Surely the greater cultural difference is between the management types (and wannabees) and those of us who would rather do than oversee. I've worked in several cross-cultural associations (I'd hate to try to think of them as organizations) where the H-1Bs got along fine until they learned to ask questions. Then the fireworks started.
The biggest cross-cultural chaos was a global Oracle integration where managers demanded almost 150 privilege levels (the most stringent for "Eastern" DB input) but couldn't agree on the type of data Bangkok would put into a field specced in New Jersey. And who fought the hardest over what Bangkok would do? Plant managers 20 miles apart in Pennsylvania. That project went many $$$M over budget.
My biggest difficulty with cross cultural organizations is the racial and gender biases. "Western" managers can be intimidated into being polite to women and African-Americans under an implied threat of lawsuits. No such inhibition exists for the manager (or wannabe!) from India or Russia. Cultural norms must reward male prerogative excessively, because I've never seen a mixed-gender work group get past it, long distance or under the same roof. Usually I have been the one let go (their loss), but the cost to the project is demoralization of the "what's the use" sort, especially, I hear later, from younger work groups. Brown-skinned managers dissing darker-skinned cubies has the same effect. Besides the legal implications, the social skills are very different from European or Corporate American management types.
Have you spoken with an Indian IT recruiter lately? The job shops have picked up a whole lot of stranded H-1Bs. The problem with accent, especially over a cell phone connection, is terrible. This AM one hung up on me when I asked him to repeat something I couldn't understand. He wasn't the first, either.
I've worked in biometric systems development for four years now, and the inherent problem is what you glossed over in your first remarks -- false accept and false reject by whatever biometric one of these "early adopters" chooses. All the rhetoric or rebellion anyone is capable of will not cause the grief that either of these responses to a request for identification (who are you?) or verification (are you who you say you are?) is capable of creating.
The sales hypes and the fear freakers and the tech junkies are way ahead of the technology.
When someone is enrolled into a biometric system, the imaging device produces digital images that are then processed into a template resembling a complex barcode. Depending upon the biometric being processed, this is only the beginning of potential FAR and FRR errors.
The template is stored in a database, dependent upon the abilities of a DBA to set up and maintain -- another potential source of error. For authentication, the database is queried; and the biometric engine/processor must match a new image or template against the stored one, within a certain threshhold of agreement (set too low - high FAR; set too high - high FRR), a system design issue. The match is subject to all the laws of probability the sales hypes avoided learning in high school math class.
Add to these issues questions of network design, encryption, etc., and you can almost smell the lawsuits coming for UNSUPERVISED biometric authentication. And supervised biometric authentication takes money and planning.
What happens when the McDonald's employees can't get in to work because they are all falsely rejected because someone set the FRR/FAR crossover rate too high? No business and big complaints to state labor bureaucracies, that's what!
There's no need to be subversive. Biometrics can be a very powerful tool when used by a competent organization for a well-defined objective, like counterfeit ticket control or making sure the right guy gets let out on parole. In the hands of the ignorant and incompetent, the systems are discarded after a couple of SNAFUs typical of whatever organization is out there ahead of the learning curve.
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Surely the greater cultural difference is between the management types (and wannabees) and those of us who would rather do than oversee. I've worked in several cross-cultural associations (I'd hate to try to think of them as organizations) where the H-1Bs got along fine until they learned to ask questions. Then the fireworks started.
The biggest cross-cultural chaos was a global Oracle integration where managers demanded almost 150 privilege levels (the most stringent for "Eastern" DB input) but couldn't agree on the type of data Bangkok would put into a field specced in New Jersey. And who fought the hardest over what Bangkok would do? Plant managers 20 miles apart in Pennsylvania. That project went many $$$M over budget.
My biggest difficulty with cross cultural organizations is the racial and gender biases. "Western" managers can be intimidated into being polite to women and African-Americans under an implied threat of lawsuits. No such inhibition exists for the manager (or wannabe!) from India or Russia. Cultural norms must reward male prerogative excessively, because I've never seen a mixed-gender work group get past it, long distance or under the same roof. Usually I have been the one let go (their loss), but the cost to the project is demoralization of the "what's the use" sort, especially, I hear later, from younger work groups. Brown-skinned managers dissing darker-skinned cubies has the same effect. Besides the legal implications, the social skills are very different from European or Corporate American management types.
Have you spoken with an Indian IT recruiter lately? The job shops have picked up a whole lot of stranded H-1Bs. The problem with accent, especially over a cell phone connection, is terrible. This AM one hung up on me when I asked him to repeat something I couldn't understand. He wasn't the first, either.
I've worked in biometric systems development for four years now, and the inherent problem is what you glossed over in your first remarks -- false accept and false reject by whatever biometric one of these "early adopters" chooses. All the rhetoric or rebellion anyone is capable of will not cause the grief that either of these responses to a request for identification (who are you?) or verification (are you who you say you are?) is capable of creating.
The sales hypes and the fear freakers and the tech junkies are way ahead of the technology.
When someone is enrolled into a biometric system, the imaging device produces digital images that are then processed into a template resembling a complex barcode. Depending upon the biometric being processed, this is only the beginning of potential FAR and FRR errors.
The template is stored in a database, dependent upon the abilities of a DBA to set up and maintain -- another potential source of error. For authentication, the database is queried; and the biometric engine/processor must match a new image or template against the stored one, within a certain threshhold of agreement (set too low - high FAR; set too high - high FRR), a system design issue. The match is subject to all the laws of probability the sales hypes avoided learning in high school math class.
Add to these issues questions of network design, encryption, etc., and you can almost smell the lawsuits coming for UNSUPERVISED biometric authentication. And supervised biometric authentication takes money and planning.
What happens when the McDonald's employees can't get in to work because they are all falsely rejected because someone set the FRR/FAR crossover rate too high? No business and big complaints to state labor bureaucracies, that's what!
There's no need to be subversive. Biometrics can be a very powerful tool when used by a competent organization for a well-defined objective, like counterfeit ticket control or making sure the right guy gets let out on parole. In the hands of the ignorant and incompetent, the systems are discarded after a couple of SNAFUs typical of whatever organization is out there ahead of the learning curve.