23 Sep 2023 - rich
Hyundai and Kia automobiles – park them in your garage and they will burn down your house. Hyundai and Kia - Park Outside But… Park them outside and they will probably get stolen! Hyundai and Kia Cars Keep Getting Stolen - Hacked and Hyundai - Easily Stolen Cars
(a work in progress)
I have commented on things like this before. Okay, probably all the time. Some see this as just, perhaps, an unfortunate series of events. That ‘stuff’ happening is to be expected and dealt with. Afterall, this is not the first time an automobile manufacturer has has a major recall. It certainly will not be the last. And, this is true. While the dark humor, the irony of these two headlines is not lost on me, the juxtaposition of these two warnings was simply something that caught my attention.
Singularly, the above headlines could be used as a reference in a business management course - customer satisfaction, fielding customer complaints, risk and cost analysis of having to fix major issues after a product has been released, sales and marketing - do you really need the bad publicity and how to deal with such issues. Or this could be sidenote regarding manufacturing processes, thorough testing and analysis of collected data. This example could even be used to describe the psychology of buyers and sellers, brand loyalties, and perceived, embedded value for ones investment.
This could also be used to address product developement cycles and time to market factors. Lean, Six-Sigma, Kaizen (改善) and continuous improvement – processes used to get more reliable, consistent things into consumer hands more quickly.
I would contend that this single topic could be used as the basis for an entire discipline within a university setting. When you factor in the psychological, the philosophical, the economics, the business, the cultural and political aspects of just these two articles, it could become an engaging topic to study. And of course, driving all of this - the data collector, the information gather, the observability and monitoring, the process tracker – technology does not escape this.
Is technology just another topic, another piece to be added to this conversation, or does it have a more impactful role in all of this?
Yes, it is a tool, and a discipline, that enables and expedites the collection, analysis, and study of this data, but does it serve a deeper role in all of this?
My contention is that there is much more to it.
Because of all of this, the assumption is that it can fix my problems for me… and to some extent, to some level, it can. But, that does not mean it should be unchecked or unverified.