booths

Public authorities that have blocked British Telecom's rollout of next-generation phone kiosks have set up rival street comms infrastructure from which they get a share of the profit.