MoveOn.org recently sent out an email to collect donations to help CommonCause promote the development of electronic voting machines with a verifiable paper trail.
I’m absolutely fascinated by the issue of paper trails because, well… have you wondered about the line "Your call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes." Now, as The New York Times pointed out in an 11-Jan-05 article entitled "Your Call (and Rants on Hold) Will Be Monitored," there is an awful lot behind recording customer service calls.
But the birth of recorded calls in call centers, at least as I understand it, was part of a database backup strategy. Think about it: your database administrator screws up and somehow turns off the database’s transaction log (for those of you unfamiliar with this, all modern relational database management systems keep a log of every individual change in data, and this log is written before the database is actually updated). Later that evening–before backups of your database are created–a power surge from a major storm toasts your database server. You attempt to reapply those logs to the database (logs are typically backed up more frequently than the actual database, and are stored on a different physical server). But you don’t have any logs because your DBA messed up.
Your only hope is to pull the physical tape of every single call, and have your call center employees re-enter all those orders.
This is Database Management 101–for critical systems, always have a backup that isn’t a database or transaction log, something physical like paper or audio tape that you can go back to if your computers completely fail.